This book is written with every deliberate intention to make trouble.
I am fed up. .
And I am frankly looking for a fight. I am disgusted by nativism and even more disgusted by the pale, sickly, self-hating ignorance of those who claim to be Catholic thinkers.
"Ah," say those types, "you're angry."
Damn right.
But I do not intend to merely make trouble. I also intend to try to communicate with a new group of Catholics which is beginning to emerge and will continue to grow in American society. I call them "communal Catholics" because they are strongly identified with the Catholic community but are rather uninterested in the organized church. If American Catholicism has any future at all, its best hope lies with these communal Catholics who can transcend the foolishness of the present moment, in part because they have tuned it out. The communal Catholic has begun to wonder if Catholicism, with its rich and varied tradition, has anything at all to say-which is not derivative from the current liberal chic-that might be pertinent to contemporary American problems.
Damn right it does.