Punditry

Rich at Ten Reasons points out:

Each year, the USCCB’s Catholic Campaign for Human Development allocates hundreds of thousands of dollars to local projects coordinated by the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. The National Catholic Reporter recently asked John Carr, executive director of the USCCB Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development, which includes the CCHD staff, about success stories. Here is what he cited for Cincinnati:

And here is the success story referenced:

“Some of it is mundane, but very important,” Carr added. He said on a recent trip to Cincinnati, “I asked the CCHD archdiocesan director if there had been any significant victories recently.

“And he said, ‘Absolutely. There was a huge victory.’ He said one of the groups that CCHD funds was able to persuade the mass transit board to change the route of a bus line so that it didn’t stop three-quarters of a mile from the mall — so that the people who work in the mall and people who shop in the mall who don’t have a car, mostly low-income people, don’t have to walk in the rain, or walk three-quarters of a mile in order to carry out their work or do their shopping.”

Now if that doesn’t grease open your wallet to give money to CCHD I don’t know what would. I mean a success story like that will be passed on for ages.

Well maybe not, I for one am glad my bishop is not contributing to CCHD in our diocese. CCHD is trying to rebrand itself putting aside the errors in the past to forge one. Unfortunately their renewal sounds exactly like more of the same in giving money to exactly the same problematic groups that are better at promoting themselves than actually doing something for the poor.

Earlier the New York TImes had an article Catholic Bloggers Aim to Purge Dissenter that I was tempted to comment on, but a lot of other Catholic bloggers have already spilled plenty of screen pixels on. As you would expect from an NYT article it is pretty much a totally negative piece of agenda journalism. The NYT never could bring itself to mention the purges of Stalin which killed a large multitude, but for conservative Catholic bloggers they find the term just fine. The article goes downhill from the headline.

So this article aptly criticized by many bloggers of course gets called a fine piece by Fr. James Martin of America Magazine. Now as someone who has hundreds of Catholic blogs in my RSS aggregator I get a pretty good sampling of what happens in the Catholic blogosphere. It is no surprise that blogs like people range the gamut and the range of charity in an post will also do the same. Generally though Catholic blogs that focus on punditry usually focus on dissent and bad theology. Personal attacks on people who dissent or advance bad theology I have found to be rather rare, though certainly some blogs are more prone to this than others – again blogs are remarkably like people. So I found the NYT piece to be rather silly and to be expected.

Fr. James Martin should get an Irony of the Week award for the following sentence.

Finally, many in the “Catholic Taliban,” as John Allen so bluntly puts it, seem devoid of any sense of Christian charity.

So Fr. Martin repeating John Allen’s term, which he has subsequently backed off from, and using his own term “web-based McCarthyism” is an example of Christian charity? “Hey you #*$(I@)%, be more civil.” Certainly we all fail at this at times and I guess I will have to work to model myself off of America Magazine wonderfully vicious writer Michael Sean Winters. Father Martin is so concerned about civility that he is associated with and writes for the Huffington Post the very mirror of Christian charity – well an inverse image at least.

Carl Olson in his reply to Fr. Martin’s post said “He’s a smart, well-spoken, and thoughtful man, and a talented writer as well.” I would agree with his assessment and I mostly enjoyed his book “My Life with the Saints” which I would recommend with only some very minor quibbles. Fr. Martin also identified himself as a Progressive when he was writing in the NYT during the Pope’s visit to the U.S.

Fr. Martin seems to have a problem with anonymous bloggers and commenters, though when it comes to anonymous bloggers within St. Blogs there are a very small minority. Though maybe he is thinking of Diogenes and his rather pointed commentary. Fr. Martin seems to forget there is good reason why some might go the anonymous route which is certainly not always cowardly as the charitable Fr. Martin contends. Some people work in situations where their employers might fire them for having a faithful Catholic worldview. Look at what happened in California when homosexual activists went after and got people fired for signing the petition supporting real marriage. Now as to anonymous commenters, well this is the internet and you don’t even know when somebody puts their real name in the first place. I for one would like to live in a troll-less world and peruse comment boxes full of thoughtful opinions – but comment boxes pretty much affirm the doctrine of original sin.

He also complains about the theological ability of “attack-bloggers”, another charitable term he uses. Certainly true to some extent, but you don’t need a degree to say that abortion is intrinsically evil. Most of the battles of today are not at the depth that required the earliest councils concerning Christology. Often though it is those that do indeed have degrees in theology that defend the indefensible so that you can vote for or support whoever you wanted to support anyway. Understanding “Though should not kill” does not take the theological depth of a St. Aquinas and it is an elitist argument to imply that it does. A deeper understanding of theology will serve everybody well, but the issues of the day just aren’t all that nuanced.

Third, the focus of their blogs is almost risibly narrow. Here are the sole topics of interest, in the order in which they cause foaming at the mouth (or on the keyboard): homosexuality, abortion, women’s ordination, birth control, liturgical abuses and the exercise of church authority. Is this really the sum total of what makes us Catholic?

So if people were blogging during the Council of Nicea would you be surprised if the prominent topic was the nature of Christ? Of if blogging during the Council of Trent that the topics concerned the Sacrifice of the Mass and the nature of the Priesthood. I for one would be quite glad to never have to blog on ” homosexuality, abortion, women’s ordination, birth control, liturgical abuses and the exercise of church authority” again. But these are the issues of the day and evil does not go away just because you want a faux civility. The toll of abortion worldwide is such a palpable evil that anyone who decries talking about it just doesn’t get that this is the slaughter of the innocents and a crime continuously calling out to Heaven. I guess Blessed Mother Teresa should have just chilled instead of talking about this issue. Everything he lists except liturgical abuses are intrinsic evils – isn’t that exactly what we should be writing about, praying about, and doing what we can to bring people to the truth and closer to God? Of course America Magazine does not really write about these topics, because it seems to be they are on the other side concerning them. Fr. Martin often blogs stories concerning homosexuality, but never the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil. I remember once he wrote a couple of posts concerning some bishop who the press reported said that all homosexuals go to Hell. Now the charitable approach to such a story is to think that the bishop was misquoted as happens pretty much daily in the press. I expresses exactly this in his comment box and once again when he addressed the story again. Several days later the story was clarified showing that the bishop did not say what the story quoted him as saying and expressed what the Church actually teaches instead of the falsehood that all homosexuals go to Hell. Yet there was no followup post to this story and no apology for his slandering of the bishop. Fr. Martin talks about courage and yet it seems rather obvious what his feelings are about what the Church teaches on homosexual acts and yet he seems to dance around this – though certainly I would be happy to have misread him and to see him actually affirm the constant teaching of the Church on this.

Fourth, anonymous attacks drummed up by these bloggers often make their way, slowly but surely, to the offices of church leaders, where they can do real damage to real people with real jobs in Catholic schools and universities, parishes and chanceries. Church officials, often unsure of the veracity of the attacks, may try to play it safe by disciplining or even firing the target of the attack.

Examples please. Certainly some people have lost their jobs such as the USCCB staffer who was supporting John Kerry using USCCB computers during work. Having been involved with the Catholic Blogosphere since 2001 I can’t think of one example of a “anonymous attack” that resulted in such a situation. If anything even when somebody has been shown to dissent against Church teaching in a serious way nothing is done. I could almost wish Catholic bloggers had such power, that is if I wasn’t highly suspicious of power and how it is easily misused. The real world experience I have gathered is that in most cases Church officials ignore scandal until forced to act and not always even then. The idea that they have some hair-trigger response to a rumor mill in Catholic blogs is laughably not credible. As I said “Example please.”

Fifth, there seems is little apparent desire on the part of some of these watchdogs to speak to their targets. Rarely are the targets of ad hominem attacks contacted for any comment or explanation. And, in my experience, when you respond to some of these bloggers, while at times you will receive a thoughtful apology, or a revision on a blog, or you will agree to disagree in charity, most often than not you are met with even more invective and further hateful comments. After a while, you just find yourself give up.

Isn’t it Ad hominem to talk of attack bloggers, Taliban Catholicism, web-based McCarthyism? Seems like a rather personal attack to me concerning my pundit blogging friends. I also can not think of any of the top Catholic blogs that would not issue an apology if mistaken or had the facts wrong since they have done so in the past. I certainly have revised posts when I found I got something wrong.

Of course the common defense is that real charity is pointing out a “heresy,” which will damage the faithful. (As in, “It’s a good thing we burned Joan of Arc at the stake!”) Or they say that calls for charity just mask dissent. But fidelity and charity are not competing values. Or they argue that they’re just doing what Jesus did when he called Herod a “fox.” What they seem to forget is that they are not Jesus. Overall, while many of these bloggers certainly seem Catholic, they don’t seem particularly Christian

Again is the good Father trying for the Irony award? St. Joan of Arc was burned for what were really political reasons by clerics who put politics first. They had a political agenda in condemning this saint and they twisted theology to bring about the result – sound familiar? The targets of so many Catholic bloggers are again those who put something first before the faith whether it is party politics or something else. Certainly fidelity and charity are not competing values and fidelity requires charitably calling out dissent both for love of the dissenter and to prevent harm to others. Purges are not what I want or I believe others want. We talk of excommunication only as medicinal remedy to bring someone back to full Communion with the Church.

Oh and by the way that NYT article that Fr. Martin called a “fine piece.” In one part of the article it says that Catholic bloggers refer to the “National Catholic Reporter” as the “National Catholic Destroyer.” Strangely I have never read anybody actually saying this. Now the term “National Catholic Destroyer” has certainly been used as a play on words. Dale Price Googled the words “National Catholic Destroyer” and found the only hits were related to the NYT piece itself. Yes a fine piece that couldn’t even spend the time to get basic facts right.

One last point. I would certainly agree with Fr. Martin on some of the points that he made and that when a discussion becomes heated and charity is lost – too much is lost. We all need to take G.K. Chesterton as role model in his in that he could be great friends with people like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells while also critiquing their views in his columns and his books. These men returned his friendship despite the fact that they knew is disagreed with them at a fundamental level. So pray for me that I might emulate the same in my life and my blog.

Tom at Disputations has a good critique of what Fr. Martin wrote and the original article.

Here is an update to a story – first a little background.

Early in 2006, Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a statement clarifying that Church agencies should not place children for adoption with same-sex couples. The statement had particular significance for Levada’s former Archdiocese of San Francisco, whose Catholic Charities agency had been placing children for adoption with same-sex couples.

In response to Cardinal Levada’s statement, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution denouncing the Vatican’s foreign meddling, demanding Levada retract his “hateful,” “insulting,” “discriminatory,” “callous”  and ignorant directive, and urging current San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer and Catholic Charities “to defy all discriminatory directives of Cardinal Levada.” Members of the Board of Supervisors also threatened to remove funding from Catholic Charities’ other programs unless they did defy the Vatican (The City was not funding the adoption program at Catholic Charities).

Always nice to have a city council call your religious beliefs to be hateful. Apparently loving your brother and not wanting them to sin is hateful and calling sin normal is loving.

We would have a different case on our hands had the defendants called upon Cardinal Levada to recant his views on transubstantiation, or had urged Orthodox Jews to abandon the laws of kashrut, or Mormons their taboo of alcohol. Those matters of religious dogma are not within the secular arena in the way that same-sex marriage and adoption are.

Jack Smith at the Catholic Key blog replies to this nonsense succinctly:

Translated, your freedom of religion encompasses all the superstitious voodoo you care to indulge in, but you may not have a religious dogma at variance with something the City cares about – like sex.

Political Correctness is the secular dogma that must be adhered to or you will be banished Now it might sound like no big deal that a silly city council like San Francisco’s would make such a statement, that is almost to be expected. Much worse when the courts turn a blind eye to religious discrimination and bigotry. They of course can not explain why the area of same-sex marriage do not come within the arena of religious thought. Really the opposition to same-sex marriage can be discovered in the natural law and if religion can’t protect marriage the very basis of family life, than really religion becomes only an intellectual hobby with no real-world applications.

This appeal court is not called the Ninth Circus Court for no reason and it is no surprise how often their actions are overturned. This case certainly calls out to be tried in the Supreme Court as an important First Amendment case. If the government gets a pass on religious bigotry and know-nothingism we will certainly get more bigotry of this kind. If the case does make it to SCOTUS it will certainly become a media circus as once again the fact that five justices on the court are Catholic. I wonder if the pundits will say that they must recuse themselves? If only the anti-Catholic bigots would have to recuse themselves.

The Windhill Churches Centre in Bishop’s Stortford is being seen as a milestone in ecumenical relationships.

It was built by the Anglican Parish of St Michael and the Roman Catholic Parish of St Joseph and the English Martyrs.

The project has taken 15 years to come to fruition.

The centre comprises two halls, two kitchens, two offices for clergy and six meeting rooms.

The entrance, toilets and lift for the disabled are all shared.

It was opened on Saturday by the Rt Rev Dr Alan Smith, the Bishop of St Albans, and the Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Westminster, the Rt Rev George Stack. [Article]

Wow we have come a long way. Shared toilets! Though I guess when you are dealing with ecumenism it is best to emphasize what we share.

I once wrote a church bulletin parody for a joint Anglican/Catholic church named “St. Thomas More & King Henry VIII”

The media always want a hook when reporting religion news and preferably a hook that pertains to their worldview is what is wanted. When it comes to canonization sadly holiness and a life of heroic virtue is not a hook they care about at all. Any ole hook will do and it doesn’t even have to be true.

For example the reporting on Mary MacKillop who was canonized today shows proof of this. Over the last week the meme has been that she reported directly to the bishop the case of a Franciscan priest who was an abuser. Hey nice hook that fits the agenda. The only problem of course is that it is totally false.

Sherry Weddell does good work in her post Mary MacKillop: The Whistle That Never Blew by pointing out that the new Saint happened to be living 1,000 miles away at the time the events happened and her Bishop was away for a year and a half at the First Vatican Council. So the idea of her going to the bishop and denouncing this priest just was not possible in any way.

History is sometimes stranger than fiction! The primary whistle-blower turned out to be a wildly eccentric, mentally ill male cleric, Fr. Woods, not our new woman saint. Since Fr. Woods was regarded as “the founder” of the Josephite sisters, Fr. Horan sought to take vengeance by destroying the women’s community that he had founded.

It turns out that the carelessness and incompetence lay elsewhere. Now both Fr. Gardiner and the executive producer of the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Compass show (the source of the original story) have vehemently denied ever asserting that Mary was a whistle-blower.

Though how can we expect the media to get it right when the Vatican press office can’t.

“The merits of Mother Mary MacKillop, her commitment to children, to the poor, to indigenous peoples, to the dignity of all human persons, were much more extensive than the fact that she denounced an abuser,” Lombardi said.

The quote would have been perfect if Fr. Lombardi had left off the last part. She is a saint because she lived a life of heroic sanctity which bore fruit in her helping the poor and others.

The Denver prelate made his remarks on Oct. 15 at the “Faith in the Public Square” seminar sponsored by the Diocese of Victoria. He opened his speech with a reference to Shirley Jackson’s famed short story “The Lottery.”

Jackson’s story – set in rural 1940s America – features the tale of a small town that gathers every year to implore an unnamed force to grant a good corn harvest the people. Each year, town members draw a piece of paper from a wooden box to see who will be chosen for human sacrifice. A young mother ends up drawing the ominous black slip and is stoned to death by the community as part of the annual ritual.

Reflecting on Jackson’s piece, Archbishop Chaput cited professor Kay Haugaard’s analysis on how young people in academia in decades past would react passionately to the tale with intense classroom debate and discussion.

“She said that in the early 1970s, students who read the story voiced shock and indignation,” Archbishop Chaput noted. “The tale led to vivid conversations on big topics – the meaning of sacrifice and tradition; the dangers of group-think and blind allegiance to leaders; the demands of conscience and the consequences of cowardice.”

“Sometime in the mid-1990s, however, reactions began to change,” he said.

“Haugaard described one classroom discussion that – to me – was more disturbing than the story itself. The students had nothing to say except that the story bored them. So Haugaard asked them what they thought about the villagers ritually sacrificing one of their own for the sake of the harvest.”

“One student, speaking in quite rational tones, argued that many cultures have traditions of human sacrifice,” the archbishop continued. “Another said that the stoning might have been part of ‘a religion of long standing,’ and therefore acceptable and understandable.”

Another student brought up the idea of “multicultural sensitivity,” saying she learned in school that if “it’s a part of a person’s culture, we are taught not to judge.”

“I thought of Haugaard’s experience with ‘The Lottery’ as I got ready for this brief talk,” the prelate explained.

“Our culture is doing catechesis every day. It works like water dripping on a stone, eroding people’s moral and religious sensibilities, and leaving a hole where their convictions used to be.”

“Haugaard’s experience,” he added, “teaches us that it took less than a generation for this catechesis to produce a group of young adults who were unable to take a moral stand against the ritual murder of a young woman.”

“Not because they were cowards. But because they lost their moral vocabulary.”

“Christians in my country and yours – and throughout the West, generally – have done a terrible job of transmitting our faith to our own children and to the culture at large,” Archbishop Chaput remarked.

“Instead of changing the culture around us, we Christians have allowed ourselves to be changed by the culture. We’ve compromised too cheaply. We’ve hungered after assimilating and fitting in. And in the process, we’ve been bleached out and absorbed by the culture we were sent to make holy.”

“We need to confess that, and we need to fix it,” he asserted. “For too many of us, Christianity is not a filial relationship with the living God, but a habit and an inheritance. We’ve become tepid in our beliefs and naive about the world. We’ve lost our evangelical zeal. And we’ve failed in passing on our faith to the next generation.”

Renewing Catholic catechesis then, Archbishop Chaput added, “has little to do with techniques, or theories, or programs, or resources.”

“The central issue is whether we ourselves really do believe. Catechesis is not a profession. It’s a dimension of discipleship. If we’re Christians, we’re each of us called to be teachers and missionaries.”

However, the Denver prelate noted, “we can’t share what we don’t have.”

“If we’re embarrassed about Church teachings, or if we disagree with them, or if we’ve decided that they’re just too hard to live by, or too hard to explain, then we’ve already defeated ourselves.”

“We need to really believe what we claim to believe,” he stressed. “We need to stop calling ourselves ‘Catholic’ if we don’t stand with the Church in her teachings – all of them.”

In his concluding remarks, Archbishop Chaput added that “if we really are Catholic, or at least if we want to be, then we need to act like it with obedience and zeal and a fire for Jesus Christ in our hearts.”

“God gave us the faith in order to share it. This takes courage. It takes a deliberate dismantling of our own vanity. When we do that, the Church is strong. When we don’t, she grows weak. It’s that simple.” [Source]

When The Lottery was first published in the New Yorker, Shirley Jackson got a lot of hate mail from people very upset by the story. She later replied via another publication.

“Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

That students now have a totally different reaction to this story I guess could not be called shocking in the Culture of Death, but disturbing all the same what moral relativism under the trojan horse of multicultural sensitivity has wrought. Good thing the British did not have this phony sensitivity in the face of Sati (wife burning) in India.

This though is exactly what the underlying atheist assumptions of modern education has led to. When there are no moral absolutes and no God to pin right and wrong to, we have to then tie moral values we inherently believe exist to culture and a sort of societal getting along. So when you do this the students reactions are totally to be expected and within the framework of moral relativism. Cultures change, thus moral values change is the obvious assumption those taught under this system make.

What I love about Archbishop Chaput is that he can take the changing reactions to The Lottery and show the defect that caused them and at the time go on to give us an example of what we need to do. This call is to the individual level in growing in holiness and living lives totally congruent with the faith we profess. These changes occurred within a generation and through true catechesis they can be reversed, a least in the sphere that engages in true catechesis. Families, public schools and too many other institutions including religious ones will likely keep to teaching a morality tied to in-effect nothing which is like anchoring a ship to a helium balloon.

As for the late Shirley Jackson, she is a fabulous writer who wrote one of the best pieces of psychological horror fiction ever “The Haunting of Hill House” and could also write hilariously such as in “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.”

If you were planning on having a convention or a large meeting of Catholics, part of your planning would consist of contacting the bishop of the Diocese where it would be held. Some people that I know who planned such events certainly saw this as a necessary step. That is unless you are the American Catholic Council and not only do you not inform Archbishop of Detroit Allen Vigneron, you ignore him when he tell you to cancel the event.

The virtue of obedience is of course one sorely lacking among “Progressive” Catholics who want to always dissent and only assent when it agrees with them. It is very easy to get rid of or silence faithful Catholics since these Catholics actually obey their bishops even when they disagree with them and they don’t go publicly whining about maybe be shuffled off to a smaller parish in the countryside. Simply where there is no obedience to proper authority in the Church there is also no holiness. A disobedient reform movement is no reform movement at all.

So what fresh young voice have they scheduled? Why the heretic Hans Kung of course. It would seem to me that denying papal infallibility among other things certainly follows under the Canon law definition of Heresy as the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same. That this group links to other dissident groups include pro-homosexual acts and women’s ordination is also no surprise. In fact usually if you have the world America or U.S. in your name you are a heterodox Catholic. (i.e. America mag, U.S. Catholic, americancatholic.org, etc). Usually this is because they place a higher allegiance to the idea of democracy than they do to the Catholic part. They complain about the hierarchy when really they aspire to replace it to be able to direct us. After all they know better than the consistent teaching of the Church.

So a thumbs down to this phony reform group and thumbs way up for Archbishop Allen Vigneron and his concise statement.

The Archdiocese of Detroit has been contacted by concerned members of the faithful about a movement called the American Catholic Council. Self-described as “bringing together a network of individuals, organizations, and communities to consider the state and future of our Church,” they have planned a national gathering in Detroit for the weekend of Pentecost 2011. The American Catholic Council movement and its national gathering are not conducted under the auspices of the Detroit archdiocese, the universal Roman Catholic Church, or any entity or organization affiliated with the archdiocese or the universal Roman Catholic Church.

Although their stated purpose is to “respond to the Spirit of Vatican II by summoning the Baptized together to demonstrate our re-commitment and the documents issued by the American Catholic Council offer some valid aspirations for the Church, in fact, the goals proposed are largely in opposition to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the Holy Spirit, which inspired the Council.

The archdiocese wishes to commend and embrace all true efforts at Church renewal – the American Church Council’s agenda is not such an effort. Some of the advertised speakers and groups organizing the effort espouse positions which are clearly contrary to Catholic faith, leading to alienation and estrangement from the Church. The Archdiocese of Detroit cautions any Catholic against participating in the American Catholic Council local listening sessions and national gathering in June 2011. Catholic parishes, schools, and institutions are not to host any meetings, gatherings, or “listening sessions” associated with the planning of the June 2011 American Catholic Council. Priests, deacons, and ecclesial lay ministers will want to avoid lending support to such a misguided effort. On behalf of the archdiocese, Archbishop Vigneron has asked the organizers to cancel their plans for this national gathering that distorts the true Spirit of Vatican II. He asks us all to pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit so that we may embrace authentic development of faith and morals, and shun efforts which threaten unity.

Father Z on Dissenter’s Ball

In response to my post on the idea of a Catholic Tea Party, Deal Hudson critiqued my post on the subject.  After reading his commentary I came to the conclusion that we were talking past each other and that clarity of my post might have been better.

My two main thrusts were in regards to the name Catholic Tea Party and the dangers involved when faithful Catholics become identified with  one political party.

The name Tea Party is a fairly apt name for the political movement calling for fiscal responsibility, limited government, and support of the free market.  Social issues such as the pro-life cause is not a main thrust of this movement, though a majority of Tea Party Members are pro-life while a reported 35% are pro-abortion.  There is certainly some overlap in opposition to the Obama health care plan.  From what I have seen this is a worthwhile grassroots movement that Catholics certainly should participate in.  The media’s hatred and mischaracterization of this movement has been rather obscene and a sort of projection of their own hate.  Charges of the Tea Party being a racist movement are without evidence and quite laughable until you realize how seriously opponents of the Tea Party actually believe this meme.

If I am not mistaken Deal Hudson is calling for a movement of Catholics active in the political sphere to advocate in defense of life and other social justice issues as actually defined in Catholic teaching.  That we should not be waiting for the Bishops to act and to apply pressure and we should organize and do so ourselves.  Part of this political advocacy would also be in regards to the USCCB itself and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) and the misuse of funds for organizations opposing to Catholic teaching and other problems. I would imagine such a movement would be involved in Catholic education and the myriad problems of dissenting organizations or ones that just go wobbly at times.  I would totally support all of these aims – just don’t call it a Catholic Tea Party.

In the rich history of the Catholic Church surely we could take a name from the various reform movements in the Church and not from American history.  While faithful Catholics will be disparaged no matter what name was attached to such a movement, surely Tea Party doesn’t help.  So as to a Catholic Tea Party I think what Deal Hudson and I disagree on is the prudence of the name of such a movement.

As to politicizing the Church and the problem of the faithful being attached to one political party I would clarify my previous post which concentrated on why this can be a problem rather than the political realities.  As I referenced before, previously Catholics were largely identified with the Democratic Party and when that party succumbed to radical feminism and the Culture of Death there were way to few Catholic Democrats objecting to this obscene turn of events.  This change would have been very short lived if Catholic Democrats had mutinied or totally resisted this change.  It took the Bishop’s conference decades to adjust to this change and to start to speak out.  So I don’t want Catholic Republicans to do the same and to become just a cheap date for the GOP of expected votes.  I hear too much talk about the Big Tent for republicans and that some seem to think you actually have a conservative in office  if they have an R next to their name.  I can hardly imagine the early Republican Party to have supported Republicans candidates in favor of slavery.  As bad as slavery is, abortion is worse and the party supporting pro-aborti0n members as long as they are “conservative” on other issues frankly pisses me off.  A Big Tent that enables the slaughter of the unborn is a tent that needs to be ripped down and rebuilt.  Sure there are political compromises, but when you compromise on the murder of the unborn – what else are you willing to compromise on?

The political reality right now is that the Democratic Party is the Party of Death and that there are extremely few Democrats who could be called pro-life in their voting records.  Democrats had picked up many seats by running so-called pro-life Democrats.  The number that ended up opposing the Presidents health care plan was minuscule with almost all prominent “pro-life Democrats” getting their pottage in exchange for their vote. Even in the case of the mythical pro-life Democrat, if you vote for them against a pro-life Republican you end up supporting the Democratic Party and it’s advocacy of multiple intrinsic evils as “rights”.  They have become a deeply morally corrupted party whose policies can not be supported by faithful Catholics.  Though many take a heavy dose of moral relativism to justify such a vote and put on the same level prudential questions with ones that are intrinsically evil.

In contrast the Republican Party larges opposes those multiple intrinsic evils that the Democratic Party does. It is certainly a good questions how many Republicans are actually pro-life.  Being in Florida I never trusted Charlie Christ who became “pro-life” to run for Governor and the snake certainly has shed his skin since then.  On the other hand of course even if many aren’t ardently pro-life – they at least vote that way.  We need to hold their feet to the fire and to not allow party politics to support members who are not in alignment with a basic plank of the party.  We must rebel against pro-abortion candidates the same way the Tea Party rebelled against faux conservatives to support candidates more in line with their values. I think it was scandalous that Sen. McCain who supported research using human embryos got the party nod. Though to reduce evil and to vote for a greater good I voted for him since the reality of the extremely pro-abortin Obama is much worse.  These types of compromises even when they are fully allowable within Catholic teaching should not makes us complacent about such things.

When it comes down to it I can see no way in Hell a faithful Catholic can vote Democrat in the large majority of circumstances.  This does not mean that automatically the Republican candidate gets the nod though, it is just that in most cases you would be supporting a greater good.  For good or for ill it is the Republican Party that is fighting against abortion. ESCR, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, and cloning and to pretend other issues are more important is to make a mockery of the Catholic faith. Voting third party can certainly be morally licit, though I personally don’t see how this advances much other than being able to feel better about that vote.  I just have not yet been convinced by arguments by friends such as Mark Shea in this regard.

Now as to some of Deal’s specific critiques.

I am guessing here, but I suspect the only reason Miller and others make this charge of partisanship is because of my association with the Republican Party. But what public figures — outside of the clergy — don’thave associations with political parties? Does that make anyone with a party association guilty of politicizing the Church, arguing only for partisan purposes?

Obviously the clarity of my previous post must have caused such a confusion since I believe nothing of the kind or I believe mentioned partisanship. I respect the Catholic outreach that Deal Hudson has engaged with in the Republican party, especially in the case when Pastor Hagee became an issue. Being associated with the Republican Party myself I can have no objection to his association. I have not voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter who I voted for in my first election. His incompetence brought me out of the Democratic party when I was the typical bleeding heart environmentalist wacko. The following election I did not vote since I could not bring myself to vote for Ronald Reagan who was the equivalent of the anti-Christ in my environs shaped in Portland, Or. I did vote for Ronald Reagan on his re-election.

Unfortunately, the Curt Jester’s point of view also suffers from a fundamental naiveté about politics. For example, he says:

It is such nonsense in politics to accuse others of not having what are really basic agreements. The real disagreements come into place in regards to prudential decisions on how to best achieve these goals.

Has Miller not noticed that many voters — even Catholic voters — do not agree with the Declaration of Independence on the inalienable right to life? That’s precisely why the abortion issue drives so much of American politics, because it contains a basic disagreement over the very meaning of human life.

What I was trying to get at was that all men seek the good, even if their apprehension of that good is greatly mistaken Though the examples I was specifically thinking of is when Democrats say that Republicans want to destroy the environment, hate poor people, or are racist because they oppose some program towards these goals that they think are either ineffective or will make matters worse. Or in the case of Republicans saying a Democrat wants to destroy the economy, when really the focus should be not on the motives but the actual program that might indeed be destructive of the economy. Let us offer thorough critiques of ideas not motives. This is difficult in the sound bite political arena which responds more to zingers than facts.

Mainly I guess much of what Deal Hudson responds to totally misses my intent which can easily be because I was not clear enough, the easy to fall into trap of reading into something, or a mixture of the two.

Finally, Miller laments the identification of the Catholic faith with one political party over the other for the moral relativism it engenders. He gives two examples: First, he notes the gradual acceptance of abortion by Catholic Democrats. Then he lays out the great crime of the Catholics in the GOP:

The same thing happened when torture was used by the Bush administration and once again moral relativists decided that an evil could be promoted to bring a greater good. Way too few Catholics who were Republicans spoke against this outrage and mostly went on to advance the same moral relativistic arguments the pro-abortion types advanced.

So in other words, 40 years of Catholic Democratic advocacy of abortion is thus equated with the arguments supporting waterboarding by Marc Thiessen, a single Catholic member of the Bush administration.

I certainly did not intend to equate the various intrinsic evils in any way. But an intrinsic evil is still an intrinsic evil even if the other party commits far more and results in millions of deaths. My main concern is that I don’t want conservatives to accept such an evil. I think Mr Hudson dismisses the Catholic response a bit here. While Marc Thiessen was the public proponent for waterboarding in the Bush Administration, no doubt there were others who agreed with him and I can certainly name a significant group of public Catholics who did support torture and some gave an outlet to Mr. Thiessen on Catholic Radio/TV. Whenever I bring up this subject myself there is always some negative reply in the comment boxes about this. Certainly Mark Shea, Tom Kreitzberg of Disputations, Erin Manning and others get loads of comments defending torture by Catholics.

One thing about Deal Hudson’s post that really gave me a hearty laugh was a comment by Deacon Ed, who said “Deal I suspect that what you wrote flushed out a Catholic Democrat and hit a nerve.” Now I know how Mark Shea feels when he criticizes a Republican and is charged as a Leftist Democratic operative.

In the history of bad ideas we almost always find that there is always room for another bad idea. This time it is the idea of a “Catholic Tea Party” as promoted by Deal Hudson and others. While I am largely in agreement with the aims of such, I think the name does more harm than good.

I don’t say this because Catholic should not be associated with the political Tea Party movement if they want to, but that the term is another unhelpful politicization of the Church. So many terms adopted from the political sphere become nonsense when applied to Catholic movements. Right, Left, Conservative, Liberal, Progressive, Far Right, Far Left become labels that in the end don’t tell you anything.

I’ve written before about prefix-Catholicism that always narrows the meaning of Catholicism. You don’t need a prefix for universal since any prefix narrows the scope. Ultimately there are only orthodox and heterodox Catholics. But among orthodox Catholics there is also large room for prudential disagreements on how best to live and to apply the Catholic faith.

When you confuse the faith with a political party it makes it easier for someone in the other party to dismiss you.

Fighting against abortion is not a conservative thing, it is a protection of the truth that we are created in the image of God and that the innocent can not be murdered. Doing what we can to help the poor is not a liberal idea, but again the protection of the truth that we are created in the image of God and that we can not limit the scope of the world neighbor.

In the area of prudential application of the faith, these actions often overlap into the political sphere and thus at times we must interact with that sphere. Foremost we need to determine if our prudential actions are indeed motivated by the faith or by a political party. Really everybody believes that we should be good stewards of the environment, to help our neighbor when they are in need, that we have a healthy economy that supports job growth and provides a fair wage. It is such nonsense in politics to accuse others of not having what are really basic agreements. The real disagreements come into place in regards to prudential decisions on how to best achieve these goals. Criticism of policies that don’t meet the goals of course are fair play, but the polemics of people saying the other side hates such and such is useless. These types of polarizations do way too much damage and as Catholics we really should assume good motives of others even if we totally disagree with their means of achieving something.

Some of these disagreements range into the are of the support of things that are intrinsically evil. Where a political party supports an intrinsic evil such as abortion, ESCR, homosexual acts, human cloning, euthanasia, torture, etc they must be totally opposed and every effort made to destroy the support and use of such evils. This should be done without lapsing into the hatred and demonization of those who hold opinions supporting intrinsic evils. Loving our enemies means both that we can have real enemies and that our primary motive must be to seek their repentance.

The identification of the Catholic faith with a specific political party is fraught with danger. In the last century Catholics largely identified with the Democratic Party and when that party started supporting intrinsic evils such as abortion it caused people to diminish this problem. Instead of Catholic Democrats revolting at this corruption, largely excuses were made and the Bishop’s conference decided to go into three monkey mode for decades in regards to this. With so many Catholics making up the Democratic Party then they should have been able to reject this perversion allowed under the corrupting auspices of a false feminism. Moral relativism became the standard in support of this evil and evidence of the trumping of the Catholic faith by political idea. The same thing happened when torture was used by the Bush administration and once again moral relativists decided that an evil could be promoted to bring a greater good. Way to few Catholics who were Republicans spoke against this outrage and mostly when on to advance the same moral relativistic arguments the pro-abortion types advanced.

This confusion between the Catholic faith and the sphere of political parties is a common one and something we must always be aware of. At one time I would have been politically described as a man of the left and now as a man of the right. It is a constant temptation for me to make the error I mentioned and I have to evaluate myself as to whether something I believe is a result of my Catholic faith or a sympathy towards a political party. I do not want to personally make the mistake the Catholic Democrats made when it came to abortion. I might have easily done this in regards to torture when looking for wiggle room in the magisterial documents and finding no such wiggle room. I only pray to continually be intellectually honest enough to not make this mistake in the future. Though it is also seems to me a temptation to say “A pox on both of their houses” since political parties can be useful to advance the common good, just never forget to do what you can on a personal level to do the same.

Now back to the topic of this wordy rant. I certainly think the name “Catholic Tea Party” is a bad idea. I think though the aim of it is mostly correct. The Church is always in need of reform because each of it’s members are always in need of reform. Renewal is always needed, with the caveat that G.K. Chesterton suggested “The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.” I certainly think a general movement of Catholics who are orthodox in their faith is needed and much good can be done by those Catholics who reform themselves and seek to fully know their faith so that true reform can be achieved.

Now if someone had asked this lowly couch critic the name for such a movement I would have offered one much better than the “Catholic Tea Party”, I would suggest the “Catholic Trent Party.” The Council of Trent was a large leap in the right direction of necessary reform after the Protestant revolt. They made necessary clarification in response to the errors of the day and built upon the constant teaching of the Church to clarify and to achieve this. This reform included such saints as Ignatius of Loyola , Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Francis de Sales. Politicization of the Catholic Church did not achieve this reform, but saints and those living their faith.