Sunday Morning in the Snow

Sunday is a good day to be contemplative about life. Listening to U2’s "The Joshua Tree" certainly helps one to be in a reflective mood. I was thinking today how it was to grow up Catholic. I know my mother says her faith was the only thing that got her through my Dad’s death. He was the only man she had ever loved. She was in her teens when she married him and he died a couple of weeks after their 55th wedding anniversary.

When he was on Charlie Rose’s show Bono said something that really resonated with me. He attributed his social activism to "good old Catholic guilt." While it made me smile it also is a good description that many of us raised Catholic understand. We were taught that Jesus died for our sins and we have to make up for that in our lives by helping others. Bono does that with DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa) and his tireless campaign to help the Third World countries. Father Damien did that in the last century in Hawaii with his work on Molokai in Hawaii and his care for the lepers there.

It is so easy during this time to focus on the "abuses" in the Catholic Church and ignore the realities. According to his article on "Sex Abuse in the Church" Father Andrew Greeley says, "if the Ratzinger/NYT estimates are anything near the reality, 98% of American priests are not abusers, a point the Times neglects to make and which ought to have been the lead in an unbiased news report. I suspect that the Ratzinger/Times estimates are too low, but double the number to 4% -- which I suspect is closer to the truth -- and one still finds that 96% of priests are not abusers." He says one abuse is one too many but the reality is that the number of abusers in the Catholic Church is no higher than in any other organization. By focusing on abusers and ignoring the good priests a distorted view of the Church is being presented to the reading public.

Faith is a personal thing but I think I learned a lot in my time of nuns and catechism classes. Some of the things I learned were personal responsibility, the existence of good and evil, helping others, compassion, and for me the most important lesson of all that we are on this Earth to help our fellow human beings not for selfish reasons.

I’ve been on a newsgroup dedicated to the show "The Prisoner" for many years. While I don’t normally try to be argumentative there were two instances that I refused to back down on what I perceived as abuses. One was a slur against Aspergers sufferers that a troll used to try and slag off some people on the group. I have a nephew that suffers from this affliction and I was very vocal in saying that when you use a term that depicts a real illness for the sole reason that you want to insult someone else that you denigrate the suffering that people from this affliction are facing. Their suffering becomes nothing more then an insult term and that is wrong. The other came when a regular used foul language to insult another member and used the forum in a way to try and destroy the reputation of another member he did not like. Unfortunately that person fell into the trap and gave the obscenity user the ammunition he needed. I took both of them to task. In my eyes they were both at fault one for using an obscenity laced post after an apology had been made that he knew would push the other over the edge and the other for breaking a trust and posting personal emails. The obscenity user railed that my views were "twee" and I was a prude to object and that he couldn’t be ranked with a person who broke a confidence. Two wrongs do not make a right and yes two can be equally guilty.

I wonder if the fact that the person who refused to accept personal responsibility for his action is a victim of his atheism? When you throw out God in your life are you throwing out morality as well? Is that Catholic guilt that Bono spoke of really a good thing?

I think without a sense of morality that you can learn from religion a person risks the damage to the soul that turns the person from the right path towards the evil and darkness of the devil. You need a moral structure in your life. I like the idea of earning your way into Heaven. Of course my idea of Heaven is closer to the Simpson’s episode that Liam Neeson did. I want the Heaven with the step dancers, Guinness and yes there better be chocolate. In it I will meet again the little Irish priest in the picture, Father Paddy. He was a sweet man who was an enormous comfort to me when my marriage broke up. He died of a heart attack suffered when he was saying Mass.