Winters on Cardinal Wuerl and Frank Bruni

Michael Sean Winters has a really good post up about (retired food critic) Frank Bruni's really lousy piece against priests and Cardinal Wuerl's great Washington Post op-ed about dogma and faith.  He concludes:

The church is dogmatic, and that is good — even if it means that the church is a sign of contradiction in the world and the object of animus and disdain. It is a positive, attractive feature that what we profess is unchanging and unchangeable — the good news of a love and truth that we are called to share with the world. It is good for Catholics and non-Catholics. Were the church to compromise its creed, if we were to simply go along with today’s secularized culture, not only would the church cease to be the church but the common good would suffer greatly.

I also really liked this reminder:

Catholic hospitals provide millions of dollars’ worth of uncompensated care every year to our poor and vulnerable, and Catholic schools save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually in per-pupil costs.

I hope for the day when, the next time a school-choice opponent complains about Catholics churches trying to "siphon off" "taxpayers' dollars" to subsidize "sectarian" schools, Cardinal Dolan calls a press release to present a bill to the American people for the hundreds of billions of dollars Catholic schools have saved from the American taxpayer by educating (usually better, and for less, than the government-run schools have done and do) children (of all faiths and socio-economic backgrounds).  Remember, the state is not doing us a favor by allowing us to do "government things" like feed the poor, heal the sick, and educate children.  We were doing these things first.