Marc Barnes of Bad Catholics looks at  Christina Pesoli’s article, Why This Catholic Girl Is Praying for a Schism  that appeared on the Huffington Post (so you know it is bound to be theologically insightful).

The article is mostly typical boilerplate of complaints such as the Vatican and the LCWR and it is written in some humor so it is a kind of piece you can enjoy while pretty much disagreeing with every point made.

Contrary to Jesus High Priestly Prayer to the Father that “they may be one”,

For decades I prayed that the Catholic Church would evolve, but not anymore. Now I’m holding out for a schism, instead. We’ll be the Social Justice Catholic Church and they can be the Conservative Catholic Church.

In part this is an understandable temptation and even faithful Catholics can sometimes wish for a smaller but more faithful Church and that some of the less-faithful divisions would just pick up and move.

The piece makes me wonder if there is some strange genetic learning disability for people’s whose last name uses the letters “eilpso” such as Christina Pesoli and Nancy Pelosi.

Marc Barnes though replies to this article quite thoughtfully and makes many good points in reply.  There were many parts I loved about his reply

… Her singular focus on women’s issues. And yes, it’s truly novel, this bizarre move by the Church to call her universal claims universal, her doctrines doctrinal, and her dogmas dogmatic.

…The heart and soul of the Catholic Church cannot — therefore — be social justice. The heart and soul of the Catholic Church must be Christ Himself, for the command to love and work for justice rests on the reality of Him and His love.

Well I can just keep on quoting from it, but ignore me and just go straight to his post.

A lot has already been written on the word God being removed from the Democratic Party’s plank.  Though that never stopped me before from weighing in.

It does remind me of Jesus saying”let you yes mean yes” in that to some extent there plank is more truthful.  Besides do we really want them using the word in a plank that is so in love with abortion and same-sex marriage?  It is a positive thing to some extent that they removed God from the plank since the writers of the document had already removed God from their heart.  To the extent that is true I find nothing to rejoice about.

Besides why mention God when his replacement is already President since Barack is a jealous god and admits no rivals.  That the exclusion of God from the plank coincides with Obama’s presidency is no coincidence.  After all the President has omitted God from Thanksgiving Day speeches and also censored the word when reciting the famous passage from the Declaration of Independence.  The man who complained about people clinging to religion will have no problem with this exclusion.

Recently a video from the host committee for the Democratic Convention stated “Government is the only thing we all belong to” – yikes!  The Obama campaign is not trying to distance itself from this video played at the convention and that is understandable since it states to plainly what they believe.  They believe in a kind of bureaucratic pantheism where the government is in all of us and we are all part of the government.  From the New Deal to the New Age.  All intercessions are to be rerouted from God to Government as the nanny state has much higher aspirations than just nannyhood – more like what motivated Babylon tower building – but they didn’t build that.

While God is removed from their plank, Moloch is not.  While Moloch does not get specifically referenced his hove prints are all over this document and the convention.

I’m stealing this in full from Marcel LeJeune.

Most Catholics have never heard of Cardinal Martini, the former Archbishop of Milan, who died August 31. But, that didn’t stop almost every major news organization in the Western world in carrying the story that he said the following before he died:

“The church is 200 years out of date. Why don’t we rouse ourselves? Are we afraid?”and:

“Our culture has aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up; our rituals and our cassocks are pompous,”But is this true? Is the Catholic Church out of touch, out of date, and does it need to change? Well, let us consider the evidence.

The Church has suffered a great deal from clashing with modern cultural trends. Some have left the practice of the faith. Many criticize the Church as behind the times when it comes to sexuality, contraception, abortion, the role of women, bureaucracy, and esp. the scandals of individual Catholics (including leaders) who shame The Church.

It is true that when we look at the Church through the lens of modern western culture, that the Church is not trendy. Church leaders are not interested in changing doctrine to keep up with the times. It seems the Church is too old and stuck in her ways.

To be quite honest, this is a good thing.

What has our culture brought us:

• Abortion on-demand
• Hyper-sexualization
• Addiction
• Culture of death
• More wars (in the 20th Century) than any other time in history
• More slavery TODAY than any other time in history.
• Divorce and broken families.
• Pornography and selfishness.
• etc.

Why would we ever think this culture is healthy or good enough to be a model for the Catholic Church to follow?
Why would we ever believe the modern way of thinking is really true?
Where is the beauty in this modern culture?

Here are just a few of the problems with believing the Church just needs to be updated to keep up with the culture:

1. this belief makes the mistake of thinking our modern culture is good for us (see the list above). If it were so great, why do we have growing evil in our midst still?
2. with this mindset we jettison all of the teachings of Christ, believing they are not applicable to us today.
3. we make ourselves smarter than God. If we believe that the Church needs to change her ways, to line up with our thinking, then we are making ourselves the final judge of what is true and good = making ourselves a god.

“Doctrine” is a teaching of the Church that comes from or is necessarily connected to the deposit of faith the Church was given by Christ and from the Apostles. The Church teaches that these doctrines are not “owned” by the Church, therefore she can’t arbitrarily change them.

The Church (you and I) needs to change the culture – not vice versa.

The world needs the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has the answer for all the world’s problems in the fullness of truth and the fullness of grace she offers to the world. The Church gives us a moral anchor, an answer to broken families, addiction, sin, war, violence, abuse, and all the other issues in our culture. More than ever the world needs the Catholic Church, if our society is to last. This answer is the personal relationship with Jesus that the Catholic Church offers to us all through the Sacramental grace, teachings of the Church, and in our own personal prayer we all need.

Jesus created one Church. We are that Church, the Catholic Church and if the world needs the Catholic Church, then the Church needs saints. We need to be holy if we are to change the world.

Time to do our part. Time to be holy. Time to change the world. This is what we all need to know – and do.

Without the Catholic Church – imagine where our culture would be today…

In some ways I can’t consider a worse thing for the Church than to be considered up-to-date. As if truth needs a constant upgrade and point revisions. How we propagate the faith is another matter and certainly this is an area that needs vigilance. Catholics in general have lagged behind in adapting to new ways to spread the Gospel.  Though this is not mean jumping on board with every social networking fad – that the Vatican never had a presence on MySpace is a good thing.

Though it is rather funny the world-views that can see the headline that the Church is out of date.  One group would see the truth that the Church teaches as being out of date and the other the way the truth is preached.