Getting to Know the Other Side

Several weeks ago, I saw a segment on the PBS News Hour about the Vatican deploring the lack of strict orthodoxy among American nuns.  One of the panelists was a board member of Christendom College, which I'd never heard of.  I googled it and found that it's a small college in Virginia with standards  foreign to those of us who went to colleges unaffiliated with a religion. A strict dress code, no drinking, no fraternizing between the sexes, no dancing close, a faculty who must sign a loyalty pledge to Church law.

Who knew?   I have several friends who are "cradle Catholics," born into the faith, some educated in Church schools and colleges, but as far as I know, they're all over the map in their views on contraception, abortion, women serving as priests,  and gay marriage.  They seem a pretty easy-going lot: they drink alcohol, wear whatever they want, and the women don't cover their heads outside a church.   I don't know what they use for birth control and wouldn't dream of asking, but none has more than three children.

More googling, and I discovered an online community of young Catholic women who embrace strict Catholic law, and some of them write blogs. Now I read three of them regularly.

Reader, I'm torn.  These are introspective people, intelligent and sometimes funny; all are converts to Catholicism.  I'm a liberal, agnostic Democrat, and they're conservative, religious Republicans, but now that I know about their pets and children and recipes, I've grown to like one of them and to empathize with two of them.   I'm also agog at how much trouble they go to in order to adhere to their faith.  It's no small commitment.

And it would all be okay, except occasionally--more often with one of them--politics comes up.  Specifically, their positions on gay marriage, contraception, abortion, and Obamacare, and they lose me.  I squint and their faces disappear, and they become The Other Side, the group we can't reason with, the people who want to push their views on everyone else, many of which are unkind.   I really wish we didn't have this fundamental disagreement, but we do.