Category Archives: Faith Matters Sunday

Over at the New York Times where hostility to all things Roman Catholic is a longstanding tradition, Frank Bruni has mixed a unique cocktail of one part sharp observation, two parts confusion about Christian teaching, a dash of schadenfreude and splash of scandal. It is, in other words, business as usual at the newspaper of record, where passionate disagreement verging into bitter resentment at the sexual teachings of the Catholic Church (that homosexuals can’t marry, heterosexuals can’t divorce, and that abortion is the willful destruction of innocent human life) is almost as widespread as hatred of the KKK.

(I say almost, noting Ross Douthat’s piece this morning. Maureen Dowd, however, proudly upholds the paper’s traditional foam-flecked hatred of Rome, with the difference that loathing and contempt for Catholic ideas is expressed in our more democratic era by the Catholic or ex-Catholic children of Eire rather than toffee nosed WASPs. In the old days, hatred of Rome was a bond in New York journalistic and intellectual circles between nativist Protestants and aspiring Jewish intellectuals remembering centuries of Catholic persecution. These days everybody is in on the Church-hating.) Continue reading →

According to Dante, the last pope to resign couldn’t even make it into Hell. Pope Celestine V, a 13th century monk whose brief elevation to the papacy ended with resignation, is found among the ‘neutrals’ who neither God nor the Devil wants anything to do with. Dante was hardly an objective observer; he blamed Celestine’s resignation for the elevation of his nemesis Boniface VIII to the Papacy.

Celestine was later declared a saint (mostly as a way to make his successor look bad; Vatican backstabbing is nothing new), but even so there has always been a cloud over the idea of papal resignation. Popes are supposed to die with their slippers on; John Paul II’s heroic struggle to carry on with his work as his health and strength failed were seen by many Catholics and non-Catholics as a moving testimony to his faith and dedication. The papacy was his cross, and he carried it like his Master all the way to the end.

Benedict, some are already saying, is a shirker. Like Celestine (who, despite instituting the basic rules for papal conclaves that are still followed today, is generally considered to have been an ineffective and isolated leader), Benedict is being called isolated, temperamentally unsuited to the job, too intellectual, too pious, too weak. Continue reading →

This is the one time of year when I’m ready to declare war on Christmas myself. It’s impossible to venture into a store without Christmas music and Christmas displays. Christmas catalogs are over stuffing mailboxes all over the land. Continue reading →

Attentive readers of these posts know that my father, Loren B. Mead, is an Episcopal priest.  Ordained more than fifty years ago in the Diocese of South Carolina, he served in the parish ministry at Trinity Church in Pinopolis, South … Continue reading →