I understand the distinction and how “directly” was used, but nothing was said about them becoming a political group. Bishops have become directly involved in political issues, have aligned themselves with partisan policies, and have as a result sacrificed some of their moral authority. It is true that, if for no better reason than size, the US bishops could never become a political organization. That has not stopped the direct involvement of individual bishops.
Ender
Agreed. But I believe the fairly mild infection of many of the U.S. bishops with Liberation Theology Lite (American version) is passing into history. It has seemed to me the appointees of Pope Benedict, in particular, are more spiritual men in a basic way than many of their predecessors, who often felt the state is the answer to far too much.
I welcome that, just as I welcome the fact that so many of the younger priests are more oriented to the spiritual than they are to politics. Lots of the newer orders of sisters seem the same way; more into direct service and prayer than to lobbying or filing lawsuits.
To me, that’s as it should be, not that it makes life easier for Catholics. It makes it harder, really. It’s so much easier to be superficially “on the right side” politically, as one perceives it, than to look into one’s spirituality and actions with a gimlet eye, and ask very hard questions.
As Catholics, I believe we have a lot of soul-searching to do. The “clown masses” were, in a sense, a proper symbol for much of what the Church in the U.S. was about for a long time. I don’t mean that literally, I mean it symbolically. We were, it seems, so long in a self-congratulatory and profoundly superficial parody of what we ought to be. With some of the newer bishops and, I strongly suspect, with Pope Francis, we are now going to be challenged to ask ourselves the harder questions.
I am put to mind in this post of something a very young, highly-educated, very competent and holy nun said to me perhaps two years ago. I made some comment about how her way of life (half contemplative, half in service to unwed mothers-to-be in the worst slums in New York City) surely reflected her personal holiness. “Oh no” she said, “We live the way we do precisely because we are not holy. We need our hours of prayer, and our hours of service.”
I was slack-jawed at such wisdom in a woman who could not have been a day past thirty years old, who radiated joy in everything she did. I knew then why her presence was almost magical to everyone around her, and surely is to the desperate women to whom she brings the counsel of life in a world that counsels death at every turn.
Okay, okay, here’s her order’s website. I love these women with all my heart. See how young they are, and what they do. We can’t all be Sisters of Life, of course. But we can be something like that in our own ways, consistent with our own vocations and stations in life.
www.sistersoflife.org