The Children's Crusade

Last night, I went to another of the Fortnight for Religious Freedom events put on by the Diocese of San Diego. It was beautiful in an innocent, naive, childlike and tragic sense. The Diocese will hold a Eucharistic procession in downtown San Diego on July 1, accompanied by a choir. A men's choir. Singing hymns. In Italian.

I laughed in amazement as I sat there practicing the songs with them. While the Diocese provides excellent and organized schools for our children, is an absolute political infant. Disorganized, unsophisticated and floundering would best describe what I saw. It made the paranoid loonies who fear a coming theocracy seem all the more crazy. These people can barely organize a small procession. Taking over the country is the equivalent of the Diocese launching a manned mission to the moons of Saturn.

In that innocence, however, was great beauty. My son went with me and sang along lustily even though he, too, thought the whole idea was madness. It was a lovely slice of Americana, a bit of our not-so-distant and much gentler past.

Oh yeah, these folks are plotting a coup. No doubt about it.

Many thoughts came to me as we sat there, struggling through the Italian lyrics. The first was that of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind where he joins the Confederacy because he always had a thing for lost causes. The people at this event probably rarely use the Internet and they certainly weren't familiar with the mouth-foaming coming from open-minded progressives like NARAL. Lysol as a birth control? Well, we certainly use Lysol to clean the counter after we make our cookies for the parish bake sale, but we're not so sure about that whole birth control thing.

Another thought was that I wanted to take all the HHS mandate supporters and rub their noses in this event and scream at them, "What is your problem? Why do you have to run around telling everyone what to do all the time?" How divorced from America do you have to be to decide you need to ram things down our throats? Why can't we live the way we've always lived? If you really feel the need to manage everything a group does, then form your own and erect barbed wire fences and guard towers, just like in the old country.

The third thought wasn't so much a thought as it was a moment of grace from the Holy Spirit. Last night, I let go of my bigotry about Mormons. I've been so fixated on logic and proofs that I had become obsessed with the silliness of the Book of Mormon. Archaeology and biology and this and that, it was all wrong, Wrong, WRONG! No, the wrong part was me. Somewhere in Utah was a little Mormon church meeting room where a bunch of naive, innocent, childlike, loving, gracious people gathered to sing and worship. Forget about the Democratic Party's cornucopia of hate-filled bigots, I was the one who needed to be asked, "What is your problem?"

And maybe, for me at least, that was God's purpose for this whole #fortnight4freedom thing. It was an opportunity to find a little more grace in my life.

Viva Cristo Rey.