The Recovering Choir Director

An article by Kathryn Jean Lopez, executive editor of National Review Online and a young Catholic.

But some of the reasons for Hewitt’s move were direct reactions to problems he saw in the Catholic Church. Hewitt says, “The American bishops literally drove me out. I could not read the paper without muttering about their inanities. James Malone, the bishop of Youngstown, my bishop, who confirmed me, sputtering about nuclear weapons and poverty”—all this while Hewitt worked in the Reagan White House.

“These silly men,” Hewitt complains, “issued reams of nonsense and met and met and met even as the liturgy collapsed into incoherence and the preaching dissolved into eight-minute homilies on the need for love. There was also the problem of the Responsorial Antiphon. It would almost always cause me to either laugh or grind my teeth. Is there a worse collection of ‘music’ anywhere? And the Christian Rite of Initiation, and the revamped Sacrament of Reconciliation—all of it just another set of committee reports from priests and nuns bored with the old Church. I could go on, but my guess is that you have heard it all before.”

Hewitt concludes, “There is enormous energy and talent within the American Church which might over the years genuinely renew it and rebuild it. But I need God on a much more immediate basis.” [Read on...]