Thursday, March 16, 2006

No coverage by the Catholic Key?

So I'm having lunch at a high-dollar, white-tablecloth place with Orville (not his real name) one of my right-wing Catholic friends, as we do almost every week (don't worry about my Lenten observance: during Lent, we keep it down to one cocktail and three courses, and we only drink domestic wine).

Anyways, Orville's been in the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph since he was born, and although he's less cynical than me in general, he's even more cynical than me when it comes to the Catholic Key. So, Orville says to me that the event he attended this weekend with Fr. John Corapi, sponsored by the local Catholic radio station KEXS, was sold out, and about 2,000 people packed the venue.

"Would the Catholic Key even mention it?," Orville wondered. "They'll cover three hundred people in the basement of St. Theresa's listening to some obscure immigration speaker, and the coverage will go for three weeks, even. But will they cover a nationally-recognized orthodox Catholic preacher who draws a big crowd?"

I was thinking to myself, "Not only that, they'll cover Sister Polly Esther and Fr. Jim Jiggles giving a seminar at the Cathedral to forty tie-dyed gray-hairs on 'new ways of being Church,' but they won't dare give any press to someone who preaches relatively plainly about Catholic discipline and moral teaching—even someone who does so using the post-Vatican II vocabulary and style."

We concluded that the Key would probably ignore the Corapi event.

Was I wrong? Was Orville wrong? I had only to get home from the office to find out, because the week's Key was waiting for me.

And the answer was "no." While the cover featured some sort of Gaelic Mass thing with the Bishop, rather than Sister Polly and Fr. Jim, nowhere in the twenty or so pages of the Key was there a mention of the Corapi event.


Another week, another issue, and the Key continues to function as some layman's private newsletter for his favorite leftist causes, funded through our Cathedral taxes, rather than a tool for evangelization. When will Bp. Finn put an end to it? When will Tom Roberts, editor of National Catholic Distorter, also published here in Kansas City, take pity on the Key editor and hire him away (thus doing no further harm to NCRptr, to which no further harm could possibly be cone, but doing much good for the diocese)?

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