CATHOLICS VOTE NO

Minnesota always has been home and always will be home. We’re damn proud of our lakes, high school hockey, Prince, and Paul Wellstone. We were the first state to answer Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers at the start of the Civil War and we have one of the best social safety nets in the country. But in one week we could also become the 31^st state to rewrite its constitution to ban same-sex marriage.*

*This is civil marriage – a legal contract recognized by the state that privileges two parties to state-recognized benefits – not the sacramental union in the Church (which also happens to be recognized by the state). This is an important distinction.

We’re also proud to call ourselves Catholics. It is a beautiful Faith and the Church does some wonderful work from advocacy on Capitol Hill to feeding the homeless at the Dorothy Day Center. Nevertheless, the Minnesota Catholic Church and its exceptional support of the amendment to ban gay marriage are major reasons that the vote Tuesday remains too close to call. It would be a tragedy if Minnesota votes yes – not just for the LGBT community, but for our state, and for our Church. 

A Common Mistake

The Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD. That is not a question, that is not a guess, it is a fact. Ms. Svoboda made damn sure each one of us knew that before we left her seventh grade social studies class.* Ask any one of my classmates today and there’s a pretty good chance they still have each one of those characters etched in their brains. 4-7-6-A-D. Well, nowadays turns out they’d be wrong.

Singing in the Church

My friends all have different views on the Church, but one almost universal perception of Catholics is that they are big on ritual. To that I plead guilt-diddily-ilty as charge-diddily-arged*. I think it’s pretty cool that from parish to parish and even country to country, the Mass remains largely unchanged.