The Wrath of John

Wack Freak-Catholic Football Fan Gone Amok

Whoops--sorry. I meant to save the WF-C reference for my soon-to-be-published later "Ass Ripping Reply." Too late. Anyhow, for now...

It appears as if one BGI reader has taken exception to my having taken exception to a previous reader. For those of you with better things to do, a brief recap of the soap opera:

1. February 05: A reader writes to BGI's Fan Forum to complain about ND prez Monk Malloy having allowed non-mainstream events to occur on campus during his tenure.
2. March 05: Yours truly submits an opposing view, not disagreeing with any content from said reader but rather suggesting that the appropriate venue for discussing opinions on Catholicism, social mores and conservative vs. liberal views is, contrary to some pea-brained bible-thumping freakshows, not Blue & Gold Illustated's Fan Forum.
3. April 05: Another reader from the WF-C camp takes me to task, asserting that, indeed, the BGIFF is by far a fine, fine place to discuss religion, sex and politics.

Thus begins chapter four...entitled...

Catholic or Secular?

"In your March “Fan Forum,” subscriber Chris Fillio attacked fellow subscriber Jim Finnegan for complaining about the embarrassment felt by Rev. Edward A. Malloy C.S.C. at the Tyrone Willingham firing and his curious non-embarrassment at various anti-Catholic outrages that took place on Malloy’s watch. They included such things as a gay and lesbian film festival, the notorious Vagina Monologues, and the awarding of the University’s Laetare medal to the late pro-abortion Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Mr. Fillio thinks such comments have no place in your sports-centered pages. On the contrary. To suggest that there can be an air-tight separation between the moral stance of a university and the football team that represents it is absurd. It’s all to the good that your readers be made aware of how moral standards have withered in recent decades at the university that has been emblematic of American Catholicism.

We want to know what we’re rooting for—a university with Catholic standards, or a secular counterfeit in love with the spirit of the age.

In better days, Notre Dame could claim among its lecturers the incomparable G.K. Chesterson, perhaps the greatest Catholic thinker since Aquinas and certainly the wittiest. Under the misguided Malloy reign, the University bowed the knee to Baal and chose as its big-name lecturer Senator Bill Bradley, a one-time Rhodes scholar and a full-time abortion supporter.

Fortunately, there are still serious Catholics on the Notre Dame faculty, and so hope remains. But it’s undeniable that great damage has been done by a university president seeking academic prestige and popularity at the cost of that great but unpopular thing: genuine Catholicism.

A legend-rich football team can survive many things but it cannot forever survive, to borrow a Chesterton phrase, an attitude that prefers “perfected forms of error to a battered shape of the truth.”

If anyone doubts what Notre Dame and Notre Dame football should stand for, let him translate “Notre Dame” from French into English and then take a long look at the statue on the Dome. John M., Brooklyn NY"

...to be continued.