Catholic Leaflet

I am a devout Lutheran composer of devout Lutheran sacred choral music, but tonight I am a Catholic. As a human being, I know that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and since my Catholic sisters and brothers have been injured tonight, so, too, have I been injured.

I was leaving my grandmother’s home in Old Towne Orange, when on the way to my car I saw a smirking man in a white shirt tossing leaflets on the lawns from a dark blue Chevrolet Sprint. I was an unwilling witness to fascism in action because as soon as I picked up the leaflet intended for my grandmother (who is not a Catholic either), I could see that it was a vicious attack on Catholics.

The fact that the leaflet was obviously written by a very confused, incoherent, and probably psychotic--certainly paranoid--individual did not make this verbal violence against America’s largest denomination any less painful.

It was laughable, but it was not funny. It was written to advance the “ideas” of a man identified as “a strict fundamental Bible preacher and pastor,” in the name of fundamentalism (and in a strictly fundamental misunderstanding of the Bible that the man professes to preach).

Tonight, I remember what my fellow devout Lutheran, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, remembered about the Nazis:

“They came for the Jew, and I said nothing.

They came for the Catholics, and I said nothing.

And then they came for me.”

STEVEN CURTIS LANCE

Orange