A Traditionalist's Agenda for the Church

"Father Baker" 20th century
apostle of Charity who was
a symbol of what the Church
stood for in his day

Yesterday I posted regarding the negativity I find in so many sites in the blogosphere or on the web. I find our Church being dragged into negativity as well.  We need to go back to the past and recover our true heritage as Catholics.  There was a day when everyone knew what Catholicism stood for.  We built schools for the children of the immigrants who were coming to this country, and hospitals to care for the poor who could not afford the physicians’ private clinics.  We were on the side of labor against those “robber barons” who were forcing not only men but their wives and children to work for a pittance while they made outrageous fortunes with which to spoil themselves, their spouses, their children, and their mistresses.  We believed in an America that would be multi-cultural and we founded parishes and schools where Poles could worship and learn in Polish, Germans in German, Italians in Italian.  We established new religious communities to work among the Native Americans and to open schools and orphanages for the descendants of those Africans whom we Americans had held in slavery.  We opened homes for unwed mothers and clinics for the urban poor.  We opened sanitariums for the diseased and for the mentally ill.  We had vocational schools to train the sons and daughters of the poor for jobs that would enable them to climb the social ladder.   Some of the things we did were, by modern standards, coarse and even harsh, but by the standards of the day were among the most humane and enlightened.  Today, however, people only know what the Catholic Church is against.  That is a disaster from the perspective of what the world calls marketing and what we call evangelization. We need to wake up and change the menu.  God so loved the world that he sent his only Son that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  God did not send his Son to condemn the world but so that the world may be saved through him.  We need to step aside from the cancer of negativity that is eating out our society from within and recapture the mission Christ has given us to be Good News to the poor, Liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed and heralds of a time acceptable to God.