Candid Catholicism
Many people in many nations these days say they “don’t recognize” their country anymore. Between radical changes in sexual morals and social behavior, the inability to state the obvious like “what is a woman,” claims of racism and “hate” over everyday social frictions, massive unregulated immigration, and wholesale dismissals of the past as irretrievably evil, it’s no wonder. But it is a wonder that similar complaints – not exactly the same, but closely related – also arise often enough now about disorienting changes in the Church.
Part of the problem is that media – even Catholic media – have to fill limitless digital spaces, often by emphasizing controversies that they hope will attract clicks. Another part, however, is the radical rupture, sometimes even within the Church, with age-old human truths and goods, driven by technological developments, but also by abandonment of traditional anchors in tested truths of faith and reason, in the name of human liberation.
To understand all this is not easy; to know what to do harder still. But now comes a very useful tool from TCT contributor, Francis X. Maier. True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, which will be officially published tomorrow, is both a passionate statement of faith and love of the Church and a careful inquiry into what a cross-section of American bishops, priests, deacons, and lay people are thinking and doing at a very difficult moment for the Church and the world. (Several anonymously, to get maximum candor.)
