A panel of gay faculty members at a forum at Boston College last night said although the university sponsored the event -- the first of its kind at the school -- members of the community have a long way to go before overcoming the school's deeply rooted religious tradition.Well, that's the problem right there, isn't it? What's to be said of a person who accepts a position at an institution when he considers his personal mission to be "overcoming" said institution's mission? Isn't that rather like being a spy? Did you not know it was a Catholic school when you signed your contract? I know there are much larger issues at stake (see this post, eg, from MOJ), but what's most depressing to me about these stories is the extreme self-absorption of the players, and the loss of the sense of honor they reveal. If you really believe the Catholic tradition is an evil to be "overcome," aren't you honor bound not to live off the largesse of its institutions? Even Groucho had standards.
I don't care to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.Which, come to think of it, is precisely the logic here. You're not persecuted in the Church for being a sinner --that's the prerequisite for membership. Everyone else in the Catholic church can live with the fact the Church thinks they're sinners. Are the proud, the vain, the lazy, the envious, the angry, fornicators, fetishists, the porn-addicted, contraceptors, divorced-and-remarried-outside-the-Churchers, embezzlers, liars, tax cheats, gluttons, polluters, time-wasters, deadbeat dads, bullies, gamblers, hypocrites, alcoholics, drug users, reckless, cowardly, Mass-skippers, gossips, don't-make-time-for-prayer-ers and the downright mean people on campus demanding their own forums for "finding each other" and complaining that the Catholic character of the school makes that difficult? Everyone's battling a proclivity of some kind; we're a very sorry lot, we Catholics. Want to find "acceptance" in the Catholic Church? Admit you're a sinner and join the rest of us in the trenches.
Gee, when I started writing, I thought this was going to be about Catholic education, since I had a trio of articles to talk about. Nevermind. My thanks to Prof. K of NLT & Knippenblog for sending me the story.
