Father Norman Weslin protested against America’s most famous “Catholic” university giving President Obama an honorary degree.

 He knew that Catholic doctrine forbids Catholic organisations honouring those who facilitate abortion.

The heads of the university know that doctrine well enough, which means they should never have invited Mr Obama. The bishops of the US Catholic Church know it, and should have insisted that the performance be called off. But they didn’t.

Mr Obama knows the Catholic Church’s rules on these matters, too. But he knows something else — that despite his anti-Catholic stance on multiple moral issues, most American Catholics voted for him anyway.

Mr Obama holds the Catholics of America in contempt for having insufficient fortitude to stick to their faith – something which they seem to deserve.

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Anyway poor 80-year old Father Weslin decided to carry a cross as a personal protest against the crucifixion-like fate of America’s aborted babies.

The police handcuffed him and carried him off trussed up in some kind of a canvas stretcher.

Have a look.

It is all a bit embarrassing.

60 million Americans call themselves Catholic. Even if only, say, 20 million had marched up to Notre Dame with Father Weslin, might it not have pleased God – and perhaps forced some kind of response from the president?

Is there not something unhealthy about a Church that will not resist evil, and whose educational establishments reward evil?

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Blessed Mary MacKillop commented in the mid 1800s, when Sir Henry Parkes and others were seeking to stop Australian Catholics educating their children in Catholic schools, that, “Australia is in every sense a dangerous place for Catholics. The governments aim at strict secular schools and institutions for the poor, especially for the children of the poor . . . the poor and their children (being) torn away from the true Faith.”

To Blessed Mary, secular education was intolerable and wrong. She wrote in a letter to Bishop Sheil in 1871, “As a teacher, I saw so much of the evils attending a merely secular course of education, that all my desires seemed to centre in a wish to devote myself to poor children.”    

She told Pope Pius IX, in her 1885 Petition, that her Josephite Sisters were “daily more and more convinced of the evils to their faith to which Australian children are exposed on account of the wicked secular education that is now general.”

Sir Henry Parkes had predicted, in hopeful fashion, that his Secularisation Bill would “be death to the calling of the priesthood of Rome”. But he didn’t have as much success as he hoped for, because most 19^th century Catholics wanted their children taught the Catholic Faith.

Today however, the Catholic Church seems unsure what it wants.

Everyone who is Catholic, and wants to please God by living Catholic, can do his/her part by getting involved  in current issues and being unashamed to fight for the Faith.

This may, strangely enough, mean having little or nothing to do with today’s mainstream Church, with  its “Catholic” schools and universities which are clones of the secular schools etc. — and its modernised, doubtfully-Catholic, non-Latin mass etc..