The California Catholic Daily is turning into a wonderful resource -- sort of a localized Catholic World News.
In their story today about Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi and maker of a new (and reportedly rather hostile) documentary about Evangelicals, she talks about the wonderful way the teachers at her Catholic schools faithfully passed on the Catholic moral tradition to her back in the 80's. Not.
Pelosi, a graduate of San Francisco’s upscale Convent of the Sacred Heart High School and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said what she was taught in these Catholic schools differed dramatically from what she learned from the Evangelicals. “We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given,” she told the Jan. 17 San Francisco Chronicle. “I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.
This just really annoys me. Add these institutions to the list of Catholic schools and colleges that solicit donations from the Catholic faithful, and then turn right around and deliver a moral education that differs in no significant way from secular schools. Ms. Pelosi has just given us a couple of additional examples of how the aggiornamento called for by John XXIII so quickly got translated to "throw out every teaching that doesn't conform to the editorial positions of The New York Times."
Perhaps her teachers might respond that if they had tried to convince their students of the rightness of the Church's teachings on abortion and homosexuality, the students would simply have tuned out. If so, it's very interesting what Ms. Pelosi then says about the impact of spending even the few weeks of research she did for her film with some really dedicated Evangelical Protestants who weren't afraid of what she would think.
Talking of her experiences to the New York Times of Jan. 11, Pelosi said, “I believe in the culture war. And you know what? If I have to take a side in the culture war, I’ll take their [Christian conservative] side. Because if you give me the choice of Paris Hilton or Jesus, I’ll take Jesus.”
So maybe if her teachers back at Sacred Heart, and her professors at Loyola Marymount, had simply laid out the case for the teachings of the Church that employed them...
In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach", a haunting poem evoking the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith. As a boomer who finished Catholic elementary school in 1964 and then watched my Church falter, I've found the roar all too audible. So here I wait, listening for the whispers of that Sea's invincible return.
