longer.blue

As we approach Independence Day tomorrow, I've been thinking a lot about how many people I know are not feeling patriotic this year. A lot of us are worried about the state of the country, primarily because of the administration currently running the federal government. It makes it hard to feel celebratory about this country, and what it could stand for. That got me thinking about an exchange of dialogue from the movie SPOTLIGHT, written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy. Spotlight is about how the Boston Globe investigated the abusive priests in the Catholic Church and the people in charge who had tried to hide things. In the middle of the film, reporter Mike Rezendes is on the phone with Richard Sipe, a priest and psychotherapist who investigated these issues himself. And he asks Sipe a personal question. -- MIKE: Richard, do you still go to mass? SIPE (ON SPEAKERPHONE):No, I haven’t been to church for some time now. But I still consider myself a Catholic. MIKE: How does that work? SIPE (ON SPEAKERPHONE): The Church is an institution, Mike, made of men. It’s passing. My faith is in the eternal. I try to separate the two. MIKE: Sounds tricky. SIPE (ON SPEAKERPHONE): It is. -- Sipe goes on to note that the Church has been going after him for speaking the truth, and he warns Rezendes that they will probably go after the Globe team as well. Our American government is an institution. This year, it might be made up of flawed people (I know that some would call this an understatement) but the institution itself is not the people in charge. American began as a vision, a promise, and it didn't begin necessarily as one that all of us would have been allowed to participate fully in. But the ideals that we want America to stand for, the ideals that we ourselves can work towards–those are worth honoring and those are worth celebrating. A happy semiquincentennial to all.