And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

... that I had occasion to travel through portions of Allamakee and Clayton counties during the second full week of this month, and a couple things really impressed me.
One was the fall color show. It must have been the peak of the season, because I do not think I have ever seen more color. For example, the trees right now pretty much canopy that hill that drops down into Guttenberg, and it was like driving down the aisle of a cathedral with golden arches. Breathtaking beauty.
The second was the lack of something. Soybeans. On a couple trips over that same route earlier in the year, I was impressed by soybean fields to the horizon. This time, nothing but short stubble barrenness. All beans harvested.
The abundance of fall leaves reminded me of how much I used to enjoy the perfume of burning leaves as, between the ages of 7 and 11, I walked each fall day from St. Pat’s school to our home near the public high school, on West Court Street. There is no open burning these days. I burned a bunch of weeds in my burning barrel the other day but they did not smell good.
I subscribe to two daily papers because of accidental information acquired only by reading the “whole” story. The most interesting things sometimes appear well into the article.
For example, the Cedar Rapids Gazette endorsed the Democrat in the U.S. Senate race in Iowa. One reason was that Iowa would continue to have one Republican and one Democrat representing the state, which the paper concluded was good. I’m not sure I agree with that, since it usually means they cancel each other and Iowa has no vote.
I also detected a bit of pique as the paper noted the Democrat candidate agreed to an interview with staff, while the Republican did not. Nose out of joint, maybe?
I received some criticism when, to my personal dismay, my Catholic Church welcomed its first Jesuit as pope, and I said so. The Jesuits are historically the progressive wing of the church, and I guess I am a conservative. So I thought “I told you so” when the pope, opening a synod of bishops, said it was time for the church to quit being so doctrinaire when discussing a few things long considered forbidden. Obama-like, he said it wasn’t necessary to change the dogma, and that the church could just sort of ignore those things he didn’t like, because they were unpopular with large segments of the public. A little moral relativism, if you will.
Conservative bishops declined to endorse that idea. At their peril, perhaps, since the pope rather vindictively removed a conservative American Catholic Cardinal, Burke, from his exalted post on the Vatican’s canon law court, saying he was being reassigned. To Siberia, maybe?
And the pope said conservatives should be prepared because he wasn’t done with his proposal for popular changes, perhaps setting up a schism within the church, like the one in the country.
It took a Protestant, much more familiar with the Bible than I am, to recommend reading St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter One, to see a 2000 year old commentary on pretty much the same subject.