THE SILLY PUTTY CHURCH: I guess you all already know exactly what I think of Nancy Pelosi’s ardent-Catholic-abortion shtik. (more) It’s “I’m a good person,” it’s We Are Church, and you know, if I’m church, I think maybe church isn’t that great.

It’s also how a nearly three-quarters majority of American Catholics (in that order, apparently) end up supporting torture.

I was once privileged to hear a discourse on the nature of conscience in the Church, in which the obvious righteousness of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was marshaled to support the potential okayness of gay sex. The Magisterium: so inconvenient!

“The creatures outside looked from Giuliani to Biden, and from Biden to Giuliani, and from Giuliani to Biden again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Me, I’m not devout. I have a rosary kicking around in my bookbag and daggone if I don’t always find some excuse not to hike it out and spend twenty minutes fitfully contemplating my Lord. I’m not ardent. I am lucky if I pray twice in a day, not counting when the ambulances and the cop cars go by. I’m not a good Catholic. I don’t say this with a kind of reverse pride. I think it’s creepy, and you guys can point out that I’ve written for money about praying the rosary even though I do it much, much less than 99.99% of the people who do it for free. I say this as someone who needs to go to Confession, someone who (Ratty can attest) consistently puts off confessing until I’ve spiraled low enough that I can’t ignore it anymore. I hang on by the fingernails and skate on thin ice and hope like hell–or, you know, I hope I hope like purgatory.

I’m completely convinced that the people who say they’re good, they’re ardent, they’re devout, are people who try hard to do the right thing and believe what they say they believe and don’t lie, and in many cases do a lot more concrete good in the world than I do. I just… I can’t agree that what they support is Catholic–at least, not in the way that Morrissey is Catholic.