Blowing the Incense from Your Eyes: Awakening the Courage to Implement Personal and Institutional Reform in the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is in serious need of reform! Check the media: be it print, radio, television, or social networking and you will find unbelievable stories describing how the Church has lost its sense of integrity, distorted the gospel message, and injured and alienated the very people it is committed to serve. If we just talk about the Church s exclusion and injury of members, we will lose another generation of people with the financial and political potential to transform the Church. Now is the time to challenge the status quo and make a clarion call to action! To that end, Pat Westerhouse has written Blowing the Incense from Your Eyes: Awakening the Courage to Implement Personal and Institutional Reform in the Catholic Church. This book sets forth the process for personal independence from the Church, as well as outlining a path for committed laity to challenge clerical authority and to reform the institution. The intent of this book is to motivate all Christian Catholics to become conscious of the nature of their relationship with the Church, and to evaluate whether their membership is the result of informed choice, or of an unexamined acceptance of dependence on a hierarchical institution. This material will inspire all members who have felt frightened, abused, excluded, injured, embarrassed, or just plain fed up, to insist on and create an experience of Church based on the message of love, forgiveness and freedom within the gospel.