Obama at Notre Dame

Christopher Badeaux comments:

'Therein lies the beginning of the story of How President Obama Went to Visit Notre Dame. We did not simply arrive, by some hidden transmutation, at a point where American Catholics favor abortion on demand (and embryonic stem cell research) at a higher rate than the population at large, and where the majority of the student body and faculty of what was, at one time, the premiere Catholic university in the country would loudly applaud a man who has spoken of good will in the abortion wars, and gone on to fight every single legal restriction on the slaughter of the most defenseless of us all. We arrived there through the cowardice of the bishops, through a hierarchy terrified of its laity and the changes in the laity, and through a laity that became mainline Protestants.

'Any history of modern American Catholicism must begin with the suburbs. Ethnic Catholic factory workers and their children raced to the suburbs for more land, better schools (the dream of universal Catholic education was always a dream), less congestion, and, over time, white flight. It was the first, real break in the old, established parish system, wherein generations would go from Baptism to a funeral Mass in the same diocese, and usually the same parish. This had two direct effects: It upended the relationship between parish priests and bishops on the one hand, and the flock on the other; and severed the day-to-day traditions that were bound up with the practice of the Faith – everything from the mere act of walking to Mass to Knights of Columbus meetings to bingo at the parish hall – robbing Catholics of the muscle memory of a life that revolved around the parish.'

I believe that Pope Benedict XVI is correct. In the West, Catholics, and even baptized Christians, have become a minority, a remnant. Our influence over cultural institutions is waning. We can only win the world through heroic love. In the words of Saint Benedict: Ora et labora.