There has been much buzz in the last week concerning a teenager who reportedly was denied Confirmation due to his Facebook page supporting same-sex marriage. Like most sensationalized media stories I smelled a rat and held off posting about it without further information.  I even saw a headline on a tech site about it and the headline mistakenly stated Communion instead of Confirmation. Well now the priest involved has spoken to LifeSite News:

… Fr. LaMoine, the pastor of Assumption Parish in Barnesville, told LifeSiteNews.com that there were other concerns that contributed to the decision to delay Lennon’s Confirmation, and that the final decision was made by Lennon himself, not the priest.

According to Catholic teaching, Confirmation is a sacrament of initiation that confirms Catholics as “mature” Christians. It is usually administered to young teens.

Fr. LaMoine said that his conversations with the Cihak family began in early October, when he sent a letter to Lennon’s parents, Doug and Shana, encouraging them to start coming to church to support their son.
The priest told LifeSiteNews.com that he only discovered Lennon’s gay marriage post by accident on October 25, the day after having a two-hour meeting with the family. During that meeting the priest had brought up the fact that the Cihaks were not coming to church, as well as “other matters” that the priest said, “I can’t get into here.” No mention was made of Lennon’s views on marriage during that meeting.

The following day Fr. LaMoine’s secretary, who is Facebook friends with Lennon, chanced upon the controversial post and alerted the priest to it.

The priest says that he then telephoned Lennon, and in the course of that conversation the boy said he had chosen not to go forward with Confirmation.

Lennon’s post came days before Minnesotans were slated to go to the polls to vote on an amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman. It showed him holding a pro-marriage sign that he had defaced to express his support for “equal marriage rights.”

The priest admits, however, that once he knew that Lennon supported same-sex marriage, and was unwilling to retract his views, that he would not have been able to confirm him.

“You can’t have people out there saying things that are so contrary to the central teaching and doctrine of the Catholic faith, and going through Confirmation,” he said. “After he put it out in the public, we would have looked like a bunch of hypocrites in confirming him.”

As usual Father James Martin S.J. who is always willing to jump in on any story involving same-sex marriage or same-sex acts before all the facts are in said:

Deeply disturbing. Denying confirmation to a teenager because of a Facebook post on same-sex marriage is shortsighted. To have the family feel unwelcome in the parish is worse. To have the mother feel permanently estranged from the church is even worse. How many teenagers are denied confirmation because they are spiteful or do not forgive?

Typical moral equivalence.  I wonder if Fr. Martin was a parish priest exactly how much denial of the Catholic faith would be acceptable before he could not confirm someone?

I know at one time for those being confirmed they were trained and then later asked questions before being confirmed.  If a bishop or priest thought they were not yet prepared the confirmation would be delayed.  Like many things in the Church today people’s experience with this will probably widely vary by location.

Though I would like to look at one of Fr. LaMoine replies regarding looking like a bunch of hypocrites if he was Confirmed.  I think the main concern should be with the young man.  If he had wanted to go ahead with Confirmation he would have been affirming what he didn’t believe in the Baptismal promises regarding the “holy Catholic Church.” Pastorally this is quite a difficult problem since same-sex marriage support among the young is fairly high and no doubt there are many receiving Confirmation who have an inadequate understanding of what the Church teaches which is in contradiction to the messages they are being bombarded with.  Mostly we need to pray for this young man.

The news media once again is trying to apply the Communion wars narrative down to a Confirmation war narrative.  Any stick will do.  That this story went forward without anyone speaking to the parish priest says a lot about the media.  Another of the media memes I have been reading more an more lately was “Jesus didn’t deny Judas the Eucharist.” We should always accept theological opinions from the media that mostly denies both Jesus and the Eucharist – well maybe not.  There is certainly some questions as to whether Judas did indeed receive the Eucharist.  Regardless the distinction between a private sin and a public sin is more at the root of the matter regarding Canon law. Canonist Ed Peters looks at Confirmation and advocacy of ‘gay marriage’ regarding proper disposition.

The picture of the young man with a defaced yard sign that supported traditional marriage has also been all over the media. I do wonder how a photo on his Facebook page got released to the public and whether this was done with his permission?

One of the things that can be quite maddening after an election is the stories about the Catholic vote and how it is used to show approval of a pro-abortion politician.  Specifically in the case of President Obama.  In 2008 this pro-abortion politician  “Catholic vote” contingent was 54% and this time it is “51%”.

To which faithful Catholics always want a breakout of a least weekly Mass going Catholics.  In 2008 this statistic turned out to be 43%, better but not exactly a figure to want to should from the rooftops. It is easy to want to blame the media and pollsters for not being more specific as to what constitutes a Catholic voter.

For example I was raised in a liberal family in a very blue state and identified myself as liberal, though I have left my liberal faith.  If they used the same metric they  used for Catholics concerning me I would be part of the “Liberal vote.”

Maybe that isn’t the perfect parallel since if a pollster asked me if I was liberal I would not confirm it in the context of the modern sense of the word.  Apparently Catholics who have stopped practicing their faith do self-identify as Catholic. Somehow I don’t think they are making the ontological distinction of having been baptized into the faith.  Being Catholic becomes more like a group identity, a cultural backdrop, something you disagree with but maintain some tenuous connection.

Really though can we expect pollsters to make distinctions between Catholics who attend Mass weekly or not?  Somebody might be a faithful Protestant and whether or not they attend services weekly might have little bearing on that.  So expecting pollsters to make distinctions like this is asking too much.

Besides as many have noted their is no monolithic Catholic vote.   The party they are affiliated with is usually going to tell you much more than what church they are affiliated with. Mostly instead of the yeast permeating the leaven the leaven is permeating the yeast.

Maybe the positive news is that people are still willing to identify themselves as Catholics at all even if they currently have little connection with the faith. Considering the long lent of the priestly sexual abuse scandal and the relentlessly negative assault on the Church by the media this is a bit of a silver lining.  Sucessful programs like “Catholics Come Home” certainly remind us that we should not be dismissive of this group of Catholics as being seen just as something annoying that messes up polling statistics. We can laugh about “Christmas & Easter” Catholics and the other labels we have seen, but evangelizing them is certainly harder than the quick joke.

After election analysis can be interesting, but when it comes from the same people who got the pre-election analysis wrong it should be taken with many grains of salt. After election reactions can also be rather elitist.  I know it is easy to want to disparage those who voted against a supported candidate in a “How dare you” tone.  Political junkies kind of expect everybody else to be political junkies.

Still I was trying to understand the dynamics of this election and was not really finding a key to understanding it.  I was listening to Al Kresta and he said something that kind of provided that key of understanding to me.  That President Obama has become a cultural icon and the election turned more on this than an endorsement of his politics.  There are several seemingly incongruent facts that then make more sense when seen in this light. Being a cultural icon and a pop culture president you become more immune from nasty facts such as the state of the economy.  Scandals that might have overturned one president can be endured with this status.  We heard again and again how his election in 2008 was a “historic event” as if all historical events are not historical events.  The fact that as a leader he was rather dangerously inept did not matter as much considering he was such a part of the culture visiting cable and TV shows, appearing on a radio show with the “Pimp with the Limp”, opining about personal conflicts on American Idol, schmoozing with the Hollywood elite and others from the entertainment industry.

President Clinton was a bit of a pop culture President appearing on Arsenio Hall’s show and  other cultural interactions. But President Obama has been the master of this and transcending the act to a whole new level.  He was most comfortable and engaged with the pop culture.  Really having to do his job as President always seemed like a nuisance to him. People call the Affordable Care Act Obamacare, but he was not the driving force behind it.  It was Rep. Nancy Pelosi who did the heavy lifting and getting the Democrats in line to vote for it. Sure the President helped out concerning a couple of wrinkles at the end like writing a worthless executive order to soothe the conscience of Bart Stupak. Actually meeting with legislators to hammer out a budget was just too much work.  He created a jobs council and then didn’t meet with it. If he spent as much time thinking about the economy as he did working out the NCAA brackets it might have been interesting.  If we ever needing an Ambassador to Hollywood surely he is the person to fill that job.

As a cultural icon he seemed to see his job as being cool and relating to young people and he mostly achieved that. Sure that is an overly broad generalization, but I think there is some truth in it.  Pop culture icons can be forgiven much and don’t have to be tied to promises and a record with little to brag about.  When the Nobel Prize committee gave him the Nobel Peace Prize at the very start of his administration they contributed to the cultural iconification where the idea of him was more important than the facts of him.  This election fundamentally has not been much different where the idea of him still triumphs.  Sure there is not an insignificant number of people who are with him all the way politically, but that he not what earned him another four years.  It seems many people still went out to vote for him mainly to feel good about themselves than to feel good about the direction of the country as some exit polling seemed to show.

What I think this means for the future is not that social conservatism and conservative ideas are dead on arrival as far as the culture is concerned.  The confluence of events that created the pop culture president is not going to be the defining truth for elections to come. This was more personality than politically driven.  The answer certainly is not for conservatives to try to imitate the pop culture aspect of his success – they never will, but they certainly have a long way to go to engage the youth and others.  In some ways President Reagan also became a pop culture phenomenon on his own terms with his extolling of conservative ideas along with a sense of humor broke through to a generation that other conservatives would have written off.  Romney was not effective engaging the new media and didn’t even spend money on ads at, for example, Hulu.  President Obama has been all over the old and new media including sites such as Reddit.  Certainly there are the younger generation of conservatives that are using the new media and maybe the next candidate will learn a thing or two from them.