So I was listening to a homily in the Lady of the Lake Catholic Church yesterday (file this one under religious rant). The priest starts off by asking for everyone who was head of the household to raise their hand and then asked how they would like it if someone came in and started telling them how to run their family. Then he had those who were head of a business to raise their hand and asked how they would like it if someone came in and started telling them how to run their business (I believe they call that “customer feedback”). The priest then goes on to explain that the same thing is happening where certain people who were trying to tell the church how to run it’s own business. He then went on a spiel about how when he was a boy he couldn’t wait to be a priest because then everyone would love and respect him and how he was disappointed that that wasn’t the case. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s hard to be living in 2010 and be sympathetic to the plight of those who desire resepct and admiration due to their position alone. And I can understand how easy it is to make the mental assocaition between “church” and “business,” but businesses in fact have to cater to the public at large to avoid losing business and ultimately failing, while pretty much nothing short of a nuclear holocaust will stop the church from outliving all of us.
But what really got me was after repeating the part of the gospels about blessing your enemy, the guy went on to talk about how the church had enemies too and told everyone that they should go check out SaveOldMandeville.com because “if anything is a hate site, it is.” Although he didn’t explain why, you can see as soon as you go to the site: it’s against an expansion of the church because the plans have a large steeple rising above the tree line. The page starts off explaining what an important part the church has been for it’s 170 years of history in the community and claims that the expansion is unwanted by many in Old Mandeville, both Catholic and non-Catholic.
To call this a “hate site” only shows how overpoliticized the general public has become and how easy it is to move the general vocabulury of “left vs. right” into the more boring and individualized local politics. I sincerely doubt this site would have been given such a title 10 years ago before “hate site,” “murder-bomber,” and “socialist” entered the common vernacular. I admit I’ve become a product of it as well, using the term “hate radio” to describe the morning bitch-fest Savage, Limbaugh, Beck, and all the others who monopolize the air waves with, but at least in this case I can point to a decade ago when the radio was about making dirty jokes. Local arguments over building expansions have been going on forever.
I wouldn’t be too surprised that priests (or anyone really) think like this when it comes to their own personal local problems, but for him to even introduce the subject in a homily and to label it as an enermy of the church shows how self-absorbed he is, and to relate it to a Bible verse about forgiving your enemies just goes to show how clueless he is about how the gospel message relates to our own time.
Come on, you need to move out of the South. You don’t seem to belong there 😉 By the way, I noticed people still commenting on your Texas post…
Yeah, just goes to show how the best way to bring in the crazy traffic is to misspell your words.
I’ve lived in the South my whole life with the exception of a summer in Germany and frankly, it’s not always this inbred backwoods hatefilled place. I’ve been to some wonderful, enlightened, open minded churches and temples, talked with people who defy the stereotypes and honestly, I think they are more the norm than not. If you look for hate, you find hate. that said, there’s a good reason I no longer attend Catholic church and I can tell you why in three words :St. Vincent de Paul. Four words if you count “de paul” as two words instead of one last name. That church had the most ignorant priests I’d ever experienced and I gave it a long, long chance.
Good of you as a church-goer to make this statement. Did you happen to notice the invitation to read the “building prayer” where an implication was floated that anyone opposed to the project was likely a member of the forces of evil?
At $200 to $300 a ft2 for 20,000 ft2 of gothic construction, how many doses of childhood vaccination could Sra Theresa have bought in her prime? Remember that de-sanctifying a lovely older church is part of the “deal” (along with the removal of old cottages and more interruption of natural drainage in a town that knows what drainage means). Question whether this is a monument to faith or ego.