…with Fr. McBrien’s column was that he did not address the issues. He did not honestly confront Menino’s stances on the issues at hand and put them up against Catholic teaching. He did not address the substance of the protesters’ arguments. He tossed out some stereotypes, added some uninformed comments about Life on The Internet, and stirred.

What’s the value of that? I invite Fr. McBrien to do a thorough tour of the Catholic presence on the internet – from the blogs, which are of an infinite variety themselves, where he can find everything from Thomistic parsing to Carmelite Spirituality to adventures of Catholic school teachers…all the way to the resources available for study, research, and just keeping up with life in the Church today, from the web page of the Church in Cambodia, to the blogs of the bishops in the Philippines, to the web page of Communion and Liberation, and everything in between. It’s a big church that reaches far beyond, ironically, the walled-in ivory tower of the Church he seems to hope for, and, also ironically, it’s a church envlivened by the gifts of an informed, engaged, committed laity.

But since a lot of them are not the right kind of laity…who cares?