How I am a Roman Catholic - Roger Ebert

Fr. J. W. McGinn at St. Patrick's Church in Urbana, with Pat Conerty, me and Bill Miller. At no time did I experiece or hear about sexual abuse in our Champaign-Urbana parishes.



The morning hour in religion was my favorite class. As we advanced through the grades, it began simply, in memorizing chapters from the Baltimore Catechism, and concluded in eighth grade with the four lives of Christ as told in the New Testament. We made a side tour through Genesis, observing it's "all the Jews have," but cautioning that it was written as a fable not to be taken literally. Some Protestants took it as fundamentalist truth, but not Catholics or modern Jews.

That led us toward the Theory of Evolution, which in its elegance and blinding obviousness became one of the pillars of my reasoning, explaining so many things in so many ways. It was an introduction not only to logic but to symbolism, thus opening a window into poetry, literature and the arts in general. All my life I have deplored those who interpret something only on its most simplistic level. I grant you that artworks like Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" are hard to embrace and you will never find it displayed in my home, but I understand the impulse behind it.

The nuns at St. Mary's were Dominicans They lived in a small square convent behind the school, holding six nuns (some taught two grades) and a cook and their housekeeping nun, who kept a sharp eye trained on us through her screen door. We had humble playground equipment, a swing set and two basketball hoops. Our principal sport was playing King of the World. This involved two boys standing on a log, each trying to push the other off. The housekeeper would open the screen door and shout, "If you break your necks, you have only yourselves to blame."

It was from these nuns, especially Sister Nathan and Sister Rosanne, that I learned my core moral and political principles. I assumed they were Roman Catholic dogma. Many of them involved a Social Contract between God and man, which represented classical liberalism based on empathy and economic fairness. We heard much of Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum"--"On Capital and Labor." When I hear self-appointed Catholic "spokesmen" like William Donohue of the Catholic League, I wonder if he has come across it in his reading.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/03/how_i_am_a_roman_catholic.html

Mine is the same experience as Roger. I never experienced or heard about abuse in my many years of Catholic school or church. I was an alter boy and was alone with priests quite often.