How much time do you have?

If you have 15 minutes or so, I highly recommend reading George Weigel's piece "The End of the Bernardin Era" from the Feb 2011 issue of First Things. I just finished it, and it was informative and enjoyable as all Weigel's articles are. Here's a typical paragraph:

John Paul II embodied a heroic model of the priesthood, and a heroic exercise of the office of bishop, that had a profound effect, over two-and-a-half decades, on the Catholic priesthood and episcopate in the United States. The men who elected Timothy Dolan as USCCB president in November 2010 were men deeply influenced by the John Paul II model, as they were men intellectually formed by the Polish pope’s dynamic magisterium on questions ranging from the Catholic sexual ethic to Catholic social doctrine. They understood, in a way that those who embodied the Bernardin Era did not quite seem to grasp, that it was important for the Catholic Church to be able to give a comprehensive, coherent, and compelling account of its faith, hope, and love in the Cathechism of the Catholic Church, just as they understood that the reaffirmation of classic Catholic moral theology in Veritatis Splendor was an important weapon in the war against what John Paul II’s successor called the “dictatorship of relativism.”

If you don't have much time, here's a quick email I just received from ol' Bill Donohue at the Catholic League which I believe to be related. The subject is "Sister Fiedler gets it right".

Sister Fiedler Gets It Right

Sister Maureen Fiedler, one of the most outspoken veteran dissenters in the Catholic Church, commented honestly yesterday on the meeting of the American Catholic Culture last weekend in Detroit. She admitted that those in attendance were part of the "graying" crowd, and bemoaned that it was also "a very 'white' crowd."

Thus did she validate our news release on the meeting that we issued prior to the conference. We mentioned how it would be filled with octogenarians. We didn't mention that only old white people would be drawn to event, but next time we'll be sure to mention how lacking in diversity the dissidents really are. Thank you, Sr. Maureen, for getting it right.

These aging white hippies are the folks whom people like Cardinal Bernardin were interested in appeasing with a lot of the triangulation in which he engaged during the seventies and eighties. Now that these angry fogies are dropping off his old policies are of a necessity going by the wayside and making way for straight-ahead Catholicism. At least we hope.