One website we often visit is Eureka Street, an official institutional magazine and opinion portal of the Society of Jesus in Australia. We have mentioned it here before, because it is one of those thousands of examples of where the "institutional Church" really is; despite the complaints and unending self-victimization of the Modernists and "Progressives" about the papacy and the "hierarchy", the bulk of nominally Catholic institutions (from religious orders and universities to publishing houses and journals) are firmly in their hand. Visiting such virtual places cautiously allows us to have an idea of what is in the mind of "Progressives".
In our deeply secularized world, man's need for symbols does not disappear. And one of the outstanding ways in which this need is fulfilled in our days is by an ongoing attachment to civil symbols, such as national flags. Australians may like or dislike their flag, but it certainly has deeply Christian connotations. So, when a "Catholic" journal publishes an article by a "Catholic" scholar about the "need" to change their most widely known national symbol, one would expect that he would at least recall that it also represents Australia's founding Christian heritage, a significant part of the legacy that made young Australia a great nation - no chance.
Philip Harvey, "Eureka Street's poetry editor and head of the Carmelite Library of Spirituality in Middle Park, Victoria," speaks about the "wheel of peace and Mahatma Gandhi" and about a "Zen koan". Which brings us to our lonely prominent comment of the day, by a certain Sharon:
How strange that in an article in a Jesuit magazine, written by the "head of the Carmelite Library of Spirituality", not only is there not even one vague reference to Christianity (though there are references to Buddhism and Hinduism), but he proposes to completely remove all four of the Christian crosses which currently dominate our flag, and doesn't even mention the fact that he is doing so. And even stranger, none of the previous commenters have even remarked upon this.
Poor Sharon, what did she expect? The author did not answer her - what would he say? "Yes, I make my living from Catholic institutions, but in fact I'm a post-Catholic"?
If flags are symbols of nations, the dechristianized writings that dominate "institutional Catholic" sources are symbols of what Vatican II has wrought: post-Catholic Catholics, parasites of the patrimony left by our ancestors in the faith.
