My husband handed me this book by then-Cardinal Ratzinger today. He had a chapter marked for me to read – on the problems in catechesis. I’d be interested in it, he said.

So I took it with me up to the local college where Katie now has her piano lessons, and I sat on the nearly-empty campus in the 95 degree heat and read that chapter, and a few others. And I felt…depressed.

I told him later that I find that reading Ratzinger drives me into wild mood swings. He makes me very happy, but the whole experience is, in general, depressing.

Why? Because when I read him, and then observe the Church (in the US, at least), and what’s going on, I see this incredible chasm. It is really like two different languages are being spoken. He begins a chapter on liturgy by talking about visiting some monastery somewhere that was built in the 12th century. He describes the art, as still reflective of the best of what we now define as Eastern and Western Christianity, then uses that to explain what the Mass is and what we’re about as Church when we gather, and what is happening there, what we’re entering into,…

And I know that over here, 90% of the people involved in directing our liturgical prayer have no use for this because it comes from Ratzinger and they’ve decided that he must be all about "putting the Church back before Vatican II" (a stance, incidentally, he explictly condemns), and they won’t even listen and will just go on about their business as usual, tethering us even more tightly to the here and now and Jesus as The Best Darn Teacher Who Ever Lived, nothing cosmic about it, thank you very much.

Well, at least Katie likes her new piano teacher. That’s a good thing. Possibly even in a cosmic kind of way.