Life Lines
By Mary DeTurris Poust
Sorry, but these convenient labels just don’t fit
Stereotypes are never a good thing, but they seem to be an acceptable thing where Catholics are concerned.
Look at any secular newspaper coverage of Catholic events, or TV and movie offerings that portray supposedly “regular” Catholics, and it’s typically the equivalent of a slap in the face.
As far as secular society is concerned, Catholics are supposed to fit into some neat little box, where abortion is the only issue we care about and nuns still wear the kind of habits that anyone born after 1965 probably has never seen on an actual living person.
I recently attended the New York State Catholic Conference’s annual Public Policy Day in Albany, where the wide-ranging agenda covered such issues as human trafficking, health care for the poor, embryonic stem cell research, criminal justice, living wages and tuition tax deductions for private and parochial school families.
And yet when the story appeared on the front page of a local daily newspaper the next morning, the lead paragraph boiled down to this, almost word for word: Stem cell research — bad, tax deductions — good.
The reporter attended the same event I had, but somehow missed — or, more likely, chose to virtually ignore — more than half of the issues covered. Interestingly enough, he dropped all of the so-called liberal issues, the issues that focused on the plight of the poor and children and immigrants and the elderly and prisoners.
Why?
Because the secular media continually tries to paint Catholics as one-issue Republicans rather than figure out what we are really about, which is so complex and so far afield from anything secular society can fathom that it would make their proverbial heads spin if they gave it more than five minutes of thought.
Secular society doesn’t really want to understand us because understanding us might mean that they have to see beyond the caricature they have created. Unfortunately, Catholics are used to this sort of disrespect.
We have come to expect the usual parade — especially around the Easter season — of wildly unsubstantiated claims that are meant to shake the very foundations of the Christian faith. No one is safe from the alleged “documentaries” or “historical” books and articles that attempt to take down what Jesus built up.
What secular society doesn’t get is that Catholics are not a people easily shaken, even if we do get stirred — by the questioning looks of non-Catholics who want to know what we think of the “fact” that they found Jesus’ tomb, or by the need to explain to our children that what they’re hearing about their faith is a lie and that they should expect more of the same throughout their lives, or by the frustration of constantly being cast as a stereotype.
Maybe our ability to remain steadfast against the tide of the times is due to the fact that we are simply too tired to do anything more than maintain the status quo.
But I’d like to think that many Catholics are unshakable because we are so used to dealing with threatening issues — both inside and outside of our Church — that we have become adept at redirecting our attention away from the more human elements of our faith to the core of what we believe: that God became man, walked among us, died for us and handed us eternity with his resurrection.
It’s funny, but have you noticed how the stories and movies meant to shake the faithful fade away as quickly as they surface? Like so many attempts throughout history to derail the pivotal event of all time, they fail.
They fail because they are false. They fail because when it comes right down to it, being a Catholic has nothing to do with one issue and everything to do with one man, who was both human and divine and who will remain standing when everything else is shaken to its core.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law