Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "One of the Most Creative Things That’s Happened to the Catholic Church in America Has Been This Vast Exodus of Catholics from the Church"

James Carroll in a recent interview with Michael Schulson:

One of the most creative things that’s happened to the Catholic Church in America has been this vast exodus of Catholics from the church. Everybody who leaves the church, whether it’s women who are impatient, fed up with the second-class status of women, or whether it’s people who are fed up with this clerical sex abuse scandal, whatever it is: everybody who leaves the Church is a challenge to the church to do a much fuller job of reckoning with the truth of this situation.

"A much fuller job of reckoning with the truth": since every Catholic who leaves (and/or is shoved away from the Catholic table) is an indictment of a catholic church's claim to be truly catholic, to be able to cope with the multivalent truths of many different kinds of human beings, to set a table big enough that we all can sit around it . . . .  A church that exists to serve and include only the few, to endorse the truths of the lives of only the select chosen, cannot honestly call itself a catholic church.