Dino D'Agata: "The Pope and the President: From Notre Dame to Vatican City and Back"

"One would hope that many Catholics, starting from the bishops themselves, would understand that Christianity means a human encounter in which Christ makes Himself known through the very presence of the baptized believer— something the Holy Father exemplified for us in his encounter with Barack Obama— an encounter that cannot be reduced to either side’s “positions” on a variety of topics. One would hope that Catholics— conservative and liberal alike— take their cue from this and stop reducing their faith to a set of easily apprehended ethical tenets when the true ontology of faith is unpredictable, because it has to do with the mystery of how God takes on human flesh in the present— something that can potentially throw back any believer, liberal and conservative alike, because it removes faith from the realm of one’s own intellectual pretensions and transcends any facile reductions of what a human being actually is to what he or she thinks or believes."