Friday, January 15, 2010

Some of the best... and then there is the other side

Disasters often have a way of bringing out the best in people, unfortunately sometimes they allow strange things to crawl out from the woodwork. Witness some of the response to the earthquake in Haiti. I am aware of many good people who reacted immediately with an outpouring of financial support and prayers.
Then there is that intellectual light of the age, Pat Robertson, who shared with the world his knowledge that the earthquake was simply the inevitable result of the pact that Haitians made with the devil to free themselves from French colonization. No to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh also weighed in on the situation with the level of compassion I have come to expect of him.
There is also the gentleman who came into the rectory office demanding to know what the Catholic Church is doing to help. He asked the question but did not really want to hear the reply. He got aggravated when told that, in addition to a general call for prayers (as Catholics our first option is generally to go to the Lord in prayer), Catholic Relief Services immediately committed $5 million to relief efforts, the bishops have asked that special collections be held this weekend to aid the effort, and that multiple Catholic organizations do not have to go down to Haiti because they have been there all along ministering to the people of that impoverished country, or as Archbishop Dolan of New York put it, "We don't have to parachute in.
We're there anyway. We're on the scene. We know the terrain. We've got the trucks. We've got the supplies."

The gentleman left in a snit after being asked, "And what are you doing?"

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