Comments on: ACORN and the Roman Church: A Sermon on Hypocrisy

By: Casual Observer

Casual Observer — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:54:40 +0000

Nice one, WT. You know, I’ll bet the Catholic Church was but a little acorn, once. As was our mighty and diseased nation.

By: William Timberman

William Timberman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:49:17 +0000

No apologies necessary, and thank you for the compliment. I’ve been promising myself for years that someday I’d find a place to say all the things I wanted to say that I couldn’t say to anyone I knew. Academics are about the only ones I know who get to do that as part of their ordinary lives. Fiction writers do too, I guess, but only if they can convince a publisher that there’s money in it.

So along comes the Web, and in due course, blogging software and cheap hosting services. Hooray! And then, of course, I had to actually sit down at the keyboard and make an honest man of myself. Once I did, I found that there was a value in it that I hadn’t suspected. In the course of all that pondering and scribbling, I somewhat belatedly discovered what it was that I actually thought. There were a few surprises, too — good ones and bad ones — but in any event I learned something that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

Of course, it’s also nice to know that occasionally the result reaches people like yourself, who’ve always been the intended audience. Whatever they make of it, life is good.

By: Daniel De Groot

Daniel De Groot — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:03:39 +0000

William,

Just discovered you have a blog. Apologies for not noticing and stopping by sooner. I see the quality of your commentary does not suffer from having your own place to post it. The insight about cultural institutions is a good one.

By: William Timberman

William Timberman — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:02:17 +0000

Thanks, Karen. Well, the Church is many things to many people, not all of them bad by any means. It’s also true that its hierarchical organization has allowed it to survive longer than most other human institutions. That, and its flexibility, the lack of which at this late date is, oddly enough, what seems to threaten it the most.

Back in the time of John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, and Pacem in Terris, the Church seemed on the verge of turning itself into a genuinely forward-looking institution. I don’t know what happened — a failure of nerve perhaps, a circling of the wagons against any threat of the Church becoming something which the old geezers at its head could no longer control.

It reminds me a little of the reaction of Israeli conservatives to a Jewish diaspora which is showing signs of lessening fervor for the Israeli cause as the Likud understands it. Strike first, issue a false apology later, is their reaction to very nearly everything and everyone these days, just as it seems to be with Benedict.

Ah, well, neither is really what I was thinking about here. Taking my cue from Paul Rosenberg, who wrote the diary I was responding to originally, I was concerned more with the hypocritical reaction of my fellow Americans, who ought to be able to see an injustice and call it what it is, than with either the Democratic Party or the Church per se.

By: Karen M

Karen M — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:49:36 +0000

Hey, William! I’m inclined toward the notion of the church imploding. I have a good friend at work who’s a fairly observant Catholic. Her husband is even more devout, having been raised in a very large, Irish-Catholic family.

They are having doubts and feelings of disgust, lately, though, because of the pedophilia in the “Church.”

When an institution begins to lose its most observant and devout believers, it is on the way down.

And I’m completely with you on your compare/contrast of ACORN and RC! …as well as the way you bring MLK into it all.

By: cocktailhag

cocktailhag — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:39:04 +0000

I don’t intend to be polite about it; not one bit. Lawless, secretive elites are something I’ve had quite enough of, although there’s always more where that came from. Any practicing Catholic ought to be quite embarrassed and just as loud. It’s already happening here; because Levada is from Portland, we got some coverage in the Oregonian, and the current Archbishop called for Catholics to cancel the newspaper. The noive of these people….