Is that when I’m away from blogging for a time, it gets hard for me to get back into it, especially newsy blogging. So don’t come here lookin’ for that any time soon. I’m still not into the groove. Go to Mark, HMS, and Dom, especially for such – but you already knew that, I’m sure.

I did a slew of radio over the past couple of days – KDKA in Pittsburgh, a Dallas station, and, of course the Monday HMS gig. Talked about De-Coding for over three hours during that period. My ear hurt.

These sessions were notable, however, in that I finally got some listener calls that weren’t defending DVC and preaching the gospel of inscrutability, which has been the norm up to this point.

What I mean by that is that a great many people, including those who define themselves as “Catholic” or “Christian” will announce to me that you really can’t know anything certain about Jesus, that all the gospels are merely a reflection of certain individual’s or church’s views and that all we can really say is that Jesus told us to love one another. Probably.

So therefore the contentions of DVC, or anyone else for that matter, are as interesting or as useful as the Gospels because all of the texts are of equal value and one’s choice of a preferred text is, in the end, a political matter.

I feel like going to Denver when the bishops get there and just screaming at them to get their acts together and get a grasp on the reality of the assumptions their flocks are operating out of. But then, I gather I’m not the only one.

Russell Shaw with an open letter to America’s Bishops

Farsighted people have understood the implications of assimilation for a long time. Back in 1916 George Santayana published an article in The New Republic with the provocative title, “The Alleged Catholic Danger.” Not to worry, he assured liberals who then were fretting over the rise in Catholic numbers and political influence (very much as Samuel Huntington fretted in Foreign Policy a few months ago over Hispanic immigration in the United States)—there was no danger from that source. American secular values could be counted on to act as a “solvent” that would undo the distinctiveness of Catholics.

Santayana was a bright man. Currently we’re watching the symbolic culmination of the solvent process as an unblushingly pro-abortion Catholic politician seeks the presidency on the ticket of one of the two major parties. This scenario has been a nightmare for some of us ever since the Cuomo years. Now the nightmare is real.

I hope Senator John Kerry’s candidacy will have a large place in your deliberations in Denver. You need to frame a response to its challenge—to you and to the Church—well before November. When I told a politically sophisticated friend that some bishops take the view that although pro-choice Catholic politicians shouldn’t receive Communion, no effort should be made to prevent them, on the assumption that they’re in good faith, he replied: “If any bishop thinks Senator Kerry is in good faith on this matter, he’s the only person in the country who does.”