Note that what had been a very traditional parish had later become anything but. They now do novus ordo Masses in a church totally gutted from the beauty of yesteryear. The parish has become a Kumbaya pariah. That is what effectively destroyed them. Pews in a circle or semi-circle and hand clapping galore. Sensitivity abounds and discipline has faded badly.
You know, I suspect that you have never been Catholic. I do not doubt that you are reasonably disappointed in many of my co-religionists, maybe even in me, and that you are firm in your own faith whatever it may be. I am not comfortable worshiping in reformed churches and am firm in the Roman Catholic Faith. I know I am not going to change and you and many here are not likely to change either. For good or for ill, we are stuck with each other. Don't be such a pessimist. We really are not as bad as you imagine.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, virtually every member of my quite large extended family was a militant New Deal Democrat. The two exceptions were a millionaire great uncle and a first cousin who had served about 12 years active duty in the Marine Corps in the Korean War and then long enough to be on a troop ship heading for Cuba to back up the Bay of Pigs invasion (but his ship turned around and went back to Baltimore). Today, few if any of my relatives are other than determined Reagan style Republicans. Abortion and "gay" everything and pacifism and gun grabbing and other issues have converted my verrrry New Deal Democrat family to Reagan Republicans and they VOTE.
If you want to be upset with Catholics, be upset that our birth rate has declined as we have assimilated into America. I had a cousin in Boston (born in about 1860) whom I met at her 95th birthday party. She cooked corned beef and cabbage for the entire mob of 23 surviving children, their spouses, their kids, grandkids and me (who happened to be in town at about age ten) totaling about 250 people. An Irish family as God intended. My mother's Scottish-German sister had 10 kids by her Irish husband. I married late and had three kids. My relatives have not been as inclined to large families as their ancestors.
It was not just Catholics either. Nearly two weeks ago, a very holy priest died in a nursing facility in Traverse City, Michigan. He had been afflicted with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. He had been brought up in a Finnish Lutheran family and he was the sixteenth of eighteen children,the first ten having died in childbirth or infancy. He married an Irish Catholic woman whom he met in junior high school. She died in his presence in an automobile collision shortly after his military retirement. He had converted to Catholicism during a lengthy and distinguished military career. He became a "late vocation" priest against substantial odds. He was a client of mine and the bravest and most determined priest and pro-lifer I will ever know. You may remember him as the elderly priest arrested on the Notre Dame campus for carrying a cross in protest of Obozo speaking there at graduation. His name was Fr. Norman Weslin. If you knew him, you would have loved him as I did. He would have respected you for who you are and would not have let religious differences separate brethren in Christ.
The 1965 Immigration Act is undoubtedly flawed but is not the disaster you describe. Racial and nationality quotas are a national embarrassment. What we need to do is recruit among the new Americans. The culture here is going to change. It is not going to calcify in place. The good that was that parish in St. Louis is not harmed by immigration. The polo club or Junior League is more the enemy of Americans and their prosperous future than is Julio's Bar and Grill or a Vietnamese restaurant or a Korean small business.
Welcome Catholics to the ranks of conservatives. We are coming whether welcome or not and there are a lot of us. We disagree on about 5% of faith issues. Protestant conservatives are not going to win the culture wars without us and we are not going to win without Protestant consevatives. John Cardinal O'Connor could work it out with the Rev. Mr. Charles Colson and so can you and I.
Was Mother Teresa so bad? John Paul II? Is Timothy Cardinal Dolan a problem? Or 2 million Knights of Columbus? Let me just focus on John Paul II. How well do you know the story of his life? His participation in youth in the Resistance against the Nazi invaders of his country? His resistance to the soviet stooges running his country when he was Archbishop of Krakow? His role in bringing down the Iron Curtain in cooperation with Reagan and Thatcher. The attempted assassinations including that by Mehmet Ali Agca in Vatican Square, paid for by the KGB? You may not agree with Catholic theology in all respects but it should be hard not to have regard for John Paul II and his efforts in this world of yours and mine.
God bless you and yours!
Weird post to make in reply to post 12, unless you were thinking of some other poster, because little of your lengthy post was relevant to me.
You say that Catholics are going to be joining conservatives, and then you defend the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended America forever, it doomed us. That is a true contradiction claiming to want to win elections, but fighting to make sure that we never win, that we do not even preserve our culture and national identity with Western Civilization.
You should know that Catholics are not going to become conservatives, we may get another election or three where they may swing slightly, but they are headed back to the left permanently in the near future.
Why you want to pretend differently puzzles me. I don’t understand why even supposedly conservative Catholics refuse to look at the liberalism of the Catholic voter, and want more and more left wing empowering immigration, all the while insisting that they are conservatives.