The Church of Cirque du Soleil

That is the title of my recently published review of Kerry Kennedy’s Being Catholic Now . Here’s an excerpt from the review that appeared in the June 2009 issue of The Catholic World Report .

As if to provide a definitive example of the lack of serious intellectual curiosity about the Church’s moral theology, Kennedy offers in her book’s introduction this description of the essays that follow: “What comes across in these stories is that the Church is, by definition, full of contradictions—Jesus has come but is still coming; Jesus is divine but still human; Jesus died but rose from the dead; Jesus saved the world but the world needs to be saved; the Church is the bride of Christ but also the mystical body of Christ. The Church has always embraced conflict and contradiction” (xvi). The adolescent bravado from which this superficial observation springs does not speak well for the catechesis and pastoral instruction that formed the Catholic who penned it.

But this is not surprising. Kennedy, like so many of us, is from that generation of early post-conciliar American Catholics that were offered, among other “innovations,” liturgical dance and the clown mass so as to make the faith “relevant” to young people. But, as should have been expected, just as a river cannot rise above its source, the Church of Cirque du Soleil could not ascend higher than Bozo theology.

You can read the whole thing here .