Eating our young

Randall Smith is writing about the anti-Catholic Catholics... it's intriguing and good:

A modest proposal for faculty entertaining the prospect of taking a job at Catholic college or university: Please don’t take the job if you hate Catholicism. Why make yourself miserable? No one will blame you if you take a job at one of those other “much better” places: places that do what everyone else does.

Faculty who are nominally “Catholic” who take jobs at Catholic schools imagining that eventually those institutions will change and stop doing that annoying “Catholic thing” are making the kind of mistake engaged couples sometimes make. The old saying is that women get married thinking they can change their husbands; men get married thinking their wives will never change. Both end up disappointed.

The educational establishment in this country is crumbling, critically undermined by its lack of vision and its own internal contradictions. College students who pay monumental tuition and rack up crushing debts increasingly can’t write literate sentences or do basic mathematics.

In these circumstances, Catholic colleges and universities should be cleaning up, offering students of all faiths the best education and moral formation in the country. But they’re not. Often these schools are crippled by their own self-doubt and lack of vision, not to mention their contempt for the difference being Catholic makes.

Many people seem to think the problem with Catholic colleges and universities is that they hire too many non-Catholics. Actually, that’s not usually the biggest problem. Many of our best faculty members at Catholic universities are non-Catholic “fellow travelers” who respect the Catholic mission of the institutions where they work.

No, the bigger problem in most cases are those who checked the “Catholic” box, but who really just hate the Church of their birth in the way only a hurt child disappointed by what they consider to be a foolish and unloving parent can. I wish for these hurt souls something other than what they’ve got now, something less painful.

All of that (do read it all) resonates with me personally because though I didn't necessarily hate the Catholic church while I was in the wilderness for 40 years, I certainly had issues, serious issues, with so much of it.

Some of those issues were sourced in my simply being rebellious and non-conformist.  Most however was sourced in complete ignorance.  I paid way too much attention to what others said about Catholicism and way too little on researching the faith for myself.

Now however I'm home... after nearly two years of the sort of research I'd simply not done (and am still doing), I'm not only comfortable with being home, I'm regretting being away so long.

I wonder how many who have issues with the Catholic Church instead have issues with what they think they know about her.

It's something worth checking into.

Don't wait as long as I did to make the differentiation.

Comments

[julian ) j3)]

Well, at the risk of sounding like a throwback to an earlier era - we also believe in Satan, and even a fallen angel corrupted and demented, is still endowed with an intellect beyond our own - and so Satan will place people who HATE the Faith, the church and all things Judeo-Christian, in every position that he can, in order to pervert, corrupt, frustrate and infest such institutions with his own vomitous leaven.

THAT is why people who hate the Church take jobs within the Church and her affiliated arms of education, medical care and ministry to the poor. If you can't actually corrupt the general, then buy off his advisors and blackmail his lieutenants and sow discord amongst the privates. That has always been the devil's plan and it seems to work.

BTW- welcome home.

[Rick]

Thanks julian... good to be home...