On a snow-covered winter day in 1842, Father Edward Sorin stood before a frozen lake in northern Indiana and did something audacious. He consecrated the land, the institution he was about to found and every soul who would ever study or work there to the Blessed Virgin Mary – and he did this not as an afterthought or pious decoration, but as the founding act itself.
Anyone who reads me regularly knows I am not the sort of Catholic who grabs the smelling salts for every seeming insult or ignorant remark made about the Church.
Ever since Madonna danced before a burning cross, I’ve judged most of the controversial “scandals” against Catholicism to be weak broths that turn to mere water in the face of a supernatural Church that has watched the last 2,000 years of governments, political movements and infant nations parade by its Petrine seat before disappearing from sight.