UNITED STATES
Questions from a Ewe
I spoke with a bishop friend this week and asked him to explain to me just exactly what a, “radical feminist” is. He said he didn’t have the foggiest.
Since I wrote my last blog article, I’ve been thinking a lot about poor Cardinal Ray Burke. He would have been a young adult during the Second Vatican Council when Catholics’ proverbial cheese was moved. Being from Wisconsin where people take their cheese seriously enough to adorn their heads with it during sporting events, I realized that cheese moving is no easy thing for poor Ray. So, on this whole “respect women” and “women’s equality” thing, he’s just stuck – culturally incapable of moving his cheese. After all, there’s a Green Bay Packers game this Sunday and that cheese needs to be firmly affixed to his head, like for any good Wisconsin native.
In all seriousness, Ray’s father died when he was very young. I have to wonder how that loss was handled and how all that impacted his development, including his views on gender roles. He speaks of the importance of manly male fathers forming their children properly, yet it seems his own father was gone long before Ray hit adolescence. Could he be projecting his romanticized notions of fathers (and mothers) upon the world as ideal based upon a void from his own life? His words certainly seem to come from an alternate reality than the one I know, but then my father is still with me. I do not have to imagine what it’s like to have a father; I just experience it.
Nonetheless, sometimes when you so insistently remain in one place as Ray tries to do, you wind up moving in comparison to others. If they move forward, you move backward in comparison. Similarly one’s actions or inaction can result in unintended consequences.
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