Diogenes takes apart some prevailing attitudes at the once-Catholic University of Santa Clara, just a few miles down El Camino Real from where I live. It's still run by Jesuits, but as his quotes from the student newspaper's recent editorial on the school's friendliness to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community make clear, they're now that wonderful breed of gray-ponytailed tie-dyed progressive Jesuit. Read: heretic.
What makes Santa Clara's embrace of all that's trendily perverted especially ironic to me personally is that my late uncle was thrown out of Santa Clara a few weeks short of graduation -- for refusing to apologize for breaking the 10 o'clock curfew one time too many. It seems he was sneaking out to meet his girlfriend for a little smooching in a back booth at the local malt shop. That was in 1937.
Poor uncle John! If he'd only been born a few decades later, the men in charge of his Catholic formation would have been handing him condoms and leering sympathetically as he and his girlfriend headed off for the Drag Show.
Uncharitable of me? I don't think so. This kind of officially sanctioned sin, in institutions that claim the name "Catholic", just has to stop.
What do I want? Orthodoxy! When do I want it? NOW!
Hardly an original chant, but hey, its opposite seems to have worked for the gray-ponytailed, progressive Jesuits. Big time.
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.
