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The Democrats' fatal attraction
Aug. 31st, 2008 01:03 pmThere is one obsession at the top levels of the Democratic Party which has done them immense damage and which they should ditch - if people could be rational about obsessions - as fast as they can: namely, the obsession with Catholicism. Thinly disguised as a concern for "the Catholic vote", it amounts in fact to a sterile and futile desire, individual in nature but collective in perormance, to think themselves somehow Catholic when they deny the basics of Catholic philosophical anthropology and sacramental theology every day of their working lives.
Of course, the Democrats' roots are not only in the old Catholic electorate: they are also in the old South, and where that is concerned, probably more in the Southern Baptist Convention than in any other denomination. However, when Democrats of Baptist origin - beginning with two ex-Presidents, Carter and Clinton - reached the conclusion that there was not enough common ground between them and the Southern Baptist body, they did not consume themselves in futile attempts to prove that they were just as Southern Baptist as any Southern Baptist; instead, they started their own Baptist body.
Compared to this, there is something terribly pathetic about the position of the Democrat (ex-)Catholics. The unanimous insistence of the Kerrys and the Kennedys, the Bidens and the Pelosis, that they really are Catholic, cannot be called rational. The first thing a rational politician learns - and these are all old political foxes with decades of experience in their pockets - is not to pick a fight they cannot win; but the obsession with the Church leads Nancy Pelosi to launch herself into incompetent attempts at theology that rouse irritation among the Bishops and mirth and contempt among educated Catholics. It leads John Kerry to give scandal by taking Communion in public after the Vatican has as good as publicly warned him not to do so. It leads the lot of them to behaviour that is wholly suicidal; that has most recently led Pelosi to be unanimously condemned by dozens of Bishops, not one voice dissenting - and take it from me, it takes a lot to make a bishop as worldly and peace-minded as Archbishop Wuerl of Washington DC come out with an outright condemnation of a political leader.
I have a suspicion that the moment which lost Kerry the 2004 election was his public Eucharist. Catholic electors know that their representatives cannot all be Catholic; and many of them will choose a candidate, not on the basis of approval, but on the basis of least-worst. But when a man who is dancing on the edge of excommunication, virtually at war with Rome, takes the Body and Blood of Our Lord in public, with cameras clicking and film rolling, purely (as it seems) for political reasons, then that is more than flesh and blood can stand. And as history has a way of repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, of course Speaker Pelosi had to tread the same road of denial and posturing, but in the tone not of tragedy but of farce, not committing a public sacrilege, but trying to pretend that she understands anything about theology.
Politically, it would be infinitely better if these people, like Carter and Clinton, set up their own denomination, or else went Episcopalian. They could even get more Catholic votes than they get now. Their self-identification with a group that denies much of what they stand for is, quite simply, bad politics. However, I think one can argue from their language - in nearly every case focused on memories of family and childhood, Sunday Masses and altar boy practice, on all the lost paradise of infancy - that theirs is not a rational position. At the height of political power and prestige in the greatest military power in the world, they still cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that they have walked out of the Church in which they spent their childhood.
Of course, the Democrats' roots are not only in the old Catholic electorate: they are also in the old South, and where that is concerned, probably more in the Southern Baptist Convention than in any other denomination. However, when Democrats of Baptist origin - beginning with two ex-Presidents, Carter and Clinton - reached the conclusion that there was not enough common ground between them and the Southern Baptist body, they did not consume themselves in futile attempts to prove that they were just as Southern Baptist as any Southern Baptist; instead, they started their own Baptist body.
Compared to this, there is something terribly pathetic about the position of the Democrat (ex-)Catholics. The unanimous insistence of the Kerrys and the Kennedys, the Bidens and the Pelosis, that they really are Catholic, cannot be called rational. The first thing a rational politician learns - and these are all old political foxes with decades of experience in their pockets - is not to pick a fight they cannot win; but the obsession with the Church leads Nancy Pelosi to launch herself into incompetent attempts at theology that rouse irritation among the Bishops and mirth and contempt among educated Catholics. It leads John Kerry to give scandal by taking Communion in public after the Vatican has as good as publicly warned him not to do so. It leads the lot of them to behaviour that is wholly suicidal; that has most recently led Pelosi to be unanimously condemned by dozens of Bishops, not one voice dissenting - and take it from me, it takes a lot to make a bishop as worldly and peace-minded as Archbishop Wuerl of Washington DC come out with an outright condemnation of a political leader.
I have a suspicion that the moment which lost Kerry the 2004 election was his public Eucharist. Catholic electors know that their representatives cannot all be Catholic; and many of them will choose a candidate, not on the basis of approval, but on the basis of least-worst. But when a man who is dancing on the edge of excommunication, virtually at war with Rome, takes the Body and Blood of Our Lord in public, with cameras clicking and film rolling, purely (as it seems) for political reasons, then that is more than flesh and blood can stand. And as history has a way of repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, of course Speaker Pelosi had to tread the same road of denial and posturing, but in the tone not of tragedy but of farce, not committing a public sacrilege, but trying to pretend that she understands anything about theology.
Politically, it would be infinitely better if these people, like Carter and Clinton, set up their own denomination, or else went Episcopalian. They could even get more Catholic votes than they get now. Their self-identification with a group that denies much of what they stand for is, quite simply, bad politics. However, I think one can argue from their language - in nearly every case focused on memories of family and childhood, Sunday Masses and altar boy practice, on all the lost paradise of infancy - that theirs is not a rational position. At the height of political power and prestige in the greatest military power in the world, they still cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that they have walked out of the Church in which they spent their childhood.
