Weekend perspectives

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 14, 2013 | In On the Good

Talking with the National Catholic Register, Father John Wauck lends some needed perspective to the feverish debates over public statements by Pope Francis:

It’s important for everybody to calm down and look at the big picture.

Pope Francis, the Successor of Peter, is the most popular man on the planet. There are worse things that could happen...
You can quibble about how he is saying things, but we are in a good place. Even the need to explain and interpret the Pope’s words is not bad, because you get to talk about things.

For Columbus Day, my friend Bob Royal, at The Catholic Thing, recalls how he discovered and wrote about the real story of Christopher Columbus: a man of remarkable learning and deep Christian piety, whose explorations ultimately brought the world’s people closer together. As Royal has shown, it’s very difficult to sustain the leftist argument that the indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere are worse off because of Columbus; in fact, it’s simply impossible to swallow that argument without some strong ideological seasoning. He suggests another perspective:

In his enthusiasm to bring the Gospel to all nations and usher in God’s Kingdom, Columbus gave us a global world, our world, in which all parts of humanity were finally in contact with one another.

And at Catholic World Report, Anne Hendershott explains how the adoption of federal “Common Core” requirements are paving the way for “The Federal Takeover of Catholic Education.” Federal standards will certainly produce different sorts of standardized tests, she observes, and parochial-school students may be at a disadvantage when they take those tests. What is even more distressing, however, is the willingness of many Catholic school systems to adopt the “Common Core” standards without a critical look at what they include and what they omit.