On the Square Today

Elizabeth Scalia on evangelization and tolerance :

There is a video going around the internet—it seems to arrive in my email box every other day from another Catholic offering it as evidence of Americans antipathy toward the church. In the video, which was taken in early August, some gay-rights activists protesting outside a Chicago Chick-fil-A are joined in their circular march by Father Gerald O’Reilly, who proceeds to pray the rosary out loud, contra their shouting, until the activists begin to crowd around him, shouting, “We don’t want your bigoted prayers!” “Get him out of here!” and the always tiresome “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Also today, Tim Kelleher on a protest in a Russian cathedral :

Defenders of Kirill are quick to claim that Western critics take a simplistic approach to a social reality we don’t understand and are not competent to judge. No doubt, there’s some truth in that. The catastrophe of the Soviet persecution of religion, for example, placed church leaders who survived, in often-impossible predicaments, forcing compromises they felt obliged to accept, and over which they never ceased to agonize. Whereas developments in the West led to separation of church and state as the default position of the contemporary polis, the East has traveled a different path.