The Churches

Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, pleeeeeez!

Is Lisa Madigan autocratic or not?  She threatens alleged price-gouging gas stations, saying give $1G to Red Cross or else.  [See: http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-gas23.html]  Who does this lady think she is, stepdaughter of the Dem who runs the state senate?

Better yet, who does St. Ignatius College Prep think she is, an alum?  No, indeed, her school is a a much more expensive one, Chicago Latin, but in Chicago for obvious reasons she would rather be identified with a Jesuit school. 

Her being alum or not arises in view of her being an honored speaker at Ignatius in September at its Women's Council annual dinner.  This was protested by pro-lifers led by Ignatius (not Chi Latin) alum Eric Scheidler, the oldest of seven brothers and sisters also Ignatius graduates — he in 1984, the most recent in 2000, when the school gave their mother a bouquet of seven roses to honor the occasion.

"Shame on 'Catholic' Ignatius," read the signs Scheidler, son of uber-abortion-protester Joseph Scheidler, prepared reluctantly for the event, he said in an email to supporters.  “But I don't have any choice. I can't stand by while my high school alma mater pretends that Lisa Madigan is a public servant whose ardent support for abortion can be overlooked.”

This “ardent support” business is no exaggeration.  She wooed vigorously the pro-choice vote, promising to investigate (i.e., harrass) crisis pregnancy centers who insert God and religion between woman and doctor.  [See http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/20lisa.html]  The Scheidlers’ Pro-Life Action News advised her to look at the pull-back from such investigation-harrassment by her NY counterpart, AG Elliott Spitzer, who couldn’t pull off a close-down of CPCs.  [See http://www.prolifeaction.org/news/200212/madigan.htm]   In any case, she never went ahead on the project.

Not for lack of interest, we presume.  Hers is a “mania to thwart pro-life efforts,” said  Pro-Life Action News.  She was one of only six Illinois state senators to oppose a ban on partial-birth abortion and worked for a an attorney who argued against the Pro-Life Action League in NOW v. Scheidler — being argued even now, for the third time, before the U.S. Supreme Court.  Planned Parenthood loves here; they gave her AG campaign over $200,000.

The Jesuits at Ignatius love her too.  Forget turning her away from communion.  Hey, have her as a speaker.

posted by Jim Bowman @ 12/23/2005 10:38:00 AM links to this post

Let these people go?

Letting lay people read at mass and give out communion is "like taking children to a fire station and letting them wear the firefighters’ hats," says Russell Shaw in Crisis magazine [where this essay is not available online], 12/05. These lay ministers, who number in the tens of thousands in the U.S., are "moved by generous impulse" and "are badly needed" in understaffed parishes," he adds. But to make such ministry "a preferred alternative to lay apostolate in the world" is a big mistake.

He quotes Vatican Council II in its call for "ordering of the whole of creation to the praise of God" and its hailing "secular activity" as helping to make one holy and filling the world "with the spirit of Christ." Lay people have "a principal role" in this, said the council.

Shaw is on to something here, in his demoting the priest-helper role. It beats standing for communion as a statement of Christian dignity. Neither does he buy the laity-unchained concept with its liberationist, not to say revolutionist aura. The lay person’s rediscovered dignity does not imply priests’ indignity.

He also recommends promoting a vigorous Catholic subculture without the triumphalism (we-got-it-you-don’t), intellectual vapidity or at least minimalism, and defensiveness of 30s-through-50s American Catholicism. Instead, he wants "dynamically orthodox" infrastructure "motivating Catholics" to evangelize the world.

This is good stuff: confident and unapologetic defining and embracing a position and purpose. (Did I just do that? Give three pairs in sequence? Amazing.) It’s from Shaw’s new book, Catholic Laity in the Mission of the Church (Requiem Press).  Also amazing: the book is titled without catchy catchword as grabber.

posted by Jim Bowman @ 12/12/2005 10:00:00 AM links to this post