"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
What happened in Boston? Boston used to be considered a bastion of staunch Irish Catholicism. It had giants such as Cardinal Cushing as archbishop and produced others such as Cardinal Spellman. Before The Situation broke out into the open, Cardinal Law would have been considered one of this country's most conservative and orthodox prelates. But in addition to the Scandal, Cardinal Law, and to be fair, his immediate predecessors, can now be seen to have presided over the wholesale collapse of the Faith in that archdiocese. Boston has now been revealed as the Church's Potemkin Village: it had an impressive facade, a beautiful, even romantic image: And who knows but that at one time the facade reflected the reality. But the substance now underneath is empty, or even squalid and decayed.More
These items underscore a comment made below by David Kubiak, who writes:
What is in my view good about the liturgy today (i.e., the extension of the Indult and the increased interest in young people in the old rite) is getting better, and what is bad (i.e., the stranglehold of the professional liturgical establishement on the average parish) is getting worse. And both movements are occurring with ecclesiastical approval. I cannot say often enough how bizarrely incoherent the Church seems today -- it would take heroic faith to convert under the present circumstances.
I will be in Rome for Cardinal Castrillon-Hoyos' Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore on 24 May. I hope and pray that a universal Indult will be announced, since it is increasingly clear that two radically different theologies of the Eucharist -- in fact if not in theoretical principle -- are being enacted in the two rites. I want the one I was raised to believe God wants.
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