Initial Blog Entry

This is my first blog. And I won't lie. It's mostly spurred on from reading Catholic Mike, who for better or worse is rather well read. I couldn't find anything else in the Milwaukee area that looked at things from a more progressive point of view. So I have started this blog.

I'm a faithful Catholic. I welcome comments and plan to usually post them unless one person comments too often or not with a spirit of generosity.

I think we are in a wintertime in the Catholic Church right now. Pope John Paul II gave us papal representatives and not bishops. He gave us "yes men" and not scholars, not thinkers. The future of the Catholic Church looks bleak. But I'm still here. I'll go down with the ship, but I hope that it does not come to that. There are still so many good priests, good lay people, great theologians, but I think it is possible that John Paul "The Great" may go down in history as the man responsible for killing the Catholic Church.

In large part the blame goes back to Vatican II. So many, countless wonderful things happened there. They addressed the issue of collegiality among the bishops and a voice of the faithful among the laity, but they installed no safeguards to insure this vision and the thinking progressive episcopate has been decimated, almost without exception. We have been left with a Papal Regime, a Leader and followers; not an interactive world church community.

If we are lucky enough to survive the winter, I believe the next big change will be in Church structure. We have seen the seeds of this in the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandal. We now have an advisory board with lay people with the job of watching the bishops. Most American Catholics know that we need lay people that actually have a real say, real power. That will be the next step needed to keep the Catholic Church from becoming a museum a hundred years from now.

In my blogs to come I plan on touching on many issues, but this initial blog should give anybody reading this an idea of the framework that I am thinking in. God's peace to you.

A Wintertime Catholic