A Little Anti-Catholicism With Breakfast

This morning, reading what was otherwise a nice and enjoyable profile of a local Orthodox priest, I ran into this little attack on me and my faith:

The Orthodox Church, sensibly, is not wed to celibacy. Its priests, unlike their Catholic brethren, can live normal lives and have families. There's a catch, though. They must be married before they become priests. So, says Hughes, "There's the mad dash of seminarians to find wives."

He is delighted there is no pope in his life. "We have no pope and we don't want one, thank you," he says. "Freedom for us is very important."

Nor is he chained to original sin. "We never accepted the idea of original sin," he says. "What we inherit from our forebears is death. But guilt? Absolutely not. We don't believe a newborn child is sinful. That's utter nonsense." This guy is talking my language.

There exists in his church something called "ancestral sin," but he denies this is a matter of semantics: "We're only guilty for the sins we commit."

Forget the Immaculate Conception, too, he adds. Another weight off my chest. It is not dogma in the Orthodox Church, as it is in the Catholic Church. Mary was born subject to death like the rest of us, he explains, and consciously chose a life free of personal sin. That said, he finds his church hidebound. "It is highly resistant to change," he says. "We don't take risks very often. We're still living in the past."

Now, I only read the Boston Globe occasionally--so it might be seething with anti-Catholic sentiment in general--but I'm struck by the fact that in just the period of about a week and a half I've been characterized as backward and out of touch because I attend daily Mass, and abnormal because I live a celibate life!

You can read the whole article here.

And I'm going to write a cordial yet straightforward e-mail to the article's author, Sam Allis. If you'd like to also, here's his address: allis@globe.com