Acceptable Prejudice

While the "last acceptable prejudice" -- anti-Catholicism -- chugs along, the "increasingly acceptable prejudice" -- anti-Semitism -- is gaining in popularity.

In regards to the former, I finally saw Lady Gaga's confusing "Judas" video, which is chock full of Catholic imagery and calculated to offend. I find it so calculated to offend that it's not offensive, it's just stupid. The story line, such as it is, is vague enough that you could argue it is actually pro-Catholic (she loves Jesus! but she is tempted to sin!). But only if you are very, very dumb. The one part that made me pause was the bit where someone baptizes Lady Gaga's butt. I have to admit, I've never seen that before. The video ends with Lady Gaga, dressed in a sort of gossamer prom dress/habit, being stoned by the rest of the cast. And while we at the Son Rise Morning Show are firmly against stoning, I am not surprised at the cast's reaction.

Now last night's episode of Law and Order Something-or-Other (how many Law and Order shows are there?) was a different matter. I stumbled on this show half way through, because someone had left the television on, and I hope the Catholic League is on NBC like rhinestones on Lady Gaga's fingernails. The story revolved around the sex abuse scandal in the Church, in which a woman employed in distributing money to victims embezzles $2 million dollars to give to a colleague who had been abused as a teen but never reported it -- who then murders her and makes it look like a suicide. This colleague was sleeping with her, as was a prominent and handsome priest. The message here: The Catholic Church messes up your life. Even when it tries to atone for doing wrong, it does more wrong!

Thanks a lot, NBC. That kind of crap would never be pulled on Muslims and Jews. Or would it? On Jews, anyway. Take a look at the stuff being attacked by the Anti-Defamation League these days, and you won't find music videos full of histrionics or faux righteous television plots -- you'll find this, created and distributed by a gay advocacy group that wants to make it illegal to circumcise anyone under 18. Jews committed to far-left politics: Watch out. I predict more of this is coming. Anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish prejudice raises no eyebrows, and opposing it gains you no friends. Pick your friends carefully.

And for goodness' sakes, don't buy Lady Gaga's stupid song.

Guests for Tuesday, 6/7/2011

Rich Leonardi is online at richleonardi.blogspot.com.

Tom Colyandro writes at catholiclane.com.


Mark Armstrong is online at raisingcatholickids.com.


Marge Fenelon blogs at wwwmargefenelon.blogspot.com.


Bill Donaghy blogs at twistedmystics.blogspot.com.

Kevin Schmiesing is online at catholichistory.net.

Paula Westwood is online at createdorder.blogspot.com.

Send your questions for Catholic counselor Kevin Prendergast to sonrise@sacredheartradio.com.

Dr Jonathan Wells, author of "The Myth of Junk DNA"


Fiorella De Maria, author of "Poor Banished Children"


Danielle Bean is online at faithandfamilylive.com.


Mary Lou Rosien, author of "Catholic Family Boot Camp"


Dale Ahlquist is online at chesterton.org.

"You're Free to Go Elsewhere"

A friend told me, with great relish, a story she heard about a nearby pastor who got tired of parishioners complaining about the changes he was making. "If you don't like it," he supposedly told them on two separate occasions, "you're free to go elsewhere."

I confess to feeling a little thrill myself when she told this story, because I happened to agree with the pastor on both of the subjects that brought on the alleged invitations, and because (as the story was told, anyway) he didn't really mean for anyone to go: He was just fed up.

But later, thinking it over, I wondered over our reaction. After all, "My way or the highway" isn't the way I prefer people to go about explaining how they are going to run things, and I'm pretty sure the same is true for my friend. So why did we find this pastor's approach appealing?

It's partly, I think, because we are fed up. Like many people subjected to endless rounds of liturgical and management fads, we are fed up with incense bowls and substituting whatever you want for what the readings (and even the liturgy!) actually say. We are fed up with irreverence -- from people chatting before and after mass to people heading up to the altar to distribute communion dressed for a day at the beach. And we are fed up with being told there is no big difference between priests and everyone else.

A generation found those things exciting. We are the generation who grew up with them, and we find them boring at best, profoundly discouraging at worst. We missed the rush of being empowered to do whatever amazing things we could dream up, and got stuck with the banality of sitting through what "empowered" people actually come up with. We've been there, done that.

So no, I don't think we are secretly looking for autocrats to order us around. We're just happy to hear that sometimes, in some places, rules actually mean something. And if we don't like them, we're free to go elsewhere.

Guests for Monday, 6/6/2011

Tony Beshara is online at thejobsearchsolution.com.


Kevin Schmiesing is online at catholichistory.net.

Kevin Wright, author of "Europe's Monastery and Convent Guest Houses"


Dion DiMucci, author of "Dion: The Wanderer Talks Truth"


Teresa Tomeo is online at teresatomeo.com.


Sr Helena Burns is online at hellburns.blogspot.com.

Cheryl Dickow is online at bezalelbooks.com.


Rich Leonardi links us to Zenit for Pope Benedict XVI's address on conscience during his visit to Croatia.

Dr Kevin Vost is online at drvost.com.


Steven Greydanus is online at decentfilms.com.

Dan Egan is online at bibletidbits.blogspot.com.

Dr. Mike Gable and the Mission office for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati can be reached at 513-421-3131.

Australian Bishop Gets it Wrong

Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Julian Porteous has demanded that a Muslim group take down billboards and bus ads saying that Jesus was a prophet of Islam.

Calling the statement, “a direct assault on Christian beliefs,” Bishop Porteous said no religion should “set out to antagonize those with differing beliefs,” and that dialogue between Christians and Muslims “is not fostered by provocative statements.”

His Excellency is wrong on several accounts, but right on one big one. Stating that Jesus was a prophet of Islam may be provocative, but it also happens to be what Muslims believe. It’s hard to see how telling people what you believe is a bad thing when you are looking for converts. Would the bishop prefer that Muslims keep that belief secret to spring on converts later?

Second, how are Muslims and Christians supposed to “dialogue” without discussing their very different beliefs about Jesus? We believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. We believe that He is true God and true man, God incarnate, eternally begotten and still alive today, Whose sacrifice gives us the hope of salvation. They believe He was just a guy who made some prophecies and died a long, long time ago. It’s hard to see how minimizing the truth of these opposite beliefs would help anyone...

...unless, of course, we would all rather pretend that there is no big difference between our religions. Perhaps that’s what Bishop Porteous is getting at. In which case it is, indeed, in bad taste for Muslims to advertise that they’ve got the whole Jesus thing right and that we’ve got it wrong.

The problem is that Australian Muslims have already jumped off the “let’s pretend” train. They’re advertising what they do, in fact, believe. And that’s where the bishop gets it right: The advertisement is an assault on Christianity. Islam has always been an assault on Christianity.

Now that Australian Muslims have stopped pretending otherwise, it's time for Australian Christians to wake up and do the same.

Amen, Amen; Prayer, Pray

A judge in Texas has come under fire for outlawing prayer at a high school graduation ceremony because of complaints by an atheist family.

His ruling not only prohibits formal prayer and using the words “benediction” and “invocation” in the official program, it forbids students and speakers for using words including “amen” and “prayer,” and the phrases “join in prayer,” “bow their heads,” and “in [a deity’s name] we pray” in their speeches.

The ruling is more nuanced than the stories making the rounds on Fox News and internet posts. Students are explicitly permitted to wear religious articles, make the sign of the cross, kneel to face Mecca, or use the dangerous words if expressing their own beliefs. What is prohibited is delivering “a message that would commonly be understood to be a prayer... encouraging others who may not believe in the concept of prayer to join in and believe the same concept.”

For anyone to do so, Judge Fred Biery said, would cause the plaintiffs “irreparable harm.”

It’s the last part that’s troubling.

I don’t know about you, but as a Catholic I’ve been present at many public prayers and invitations to pray, Protestant and New Age and “non-denominational.” They haven’t caused me irreparable harm. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be thrilled by a call to kneel toward Mecca at a high school graduation. Let’s admit for a moment that many of the folks up in arms about Judge Biery’s ruling would be singing a different tune if the valedictorian planned to start his or her speech by asking everyone to stand and pray a decade of the rosary.

The problem here is not banning corporate prayer from a public school graduation, which is a legitimate issue people of good will can disagree about. It is the assumption that being asked to pray will harm people and so must be forbidden by law. Critics (including the Texas attorney general) are saying, and rightly so, this case is about an attempt to ban Christianity from the public square.

What the people of Medina (!) High School should do tomorrow night is simple: Not let Christianity or any other religion be banned from its public square. Every speaker should express his or her personal beliefs about God, and the school should redesign its graduation program so that it includes five minutes for prayer or private meditation before and after the ceremony. And then every single person at the graduation should use those minutes to pray OUT LOUD. Catholics should kneel and pray rosaries, Protestants should hold hands and witness, Pentecostals should speak in tongues, Jews should bring out their prayer shawls, Muslims should bring out their prayer rugs, Oprah fans should bring their crystals, Bahai’ should do whatever it is that Bahai’ do, atheists should ignore them all and read Christopher Hitchens, and “spiritual but not religious” folks should sit and observe what quaint customs the rest follow.

You want us to believe that this isn’t about banning religion from the public square? Fine. Prove it. Forbid corporate prayer but see how much irreparable harm atheists come to when everyone, at once, exercises his or her freedom of worship.

The Wanderer Comes Home

I used to work with a guy who was finishing up his philosophy credits before heading to St. Meinrad’s seminary.

I was not a practicing Catholic at the time -- I thought I was too intellectual and sophisticated for that. But I really liked Tom, whom (I see now) I regarded sort of the way President Obama seems to regard other human beings: as an exotic animal whose qualities I could appreciate but not share.

Poor Tom probably thought that he did a bad job with me. He was never able to convince me that Catholicism was true, although I wished him well, promised to come to his ordination, and even corresponded for a while after he left for Chicago.

Years later, after I came back to the Church, I tried to contact him to tell him that he had been in the back of my mind for all those years, a sort of goad or inspiration (depending on the day), one of the people who had led me back to the Church by his kindness, his humble witness, and the memory of his friendship. But I was never able to locate him. So as far as he knows, I am still an ex-Catholic puttering around in happy relativism.

We never know what affect we have on others. I remembered Tom again this week when I read Dion: The Wanderer Talks Truth, the new book by Dion (Runaround Sue, The Wanderer) DiMucci. A breezy memoir of his life as a singer/songwriter and what his Catholic faith has meant to him, the book is sort of an Italian-American rock and roll version of St. Augustine’s Confessions, but a lot shorter. Used to writing for a pithy three and half minute limit, Dion gets straight to the point, whether he’s discussing his own addictions (“Once upon a time such stories were shocking. But in my opinion, they got tiresome years ago, and I will not subject you to another drugalog.”), his long marriage to his high school sweetheart, his meteoric rise to fame (“I wasn’t yet twenty years old and I was already a millionaire a couple times over. It happened that fast.”), his realization that the Catholic Church was right and he was wrong, and his opinions of messages other musicians chose to give (“What right did [John Lennon] have to preach world peace when he couldn’t even get along with the Beatles?”)

It’s a great read, and the two letters in the back alone are worth the price of the book if you have friends or relatives asking questions about the Church. But I keep going back to his description of his childhood parish priest, Msgr. Pernicone, who never stopped talking to him about God and philosophy even during the years he ran around with street gangs. Msgr. Pernicone may have thought his talks with Dion were failures. But the priest was there in the back of the rocker’s mind, St. Monica to St. Augustine, a goad or in inspiration (depending on the day).

Let’s give thanks for all such people in our own lives, and never stop hoping that we do the same for others -- no matter what success we think we have.