NCR Touts Googling God Blog

Heidi Schlumpf formerly of US Catholic and now writing for NCR has an excellent piece on progressive Catholic bloggers including Deacon Greg and yours truly amongst others in the National Catholic Reporter.

My theory is that those who feel outside the mainstream are more likely to take advantage of alternative media like blogs. And traditionalist Catholics are still outside the mainstream of American Catholicism (if you look at the entire church, not just the hierarchy). Most prominent national Catholic publications are still moderate-to-progressive and feature more liberal bloggers, including National Catholic Reporter’s own NCR Today, whose writers include NCR editors and contributors from all over the country, including yours truly. (Commercial break: If you haven’t checked out NCR Today yet, you’ll find lots of interesting news and opinion there, including a “Morning Briefing” first thing every day.)

Other progressive bloggers write for America’s In All Things, Commonweal’s Dot Commonweal and U.S. Catholic’s blogs. But there are also a number of individual bloggers who favor a post-Vatican II type of Catholicism. Here are some of my favorites:

The Deacon’s Bench (deacbench.blogspot.com), by Greg Kandra, a deacon in the Brooklyn, N.Y., diocese who used to work for CBS News, now for the diocese’s cable channel. His blog is very newsy and updated daily. If you read this blog, you’ll be up on most of the major Catholic news stories.

Googling God (googlinggod.blogspot.com), by Mike Hayes, an expert in young adult ministry who cofounded BustedHalo.com, an online Catholic site for young adults. Blogging since 2005, Hayes just took a job as campus minister at St. Joseph’s University Parish in Buffalo, N.Y. He has a nice mix of personal stories and links to other Catholic and religious material.


Ad Dominum (ad-dominum.com), by “Thom,” a secular Franciscan and reference librarian whose blog description promises “progressive theology, traditional liturgy.” I know you’re thinking, “A librarian and a liturgist?” But trust me, he’s interesting -- even if he does like to dissect every Mass (most recently Ted Kennedy’s funeral).

Catholic Anarchy (catholicanarchy.org), by Michael J. Iafrate, a singer-songwriter working on his doctorate in theology. With the tagline “vox victimarum, vox dei” (“the voice of the victim is the voice of God”), Iafrate’s blog covers politics, liberation theology and social justice movements. Anti-capitalism is a category; Dorothy Day is mentioned frequently.

The Ironic Catholic (www.ironiccatholic.com), by an anonymous professor of theology at a small Catholic university in Minnesota. The only female on this list, she is currently pregnant with her fourth child. This blog isn’t necessarily liberal, but it is funny with its fake news reports, “strange but true” notices and bad theological jokes.

Humbled and honored is all I can say to be mentioned with such prolific bloggers and by someone who is an excellent writer and reviewer of all things Catholic who I have admired for years.

Today may we all rediscover the gift of surprise, which I was indeed floored by today.

NCR: Young Catholics Accept the Church as It Is

An excellent piece by Tom Roberts in NCR's Emerging Church Series. He interviews 8 young Jersey City parishioners on their sense of being Catholic. The results seem to surprise him, but are no surprise to me.

"I think the church has to earn parishioners to come," said Bridget d'Souza, one of the young professionals who joined the conversation in May at Our Lady of Czestochowa parish in Jersey City, N.J.

She was describing a kind of free-market approach to parish selection that applies to groups across generational lines, but particularly to young people without permanent ties to a neighborhood or diocese. No longer can pastors be guaranteed a congregation because of geography. People go where they're both getting fed spiritually, said d'Souza, and where they can feel ownership of the parish and its activities.

It wasn't that way growing up in a place, she said, where people owned their homes for decades and where churchgoing was determined by parish boundaries.

The loss of those physical boundaries seems symbolic of deeper lines and categories that have become less distinct when it comes to deciding on the bigger questions: whether to be religious at all and, specifically, whether to be Catholic....

D'Souza and her husband, Devantin, have been members of Our Lady of Czestochowa for three years. Both are cradle Catholics. She grew up in New Jersey, and spent time in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps right out of college. He is from Bombay, India, arrived in the U.S. in 2001 and moved to New Jersey in 2005, they year they were married. They met in business school in Washington and at the time of the interview were working as consultants for the financial firm Deloitte and Touche in New York.

In college, she said, she struggled through a period when she asked herself, "Do I want to be Catholic? Do I want to go into a Protestant denomination?" She said she had felt frustration over issues like the sex abuse and financial crises "that you're not as empowered as you might be in other areas, like with your civic government for instance."

In the end, however, it was the tug of "a tradition that goes back 2,000 years" that "draws me in."

She perceives a certain power in the tradition, in the Mass and the Eucharist. "There is something there that his so powerful, and I think the church has nurtured that. I think for me the church embodies that." In the larger culture she mentioned, Catholic Charities and all the things that the church does. I don' think most people are aware o that. If they were aware of it, all of these other things that are perceived as negative, they wouldn't be as proportionally as negative in my opinion."

Read more here and think about the young people you know...and pray for them.