James Carroll has written eloquently about his own faith journey and about the history of the Catholic Church in Constantine’s Sword, which I heartily recommend to everyone.  He blogs today about the increasingly right-ward turn of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the US. His observations are here.

His comments provide a fascinating juxtaposition with a couple of recent encounters I’ve had. One was on Saturday, with someone who came by during our open doors. We talked for a few minutes; he was clearly interested in Grace only for its aesthetics, and left after mentioning he was Roman Catholic and attended Latin Mass.

Another man came by last week and asked if we heard confessions. I made an appointment with him, and we talked this morning. He grew up Catholic, was divorced, and needed to get something off of his chest. I doubt whether he could have faced a Roman Catholic priest in a confessional, but we had a lovely conversation, that ended with me offering him absolution.

In the twenty-first century, people are going to make sense of their spiritual lives from their own perspectives, with the wide variety of resources available to them. Some will be drawn to and accept the rigid, hierarchical, authoritarian approach of traditional Catholicism or fundamentalist Protestantism. Others will search elsewhere.