It's another middle-of-the-night bathroom safari time again, and now that I'm awake, I thought I might as well check the news, just in case the world ended after all, like those Mayans predicted. It didn't end, and I think I know why, but that's for another rant entirely.
For now, let's talk for a moment or two about this local 'Catholics Come Home' campaign currently in progress around the Archdiocese of Vancouver. It's a very slick and elaborate 'spin-doctoring' campaign with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. It wants us non-practicing Catholics to 'come home' because they desperately need our bums in the seats and our collections on the plates. They're telling us we've been staying away because we've simply been "too busy" or we had objections to their rules on abortion or contraception. They very carefully avoid any hint of their past sexual abuse scandals, their priests breaking their vows, or their unrealistic attitudes toward divorce and other disgustingly frequent human failings common to not just us Catholics, but everybody.
They did a survey a while back, and found that they had 96,000 Catholics attending Mass around here, out of a possible 460,000 of us. So about 20% of us go to church. I'm tempted to say "the rest of us know better" but that would be an unnecessarily facetious remark. I'm sure there's a lot of very good and decent and righteous people still attending Mass. I haven't been one of them since my divorce in the 1960s, but that also is a rant for some other time.
Update:
I mentioned sexual abuse scandals, and here's why we have a problem with all of that. We're not convinced that there's been a real clean-up, and not just more smoke and mirrors 'spin-doctoring' instead of real action. It appears we have legitimate concerns.
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