Jay Gabler

The new-Pope buzz is reminding me that I was raised in a faith where it’s considered thrillingly progressive to suggest that condom use might sometimes be acceptable just as long as the couple are heterosexual, and married, and one of them has AIDS.

My most-liked Instagram photo from the past 2 weeks: my grade school religion class homework.

Uploaded via autosets.

You would think that being deeply devout and right with God would convey a sense of inner peace, a sense of transcendence over the fleeting laurels of this world.

That’s what you would think, but when my alma mater was named a “top 50 Catholic school” by some organization I’ve never even heard of, they got so excited they registered the URL top50school.org and made a splashy new site to brag all over the Internet about how now there’s proof that they really and truly have God on their side. Sucks to be you, 6,950 other Catholic schools. That’s what you get for not coming down hard enough on homosexuality, masturbation, women’s rights, etc.

As it happens, I just wrote about St. Agnes in a Tangential post: “I Was a Teenage Republican.”

"We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us."

From the graduation speech delivered by Rose Goosens, this year’s valedictorian at my Catholic high school, St. Agnes. When I graduated, there was no student speech: graduation was held (of course) at the church, and women are not allowed to so much as ascend the altar at St. Agnes. Since it wouldn’t do to allow male valedictorians to make speeches but not female ones (wouldn’t want to be sexist or anything, right?), there were just no student speeches at all, and each year’s graduation speech was delivered by (of course) a priest. St. Agnes seems now to have solved that problem by moving graduation to the school gym after Mass rather than at the church during it. Progress!