Question: Can a "Catholic" Progressive Convert/Revert to the Catholic Faith, Pure and Simple

 Answer: No! Not really! It is extremely rare, virtually impossible. A decadent pagan, a despairing nihilist, or a violent Marxist is more likely to convert than a true "Catholic" Progressive. Think of the legacy American Progressive Catholic families: Kennedy, Cuomo, Kerry, Biden, Peolosi! Do we hear of family members making a good confession and embarking on a life of chastity, or monastic solitude, or service directly with the poor? Hardly! Of course, we know that all things are possible to God; so we pray for them!

Let's contrast a Progressive and a Catholic and then a Catholic Progressive and a Progressive Catholic!

The Progressive looks for guidance, not to the ancient past, but to recent and especially anticipated future developments in science and technology. The past, as ignorant and deprived, is to be overcome by PROGRESS, which is eventually infallible. Contemporary, post 1968 progressivism, is the merging of five streams: evolutionary Darwinism which posits an inexorable "arc of history" fueled by science, reason, and technology; post-Freudian sexual liberation that locates human flourishing in the release of sterilized sex from marriage-family-children-the moral order, and God's creative and providential purposes; the ever present Marxist dialectic of oppression and liberation; more recently a pantheist infatuation with Mother Nature detached from a Creator-Father;  and above all the Nietzchean sovereignty of the isolated Self. These five views, if articulated clearly, become mutually contradictory, but philosophical depth and lucidity are foreign to feeling-based progressivism.

A Catholic looks for guidance to the person-event of Jesus Christ who revealed the Trinity in Israel two millennia ago and remains in living intimacy with the Catholic Church in prayer, teaching, and life. This is an organic, living, interpersonal, dynamic, and dramatic reality with a distinctive, eventful history. But throughout time there abides a stable, permanent reality that expresses itself creatively and surprisingly. 

A Catholic Progressive is a progressive with Catholic flavoring. Interiorly, in heart-soul-form-substance, the defining gestalt is that of progress. Any Catholic baggage that does not go with the flow of sexual/political liberation and "science" is displaced: contraception, heteronormativity, trans-phobia, etc. Such a "cafeteria" or "Catholic lite" progressive retains the elements of Catholicism that are compatible with the underlying paradigm: conspicuous marriage in a beautiful Church, burial, support of liberal social justice initiatives, and such.

A Progressive Catholic by contrast is interiorly Catholic: specifically, in a filial posture of trust, gratitude and obedience to the hierarchical Church. The defining center of ones life remains Christ present in his Church. Such a Catholic might very well be progressive on any number of current controversies in culture and politics: the environment, ecumenism, governmental action for the poor, liturgical reform, doctrinal development, gun control, taxes, immigration, foreign policy and health care. Such would not violate core Catholic values, especially involving the protection of powerless human life, sexuality-gender-family, and the moral limits of science. Clear denial of those principles, as in advocacy for legal abortion or "choice" is a step out of the Catholic into the Progressive religion. Underlying it is a disparaging judgment against the Church.

To understand the progressive resistance to Catholicism let us compare it with Islam. Both are Christian heresies which take elements of Divine Revelation and reject others. Mohammed, in Arabia of  600 AD, was familiar with Judaism and Christianity, especially the Arian form which denied the divinity of Christ. Spiritual genius that he was, he concocted a brilliant synthesis of elements from local paganism, Christianity and Judaism. Particularly, he incorporated monotheism and the moral code of the ten commandments. This is part of the inner core of the religion. It derives from Divine Revelation and is therefore good and true. Now the bad news: he rejected monogamy in favor of a misogynistic polygamy. He strongly employed the use of violence and force to spread his new religion. Implicitly this included an anti-intellectualism and a fundamentalist fideism. He denied the divinity, the crucifixion and the salvation by Christ and also the Trinity. His acceptance of monotheism was iconoclastic and anti-Christian as it disparaged as polytheism the doctrine of the Trinity. We see very few converts from Islam into Christianity. There are many reasons for this: in some countries converts are executed; everywhere converts are rejected by the community. But interiorly or spiritually there is an even stronger resistance: the religion has a powerful, deep, true core to the extent that it honor the Creator God and the moral code of the 10 commandments. From this high ground, it despises Christianity as polytheistic and idolatrous. 

A similar dynamic is at work in Catholic Progressivism. It does not self-define as a rejection of the Church, but as an enlightened, higher expression of it. It condemns the actual, institutional Church as repressive sexually, as misogynistic, patriarchal, reactionary. And so it is inherently immunized against fundamental Catholic truths: binary gender as an image of God, the fertile intentionality of sexuality, moral order, inherent evils, apostolic authority, ecclesial infallibility, and sacramental efficacy.

St. Charles de Focauld labored heroically in the Sahara for decades and was widely revered as a holy man, but he did not have a single convert. Muslim immunity against the Christian Gospel is deep. And so it is with the Catholic Progressive. Both faiths retain aspects of Revelation; both pervert them into an alternative religion, superior to actual Catholicism. And so like Focauld, we live peacefully, patiently in the dessert of Progressivism, commending our neighbors to God's love, extending always reverence and compassion, leaning ever more deeply into our Lord living in the Church. 

MUST SEE MOVIES: Letter to my Grandchildren

Not right away...you are all very busy with school, sports and such. But sometime...maybe when I have passed, if you are convalescing in bed, during vacation, on a long plane trip...PLEASE watch these movies. Each is a masterpiece, utterly unique, dramatic in the extreme, radiating a clear-luminous inner form, extravagant with superior writing, direction, action. I cannot rate them as each is its own utterly incomparable treasure.

Family

To Kill a Mockingbird

Princess Bride

Lord of the Rings (trilogy)

Star Wars (especially A New Hope, first one made)

Sound of Music

Truman Show

It's a Wonderful Life

Mary Poppins

Wizard of Oz

Last of the Mohicans

Chariots of Fire

Western

The Searchers

Red River

High Noon

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Shane

Big Country

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

Crime

On the Waterfront

Godfather (1 and 2)

Goodfellas

A Bronx Tale

The Usual Suspects

Jason Bourne movies

The Sting

The Dark Knight

Romance

Quiet Man

Roman Holiday

Casablanca

Lost in Translation

El Cid

Tender Mercies

Religious

Keys of the Kingdom

The Mission

The Apostle

The Passion of Christ

Into the Wonder

Confess (Hitchcock) 

The Bells of St. Mary's

Ben Hur

10 Commandments 

Mature

The Passion of Christ

Fight Club (men only)

Schindler's List

Shawshank Redemption

Cool Hand Luke

Lawrence of Arabia

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Saving Private Ryan

Gladiator

Cinderella Man

In the Name of the Father

From Here to Eternity

A Beautiful Mind

Terms of Endearment

L.A. Confidential

The list above is entirely personal and subjective. Some choices are admittedly lowbrow and sentimental. Most, however, are artistic treasures and of immense cultural significance. Notably, few are recent, most date from mid-20th century, the years of my childhood and youth. This has been for me a nostalgic exercise. The list represents some of the best of the world in which I came of age. Many are unknown to you, my Grandchildren, I hope you will enjoy them as I have. 

I would love to receive comments on movies I omitted or overrated. 

Let's Bring Back the Order of Penitents!

Since the explosion of the clerical sex scandal at the turn of the millennium, I have often thought:  We need to bring back the "Order of Penitents!" Wouldn't it be wonderful if even one of the hierarchs involved in the scandal, either an actual perpetrator or one who allowed it in negligence, were to publicly proclaim: "I did a serious sin. I repent. I ask pardon from God and the Church. I will spend the rest of my life in penance." Such a contrite soul would retire quietly, to a monastery or such, to live simply, prayerfully, sacrificially in a spirit of reparation. If a McCarrick, Maciel, Law, or any one of the perpetrators would do this, it would be a healing tonic for the entire Church. This has not happened!

The Ancient Order of Penitents

In the ancient Church, a contrite sinner could enter the order of penitents, after a serious sin (murder, adultery, sacrilege) by publicly confessing before the bishop and then entering an extended, serious period of penance. There are, for example, cases of kings repenting after the slaughter of innocents. They would not receive communion; would do public penance involving ashes, hair shirts, public humbling, pilgrimages, reparation of Churches, care for the sick and the needy. 

This spirit and protocol of penance has characterized all the authentic renewal movements of the Church, but some are noteworthy for the pronounced rigor involved. The early hermits, monks and all the monastic renewal movements come right to mind. The early Church lacked the religious orders to which we are accustomed but was structured by "orders:" catechumens preparing, virgins, widows, apostles, deacons, priests and bishops. So we can imagine that the graphic, pronounced nature of the order of penitents would elicit from the entire Church a spirit of repentance, sacrifice and reparation.

The Spirit of our Age: Anti-Penance...Indulgent, Narcissistic, Therapeutic

Perhaps no generation in human history compares with us boomers and our offspring in regard to entitlement, indulgence, narcissism, triumph of the therapeutic, spiritual lethargy, bourgeois mediority and demise of the ideals of holiness and heroism. In plain English, we are spoiled brats. We contrast sharply with our parents and ancestors who were tried and tested by poverty, persecution, warfare, migration, and suffering. Morally/spiritually inferior, we in general presume a progressive superiority of enlightenment, education, science and technology as we disparage the past, tradition, authority and revelation. And so, realities of contrition, humility, reparation, sacrifice, humility, and poverty are largely incoherent to our "enlightened" age...even to many clergy and religious.

The Spirit of Penitence

The core Gospel announcement of Jesus, already anticipated in John the Baptist and the prophets was: Repent! This involves two movements which mutually inform each other: recognition of and disgust for personal sin and evil; and desperate desire to come close to the God of mercy, justice, truth and holiness. The explosion of the Gospel across the Roman world and all subsequent renewal movements and saints have manifested this same co-inherence: aversion to sin and desire for God. 

Our age is not entirely secular, irreligious or non-spiritual. But overwhelmingly it has repressed the sense of sin, contrition, evil and repentance on behalf of the Sovereign-Imperial-Self. It lacks all sense of the supernatural, of the demonic, of the dramatic conflict between the eternity of heaven and that of hell. So we are left pathetic superficialities:  the triumph of the therapeutic, Marxist theologies of liberation, new age pantheism, sexual liberation,  hysteria about global warming, the "ground of being" of Tillich, Jungian archetypes, technological/scientific illusion of faux-Darwinian "progress" a la Teilhard, Fauci and Company. Everything except the humble, contrite, adoring soul!

Types of Penitents

Let's imagine different types of penitents. The first would be, as noted above, important people (especially clergy and religious, but also celebrities, politicians, etc.) who have gravely violated public trust and caused scandal by disloyalty, unchastity (especially abuse of the young and vulnerable), and such. Others would include:

Irregular Relationships. This group would welcome Catholics who find themselves in irregular quasi-conjugal situations: those divorced-remarried-without-annulment, homosexual unions, cohabitation without marriage. Such might find themselves in accord with the Church's disapproval of their situation but unwilling or unable to change it. They might well have some sound reasons for this: imagine for example the care of children of the union. By joining the order of penitents they would be acknowledging the objective disorder entailed, but seek the support of the Church and others struggling with similar situations to bring God's grace and wisdom to bear. They would clearly be humble and deferential to Church authority, rather than judgmental and superior. They would, of course, abstain from reception of the Eucharist, practicing a spiritual communion. The reception of absolution would be a prudential decision of the confessor but for sure they would receive spiritual support, blessings and guidance within the context of an urgency to convert and amend for sin.

Addicts and Co-Dependents who are enslaved by compulsivity but unable to free themselves. Here we imagine alcoholics, drug addicts, gamblers, sexaholics, workaholics, and such. This might also include emotional disorders of depression, anxiety, anger, mania and others. Obviously, this order of penitents would be well complimented by 12-step and Recovery (of Dr. Lowe) and similar groups, as well as counseling and therapy. As with the prior groups, these would be guided in spiritual direction in regard to the reception of absolution and communion. Since the disorder here is more subjective than objective and overt, there might be greater freedom in the inner forum of confession and spiritual direction.

Converts and Reverts who come into the Church from a serious life of sin would clearly cherish this more intense path of penance along with the Catechumenal Way.

Ordinary-Temporary penitents would be those of us who are moved by the Holy Spirit to endure a period of intense penance, possibly aware of our own sin or of the evil around us. This is currently being done by many men in Exodus 90, a 90-day spiritual boot camp, a rigorous-vigorous path to virility and freedom from addictions/pornography/lethargy/passivity entailing serious fasting from  sweets, alcohol, tv, video games, soda, snacks, unnecessary purchases and use of cell phone, meatless Wednesdays and Fridays, weekly fraternity meetings, anchor-partnership,  prayer including daily holy hour, cold showers, This stuff is not for sissies! I think all of us men (I am first on list) DESPERATELY need this! It seems to me that most women I know don't need this as they live sacrifice every day in care for family, career, home, and those needy and infirm close to them.

Conclusion

In light of these thoughts, I pray first for myself and secondly for those close to me (including you, dear reader): 

May we become inflamed, in the Holy Spirit, with a fire of humility, zeal, hatred of sin,  fraternal love, chastity, interior freedom, tender reverence for women, paternal confidence and thirst for God!

Bohemian Catholic?

When I heard that a friend had described our family as "Bohemian Catholic" I was flattered. We do not deserve that accolade, but it has always been an aspiration of mine.

"Bohemian"

The word often refers to countercultures of artists, eccentrics, anarchists and others who reject mainstream, middle class or bourgeois culture and gather in places like Greenwich Village or the East Village of NYC. The word has a complicated relationship to the literal Bohemia, now  the Czech Republic, ethnically German/Slav, formerly part of the Holy Roman and then the Habsburg empires. The word was first used in France to designate the Gypsy or Roma people, an entirely alternative or "other" group, who had come from Bohemia. At a point in the middle ages, a gracious Bohemian king had welcomed the Roma and so many settled there as they were not welcome elsewhere. The origins of this ethnicity are unclear but it is thought that they migrated 1,500 years ago from India into Europe. Eventually the French expanded the word to refer to Gypsy-like groups, alternate countercultures. 

Can a Catholic be Bohemian?

Yes, but only with strict scrutiny. The word connotes (but does not denote): free love and sexual license, indulgence in drugs and alcohol, weak work ethic, an anarchic and iconoclastic sensibility. Perhaps more spiritually toxic is an underlying arrogance, superiority and condescension towards the ordinary. We see these clearly in the beatniks and hippies. Such are anti-Catholic. 

On the positive side, the expression suggests: poverty of spirit and identification with the poor, pursuit of the true-good-beautiful for itself, freedom of spirit, release from toxic social pressures, and rejection of the "bourgeois" as materialistic, careerist, consumerist, status obsessed, privileged, secure in wealth accumulation and its accoutrements, confident in the omnipotence of science/technology.

We are directed by Jesus to be "in the world but not of it." And so the discerning Catholic may find a prophetic element in the bohemian critique of society. Many of the important renewal movements were similarly disruptive in their times: hermits, monks, friars, active religious orders, and such.

Bohemian Catholics Today

1. Catholic Worker is a pure example. Dorothy Day herself lived a bohemian NYC life prior to her conversion to Catholicism and her encounter with the eccentric, exceptional Peter Maurin. Their poverty of life style, care for the poor, pacifism, consistent anarchism, political advocacy for the disadvantaged (farm workers, civil rights, etc.) and wholehearted rejection of "the system" together constitute a flourishing, vigorous Bohemian Catholicism. I myself have emulated their care for the poor and radical simplicity of life but not their anarchistic/pacifistic political ideology.

2. Neocatechumenal Way has its origins when Kiko Arguello literally buried himself with his Bible, guitar and (was it 10?) dogs with the Gypsies in a ghetto of Madrid, Spain. It would not describe itself this way but it is radically bohemian in the sense used here: an alternative Catholic culture given over to simplicity/poverty/community/praise/Eucharist/Scripture and an exhaustive critique of modern society as dystopian and apocalyptic. It cultivates its own habits, music, art, and patterns of life as it detaches in many ways from modern culture and much of the contemporary Church.

3.Others: In my own college years (1965-9) I was myself influenced by radical left critiques of society: Goodman, Illich, Day/Maurin, Schumacher, Ellul, Freire, Holt, King, Chavez, Rieff, Alinsky, Marcel, Maritain and others. I received these, especially Illich, as a deepening and clarification of my Catholicism. Later, immersion in the Charismatic Renewal brought an entirely new dimension. The Cultural Revolution elicited an further intensification of my Catholic resistance.  This was followed by exposure to the theology of Balthasar, John Paul, Ratzinger, the Schindlers and a more distinctively Catholic and philosophical critique of American modernity. 

Recent developments express aspects of a Bohemian Catholicism:  the "Benedict Option" of Rod Dreher, home schooling, staunch Catholic colleges (Franciscan, Benedictine, Ave Maria, etc.), Latin mass communities, and a new "post-liberal" Catholicism (Vance).

4. John Rapinich, my best friend, was a certified, authentic Bohemian Catholic in the league of Kiko and Dorothy Day. His Jewish mother spent her entire adult life in a mental hospital, where John worked later, and where she was later reconciled to his father. They were both baptized and married in the Church. We were there. John was raised by his father, a tough, non-religious Slavic sailor. John suffered nervous breakdown and shock treatments in the military. He opened a coffee shop which was the gathering spot for Kerouac, Ginsburg and his other beatnik friends. He travelled with Kerouac and became a character in "On the Road." He ends up in Mexico and has a powerful conversion into Catholicism. We met in our charismatic prayer group. He lived in our house: he was uncle to my children, little-big-brother to me as I was big-little-brother to him. He worked in the mental hospital where his parents lived; went on mission with a charismatic Jesuit priest to slums on the Mexican border; worked with Hawthorne Dominicans in care of the poor dying of cancer. His last decades he was passionately (everything John did was passionate!) involved in the first Neocatechumenal community in this country. His was an extraordinary intellect and heart. He inflamed my own bohemian tendencies. I was honored to be his friend.

Conclusion

The biggest temptation for the aspiring Bohemian Catholic is an aesthetic/moral arrogance that looks down upon the mainstream and the ordinary. Catholic and "catholic" instincts will countervail this tendency and strengthen Christlike friendships across cultures and classes, appreciating the good in all things!

I am currently rereading Myles Connolly's Mr. Blue, a favorite and formative read from my high school years. Blue is the ultimate Bohemian Catholic: a modern-urban St. Francis, madly in love with God, deliriously delighted with his Creation, militantly anti-bourgeois and absolutely impractical. I am motivated to emulate this Don Quixote. My wife thinks the book is a bad influence, intensifying my worst non-pragmatic and idealistic tendencies. She is herself a good balance to me with her own blend of the bohemian and the mainstream. Countervailing my intellectual abstraction, she is an artist, a superb cook, a gardener, an earth mother with a deep faith and a heart of gold. Together we have enjoyed an ordinary middle class Catholic life, with a delicious bohemian flavoring.

An Oedipal Divide: Progressive Old Priests/Conservative Young Priests

 A sadness hangs over our Church: a tragic divide between older priests, overwhelmingly progressive, and  younger priests, unanimously conservative. Recent polls are clear: older cohorts, meaning the silent and boomer generations, identify theologically and politically as liberal/progressive, younger ones not at all. I know of good, seasoned priests who do not want to talk to their younger clerical brothers. 

Holy, loyal priests,  now in their 80s and 90s,  are in decline and dying off, without spiritual, priestly sons. The younger priests were not fathered by the older. They were fathered by John Paul and Benedict, the lay renewal movements, World Youth Days, Latin mass communities, conservative and traditional families, and of course the surprising and unexpected workings of the Holy Spirit.

Pope Francis is iconic of this. He harangues tirelessly about clericalism, rigidity, and such. He is scolding the generations of John Paul/Benedict priests who greatly displease him. How many young men are inspired, by his negativity, to pursue the priesthood? None! Our seminaries (outside of Africa, which is its own Catholic world, immune to the toxins of Western progressivism) are declining in his pontificate. We do not have, we will not have "Pope Francis priests." His legacy seems to be contradictory and ironic: he appoints progressive bishops and cardinals, but they lead local presbyterates that are entirely conservative. Somehow the Church goes on!

The difference is the response to modernity. Younger priests cherish Catholicism...traditional, stable, clear, reliable, rooted...as an antidote to modernity as secular, nihilistic, individualistic, sterile, and despairing. By contrast, those who came of age around the time of the Council experienced the peak of the post war honeymoon between American modernity and Catholicism. Theirs was a virtually erotic ecstasy of embracing the broader culture in all its exuberance and richness: culture, politics, American superiority and unanimity in the Cold War, as well as the exciting renewal movements (ecumenical, biblical, liturgical, social justice, etc.) that had been percolating for decades and culminated in the Council. That generation of priests retained as "euphoric recall" that positivity, even as the broader culture descended into godless dystopia. They somehow blocked consciousness of this decline.

Progressives are not paternal to the degree that they are not filial. A son who is well fathered and responsively filial becomes a good father; a man who is not fathered (in some fashion) cannot father. The progressive is advancing into the future by overcoming a past viewed as ignorant, backward, deprived. This is the opposite of filial gratitude, piety, loyalty, obedience. It assumes a posture of superiority over, rather than deference to the past, tradition, the "fathers." In that sense, Catholicism as filial and maternal/paternal is NOT progressive, although it is fruitfully, creatively, serendipitously conservative.

Young clergy, in the 1960s, the time of the Council, consumed what might be called "the Xavier Rynne" narrative of that historical event. Those influential, anonymous letters from Rome provided the logic widely diffused by secular media and aggressive progressive leadership within the Church: the Council was a revolution against a powerful, regressive curial college, headed by the infamous Ottaviani, on behalf of freedom, openness, creativity, and reconciliation on many levels. In this story line, Ottaviani is the bad father, repressing his sons, who revolt successfully. This is the narrative of rupture, rather than continuity. There is, of course, some truth here. But the Council was far from a radical break with the past. It was a retrieval of traditions, a "return to the sources," the fathers and doctors as well as Scripture and traditions around liturgy and other things. 

 What the Council, as well as the entire "Great Generation" that implemented it, did not do was prepare the Church for the Cultural Revolution about to explode in the West at that very moment. Significantly, the Council did NOT address contraception, but left that to Pope Paul a few years later. By the time he spoke with such prophetic clarity in Humanae Vitae the Church was already divided about modernity which had become blatantly libertarian, individualistic, sterile, anti-authority, Godless and anti-tradition. 

The Church of the 1970s, of Paul VI, was paralyzed, confused, and inarticulate as the sexual revolution infected our culture. Priests who came of age during the Council abstained from the Culture War: they neither resisted nor assisted. They would not, largely could not, deliver a sermon for or against contraception, women priests, "reproductive rights," porn/masturbation, or homosexual acts.

We might say that in a sense this generation was itself not "fathered" in that they were not prepared for the chaos that exploded on their watch. They truly became the "silent generation." When John Paul came on the scene, they were largely oblivious of his recasting of the tradition, especially in his catechesis on the human body. When the iconic "Xavier Rynne" (actually Fr. Francis Murphy) was asked late in life about this pope, he responded: "Well, he is a conservative pope presiding over a conservative curia. But he does reach out. So I don't know what to make of him." That was an honest, truthful response. He did not understand John Paul because he was still stuck in his paradigm of the Council: triumphant victory of progressive over regressive conservative. He did not really recognize the Cultural Revolution for what it was; nor could he absorb the brilliant organic, creative conservativism of the Great John Paul

As a boomer seminarian myself in the 1960s I recall with delight the intellectual-moral excitement of the liberalism of the time. And so I share the enthusiasms of the older priests. I have gratitude, affection and reverence for so many who have "fathered" me or been good big brothers to me. However, in the 1970s after immersion in the charismatic renewal I found the theology of John Paul and Benedict as the authentic, organically-creatively conservative implementation of the Council. While I am a staunch critic of Catholic Progressivism, I do emulate all the good qualities of that "silent" generation of Vatican II priests: care for poor, ecumenism, devotion to Scripture, and openness to what is best in the broader culture.

At the same time I cherish the conservatism of our younger priests as a vigorous Catholic counterculture against  modernity as Godless, individualistic, toxic and dystopian. And yet the "silent generation" now slowly dying off retained so many cherished Catholic values: liberality, magnanimity, openness, compassion, care for the needy, ecumenism in outreach and embrace of all human communities. We do not want to set the young against the old, the "conservative against the progressive."

My dear friend, teacher, and pastor, of happy memory, Fr. Bob Antzcak, was one of the most progressive priests in the Archdiocese of Newark. A highly intelligent man, he had the heart of a true priest, but was (in my view) confused theologically. Late in his life he expressed to me his visceral disgust for the Neocatechumenal Way, in which I was "walking." Shortly after that he retired to a parish in Bergen County. A new, young priest from that "Way" was assigned to Bob's parish. When the young priest arrived, he found the elderly Bob, in poor health, on his knees preparing the room for the new arrival. I understand the two became fast friends before Bob's passing. This is a happy story!

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, a prominent Francis progressive and a decent man, has now as his personal secretary (a delicate, significant position) a talented young priest from that same Neocatechumenal Way. The two are at opposite extremes on the Catholic spectrum of doctrine and morality. I understand they share a deep affection and respect for each other. This is another happy story! We see that the Catholic bonds of faith and love are deeper and stronger than theological differences, which are themselves very important. 

May we move forward, like the gospel steward who draws from the new and the old, in a Catholic synthesis of what is best across the generations. May we grow in filial loyalty to all our priests, that we ourselves be paternal/maternal for those who look to us.