Oblige Them to be Fair

This week I received a survey from a Catholic organization asking what I thought about how the Catholic Church and Faith are treated by certain institutions in contemporary society. The questions were in the vein of whether the Church was being given a fair shake - e.g. is the news media fair, is the arts community fair, is the government fair, is the business community fair, are colleges and universities fair.

Those questions are fine as a conversation starter, but the survey doesn't go past them; as a result, it risks being nothing so much as a means for harvesting a list of grievances. Nobody but the aggrieved care about that.

I replied to the survey, and added the following response:

Our society has never been Catholic, and it has always been opposed to the Catholic faith. In the days when the Church was better respected, it was because Catholics were unabashedly Catholic. Today’s Catholics, however, have turned their back on their own faith and culture; small wonder that society at large shows no respect for the Catholic Church: her own children act embarrassed about her. Let Catholics shake off their lethargy, vigorously embrace their faith and religious heritage, and so oblige the Church’s opponents and critics to respect the spotless Bride of Christ.