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Much media coverage treats US Catholicism as divided into two very distinct and warring camps. But from where I stand as someone shoved to the margins by the institution, who also has a Ph.D. in theology, there's much commonality between the two camps. /1
The hard-right Catholics who took part in the Jan. 6 insurrectionist race riot are not so much an aberrant departure from the rest of US Catholicism, but an extreme expression of something running all through the institution in recent decades. /2
It was around 1973 or 1974 that I was at a Trappist monastery with a group, on a mini-retreat, and when I bought a rosary at the gift shop of the monastery as a gift for a friend, the Trappist staffing the shop said to me, "Do people still use these things in the outside?" /3
It was nothing unusual for a Trappist β a Trappist monk! β in the early 1970s to state openly that the rosary is one among many spiritual traditions/practices in Catholicism, which has no sacrosanct status as "the" form of prayer for all Catholics. /4
But how far we fell from that time to now, with the two anti-Vatican II popes, St. John Paul II and BXVI, so that now it seems shocking to a large percentage of US Catholics to propose that you can be a great Catholic and shrug your shoulders at the rosary. /5
A spiritual practice or device that β let's face it β is very often associated with a militant, anti-modern, fortress-church spirituality that one had hoped Vatican II had overcomeβ¦. /6
Those Catholics taking part in the insurrectionist race riot are not so much an aberration or an excrescence as an extreme expression of something that's very wrong throughout US Catholicism at present: fiercely reactionary, anti-intellectual, badly educated and ill-informed. /7
