Originally published at The Crux
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“The Catholic Church: Our Lord is the Way to Eternal Life, but there is paperwork involved.”
It was a good line, I thought, certainly worth a chuckle, so I shared it to X.
It struck a nerve: 17,000 views and 15 reshares, which is a lot for me, but it wasn’t the biggest social media hit I had all week, not by a long shot.
That came from the story to which that quip I just mentioned was a follow-up, my contribution to people’s accounts of “petty tyranny” in the Church, many of them turning on the strict enforcement of mostly bureaucratic procedure that isn’t strictly necessary or even useful.
That one – the really big one (for me) – has nearly 170,000 views, upward of 70 reposts, and close to 2000 “likes” to date.
(Look, I’m a middle-aged man and I don’t really “do” social media, so this is exciting for me.)
There’s a serious point underneath this, though, which got right at something we all sense at least vaguely even when we can’t quite see it clearly, which is that red tape at the local level is keeping people from the sacraments, especially the ones that are
