'Facebooking Father' to become Canada's youngest bishop

That's the headline from CBC. Tonight on the National they did a surprising story on this priest, soon-to-be-bishop, discussing how he will become the second youngest bishop in the world and youngest in Canada.

Fr. Thomas Dowd is only 40 years old and is highly involved with social media such as Facebook. He wants to reach out to younger generations, which really would include his own in the Catholic Church.

Of course, the usual riff-raff is back with their vitriolic comments. At the mere mention of the word "Catholic", many are sent into a frenzy of insults, each trying to outdo the other in the negative things they can say about the Catholic Church. It has become an absolute fixation. There's a positive, inspiring story about a Catholic man and people can't even see the good in it. All they can do is don their judgment hat and lash out at the Church. It's really a sad state of affairs.

We all know abuse occurred in the Catholic Church and its a great tragedy, but at some point people go from concern for victims to declaring all out war on a large, visible religious institution. Logic can take a back seat to this anger. This is despite the fact that abuse in Catholic Churches is certainly no worse than in other places, especially of late. Very few cases have emerged in the past 25 years. Yet, we never hear the same vitriol concerning an article about teachers or swim coaches.

Imagine if there was a story about a 40 year old man who was going to become the superintendent of a school district. I seriously doubt anyone would be lobbing insult-cocktails at this article. No one would imply that this man was somehow responsible for abuse in schools.

Is it possible that people react so strongly to stories about the Catholic faith for a deeper reason? Perhaps they are trying to undermine the moral authority of the Church so they don't have to feel bad about sinning? They attack the Church thinking if they can hate the Church enough, their consciences will not bother them as much. I could be barking up the wrong tree, but I do wonder about it.

Like I said, bringing up statistics about other groups of people and the fact that they commit acts of abuse does not seem to change the tone of the Church-bashers. I know a lot of evil occurred in the Church, but it also did in many other places, yet none of these places are attacked. I'm not saying two wrongs make a right, I'm just wondering why people are focusing solely on the Catholic Church. I think once people admit their reason, we will gain great insight.



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