An Open Letter to Notre Dame's President

One of my favorite writers on the natural law, Notre Dame professor Charles Rice, wrote this open letter to ND president, Fr. Jenkins.

It is worth reading for three reasons:

1.  It is dead-on accurate.
2.  It provides a great model for how to approach and correct religious superiors with respect and strength.
3.  It is yet another example of how the salvation of the Church depends as much (if not more) on holy and courageous layman who demand their priests and bishops to live up to their roles as such.  We as laymen need to encourage and correct our priests.  We need to pray for them.  But most of all, we need to give our lives more and more radically over to Christ so that from us can be raised up a new generation of priests on FIRE for Jesus Christ.  We can not depend on the Church authorities for our own spiritual lives, but we can always depend on Christ's promises that he will protect His church and that He will still always be able to reach us through through the Holy Sacraments, which do not depend on the holiness of the priests themselves.

That being said, the Catholic Church is richly blessed with countless saintly priests and bishops, leaders who are not afraid or ashamed to speak the truth about Christ with conviction, clarity, and love.  Our current Holy Father's 100+ books reflect his passion for the Truth and to see it proclaimed as widely as possible.

Full disclosure: one of my greatest motivations to evangelize for the Catholic Church is so that I can draw in the very types of Christians who hold the secret to the renewal of the Catholic Church itself!  That secret is summed up in one word: Jesus.  In other words, I am inviting children of the reformation to actually come in and help me reform the Catholic Church.  (Of course, the first step will be for these folks to help reform me!)

The Catholic Church can never be reformed by people who leave her.  At the same time, those who join her will benefit immensely from the riches of grace Jesus loves to pour out through her!

The good news: there are already faithful Catholics at every level of the Church (from the Pope down) who are making tremendous headway in drawing the Catholic Church always back to Christ. 

Let us open our hearts wide to Christ!