Goodbye, Good Men
I haven't yet chimed in on Mr. Rose's book. I bought a copy of it at Borders and the cashier whose entire body had been pierced and tatooed except for the tip of his nose looked at me like I was a complete freak. Since then it has been sitting on a pile of other unread but less contentious books. A few friends have told me I absolutely must read it but I have been stalling. The negative press the book has been getting as well as the dueling letters I have read online have increased my misgivings. The fact is, though, that it is not fiction. As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus states in his piece on First Things "even if the situation in vocation offices and seminaries is only half as bad as he suggests, it is very bad indeed." That's what make me so apprehensive about reading it - I don't think I want to know even if it is almost as bad as Rose says.
What is also curious to me is that this book is getting a lot more criticism from the right as opposed to the left. Why not more from the left-leaning groups inside and outside the Church? Time Magazine caught rapture fever but there hasn't been a peep in the mainstream media about thing about the role of dissent or homosexuality had in causing this crisis. Some are saying Goodbye, Good Men is at worst a fabrication and at best bad journalism. Are we denying that there has been a problem in seminaries in this country for a several decades or is there a disagreement on the extent and nature of the problem? I have to take a practical approach - clearly there has been a problem. If this was the Titanic I'd be more concerned about the existence of a hole in the ship than it's nature.
