Gibson Nails Keller

At Commonweal, David Gibson, who is one of the best religion journalists practicing the craft today, notes the distress, not the irony, in Bill Keller's realization that he and Bill Donohue agree that a smaller, leaner Church is the way to go. Gibson rightly points disconcerted Catholics towards the Common Ground initiative which he exquisitely describes as "deeper, broader, more satisfying — if crowded and complex and maddening."

What most struck me about Keller's article was the complete absence of any sense of the divine at play in his conception of belonging to the Church or in its complicated, frustrating, even bewildering attempts to express its own faith. Like Cardinal Dolan, I am always haunted, happily so, by Henri de Lubac's observation: "What would I know of Him but for her."