American Catholic: Oxymoron
If you’re an American Catholic, you’re an oxymoron . . . or maybe just a moron, I’m not sure.
Don’t take offense. I’m an American Catholic. I’m content to be oxymoronic, and I feel like a moron sometimes. I love America and I love Catholicism. And that’s kind of like loving diet foods and Big Macs, loving your wife and your secretary, beating your kids and hugging them, enjoying football and the pre-2023 Detroit Lions. You love two incompatible things.
It’s not impossible, of course. It can be accomplished in different ways. One love may trump another for a few days, then the other one roars back. Both loves might be compromised or hold a low position in your heart. You might not truly love both but just think you do.
Or one might reconcile the loves the best he or she can, preserving the best of both without harming either.
Reconciliation. That’s the path the American Catholic must choose. America isn’t Catholic-friendly. From Puritan disdain for anything Catholic and Protestant usurpation of the Maryland Catholic aristocracy in colonial times to the founding fathers’ contempt for Catholicism (John Adams scorning: “Is there any instance of a Roman Catholic monarchy of five and 20 million at once converted into a free and rational people?”), to the nineteenth-century attacks on Catholic churches and orphanages, to the…
