A small c catholic

The morning of the walk dawned crisp and spectacular, and our team collected in a church parking lot near the start.

More than 20 members of our congregation gathered with about 3,500 others for AIDSWalk 2011, the annual event that raises funds for the AIDS Service Foundation of Greater Kansas City. Through our own donations and the pledges of others -- mostly gathered by our AIDS Ministry from other church members -- our team turned in nearly $4,000 to the cause.

Perhaps you saw the recent PBS series on forgiveness or read the related book by the director, Helen Whitney, Forgiveness: A Time to Love, a Time to Hate.

Both are clear-eyed, moving, even disturbing looks at how to understand forgiveness.

The Web site of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops devotes lots of attention to health care. As it should.

But my own recent personal experience with our health care system makes me think the bishops -- and all American religious leaders -- might do well first to insist that the system be built on rigorous honesty instead of relying on the incomprehensible money games that now seem to characterize it -- games a friend who serves as CEO of a major health care non-profit agency tells me are “absurd.”

Last June in this space I wrote about a Creighton University student’s intriguing project in which he tried to apply Catholic social teaching to the production, distribution and consumption of food.

I recall thinking then that in some ways Catholics seem more sensitive to this matter than do most of the Protestants I hang around with. For Protestants to get more interested in this, I thought, they need a way to root concern for food issues in the Bible.

Because of my long interest in ecumenical relations and Christian unity (not uniformity), I’ve been intrigued over the last few months by what seems to be progress in Catholic-Orthodox dialogue.

Fr. Thomas Ryan offered a detailed look at some of this last month in an NCR commentary -- Catholic and Orthodox Unity: Close Enough to Imagine -- which produced lots of reader comments.