Susan wrote:
" When I was a senior in high school 1975, I too used
"Banquet" in a school project! I went to an all girls Catholic BUT very
liberal school (I know it's kind of an oxymoron)."
Susan,
I don't think that a "very liberal Catholic high school" is an oxymoron at
all! In fact, it describes mine perfectly. And the sisters who ran that
school, which closed several years after my class graduated, are still some
of the strongest women I've ever known. They've been willing to take
personal risks for living their convictions, especially about social justice
in American society.
And the Catholic left in the U.S. sometimes seems almost invisible in the
media, but it's still going strong after lo these many years. Yes, this is
the church of Pope John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger; the
institution that officially declares homosexuality "intrinsically
disordered" and states that women can't be priests because Jesus was male,
but it's also the church of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, and Daniel and
Philip Berrigan, and St. Francis of Assisi. The Catholic liberal
traditional, which I might prefer to call the Catholic compassionate
tradition, is rich and deep and still alive, even as it is reflected in a
fair number of papal encyclicals, and thus, official church teaching.
Mary P.,
Proud graduate of Marquette University, Class of '82, and Jesuit Volunteer,
Cincinnati, OH, 1986-87.
(attendee at the national Call to Action conference, Nov. 3-5, 2000,
Milwaukee, WI?)
