Going to India Without Really Leaving Kansas City
Tom Fox is Publisher of the National Catholic Reporter in Kansas City, probably the most influential Catholic periodical in the U.S. You know the Reporter must be thriving, for Fox was able to take a month-long junket to India, which he tells about in the March 16 issue.
Fox reports that when he arrived in India he was spiritually restless, was “searching for something,” something in the “mystical ways” of India that would make his spiritual life more “comfortable.”
Fox encountered two elderly Indian Catholic priests, with whom he had deeply personal spiritual conversations, and they made his trip half way ’round the world “comforting and uplifting.”
One priest asked Fox if he believed in Hell. Fox answered, “No, I guess I don’t.” The priest was pleased. But probing deeper, the priest declared, “You know what your problem is, you think of God as father. You still view God as judge. You’ve got to get over it…. There is nothing you can do — no wrong — that is not already [forgiven]…by your best friend, God.”
You May Also Enjoy
Review of The King's Achievement and Come Rack, Come Rope by Robert Hugh Benson; St. John Fisher by Michael Davies; and The Martyrdom of Father Campion and His Companions by William Cardinal Allen.
If you don’t want children— contracept. If you don’t want children but you get pregnant— abort. If you do want children but can’t conceive— take fertility drugs.
For the secularist to come to terms with the traditional (Catholic-leaning) Christian dramatist whom he loves, he must first confront the Bard as he is.