Where the Rubber Hits the Road

March 29, 2010 12:00 P.M. Spreading the Big Lie:   Why did the Washington Post choose Palm Sunday to publish an ignorant and malicious piece by Sinead O’Connor on abuse in the Catholic Church? I f Irish singer Sinead O’Connor wishes to denounce her mother publicly as an abusive parent, that is her privilege. If Ms. O’Connor wishes to shred a photograph of Pope John Paul II on stage, as she did almost two decades ago, she is, one supposes, within the boundaries of “performance art.” If Ms. O’Connor wishes to  “separate” the God she believes in from the Catholic Church in which she was raised, as she put it in a March 28 article in the “Outlook” section of the Washington Post , she is free to do so. What Sinead O’Connor is not free to do is to misrepresent the teaching and law of the Catholic Church in the Post in order to buttress her claim that the Church is an “abusive organization” and that the Church threate...

In my profile, I describe myself as being an "evangelical" Catholic priest. "Evangelical" is not a word normally ascribed to Catholic clergy as it has been, for better or worse, appropriated by those of the Pentecostal sects of the Christian family. I would like to claim ownership of this term, but the credit belongs to Fr. Jay Scott Newman, the pastor of St. Mary's Church in Greenville, South Carolina (Diocese of Charleston). I have included at the end of this post a link to Fr. Scott's excellent webpage, but I include the eight principles of what he describes as Evangelical Catholicism - with great appreciation to him for encapsulating in them the essence of what I have always held to be my model of Catholicism and priesthood. "During the nearly twenty-seven years of his pontificate, Pope John Paul the Great called the Church to the urgent mission of fulfilling the Great Commission in our time, a project he called the New Evangelization. This ev...