USCCB

candidate kissing baby

“Hello, sweetie. Can I have a Ritz cracker?” At last Monday’s noon Mass in a local Novus Ordo parish, the young woman ahead of me on line for Communion was carrying a toddler. The child clutched a Ritz cracker. The presiding priest, a baby-boomerish Dominican, dropped the host into the mother’s hand while chirping to the little one the banality above. What the mother thought of that, I do not know. But it made me flinch. Flannery O’Connor had words for this sort of thing: “Stupidity and vulgarity are harder to put up with than sin, harder on the nerves.” Continue Reading
The Bishops & Those Emails

Forgive me if I do not join the chorus calling for John Podesta’s resignation or—drum roll—a pro-forma apology from Hillary Clinton for derisive email comments by her staffers about Catholics. Hillary Clinton is corrupt to the marrow. She is guilty of actual crimes. But our shepherds avert their eyes from the squalor of Hillary Clinton’s behavior in office and her policy proposals. Instead, they take aim at the thought crimes of her campaign team.     Like Lewis Carroll’s Caterpillar, our bishops puff away on their—federally funded—hookahs, “taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.” Continue Reading