Maybe, LeRoy, we can do our own indexing by referring to a subject with numbers like this one. Liked talking to you, even though briefly.

Here is a thought about Protestants: I believe very few things we were brought up to believe. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether Jesus was God or just Jesus, for example. We need Protestants, perhaps now more than any time in the last few hundred years. Unfortunately we really don’t have protestors anymore, either politically (Where is Cesar Chavez now that we need him?) or religiously. I suppose it is interesting that the earlyChurch organized itself after the Roman Empire, so took on many of the good and bad things of that era. But here in Mexico, for example, where it is not uncommon for babies to have babies…thirteen year old girls with their first child…..and AIDS is getting a foothold, I think it is unconcionable that the Church refuses the sacraments to anyone using condoms. And, by the way, that is one reason the fundamentalist Protestant sects are making such headway here and in most of Latin America.

I don’t think the Church is very responsive to these times and I don’t mean manipulating morality to accomodate a bad concience. Jesus’ messages are so simple, so fundamental, so out of the mainstream of Christian teaching now….the Church has lost its way I think. As I may have said in a previous post, Catholics should be out with pitchforks and torches like in the Frankenstein movies, protesting, protesting, protesting against the excesses and blindness of the Church….and I also don’t only mean pedophilia, I mean basic good, common sense, “natural law” morality.

I’ll end this small diatribe with a quote from Alex Hawkins, running back of the old Baltimore Colts. She was about five feet tall, but he was scared to death of her. After a night of carousing with his drinking buddies like Art Donovan, instead of going into the house, he just fell asleep on the bench in his garden. The next morning she looked in the bed, no Alex. Looked throughout the house, no Alex. Really pissed, she saw him out on the bench. She stormed out, shook him awake and accused him of drinking all night with his nere-do-well friends.

“Not so,” he said. “I just stayed up all night so I could see the sunrise over the rose garden.

Hands on hips she said, “You silly SOB, we rototilled the rose garden two years ago.

He thought about that and said…”Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

More later. I wonder what you would say to Pope Benedict if you had a chance to see him privately. What might you say that would get him to rethink some things.

My best,

Don