Fr Joseph Wilson's observation on Cardinal George's comments

Rarely have I seen a set of comments which so missed the heart of the matter. Are these the concerns which the Cardinal thinks are our most serious considerations? Over the last thirty years of what we have fondly thought to be an age of Renewal, we have seen a sixty percent decline in Mass attendance -- eighteen percent of Catholics assist at Mass on a given Sunday in my Diocese of Brooklyn, nineteen percent in New York, sixteen in Chicago, by pre-Scandal figures.

Religious Orders are collapsing before our eyes; Catholic colleges and universities are secularized, Catholic health care has been secularized to the point where a woman who has given birth in a Catholic hospital often finds herself offered a sterilization procedure.

Two-thirds of Mass-going Catholics cannot distinguish the Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist -- the very heart of our Faith -- from Protestant heresies. Forty years ago, we junked an effective, consistent method of passing on Catholic doctrine for coloring books, free-thinking, free-wheeling and finger-painting. We have raised two generations of religiously illiterate Catholics, and we're starting on the third. The Archbishop of New Orleans points out that virtually ALL of our high school Religion texts are junk and should be trashed, and people sit up and say, "Wow! Didja hear that?" But the Bishops knew that thirty years ago, gang. Thirty years ago. And they marginalized in their "kooks" file parents who complained about their children's textbooks. And Cardinal O'Connor pointed out the defective nature of Religion texts to the whole NCCB eight years ago, and someone else will a decade from now. None of these problems were caused by the courts, the legislature, or the monstrously evil Boston Globe.
...
As I have said elsewhere, I find myself increasingly perplexed. Why is it that, after these confusing forty years of bogus "Renewal," with decaying Religious Orders and empty seminaries and religious illiteracy throughout our land -- problems that weren't caused by the media, or the courts, or the legislature -- we are still waiting for a Bishop to stand up, sound the alarm, and say, "We are in a CRISIS. We have been for forty years. Let us ask the help of God, and of our blessed Lady the Mother of the Church, to address it, and bring about a renewal"?

A well written post about the nature of the REAL problems of the Church. CWNews Off the Record.