Actually, Romney won more Catholic votes in NY than Obama.
If anything, Dolan is responsible for Romney doing so well. Dolan has been a stauch prolifer.
Romney lost Catholics thanks to the flood of illegal aliens.
White Catholics voted for him, the Latinos voted for Obama.
I do not agree.
I do not want Bishops in the pulpit railing against (or for) political leaders. The Church has survived 2000 years by understanding the fact that tyrants, dictators, kings and Presidents all come and go.
Americans and Catholics should be smart enough to put 2+2 together when their Magisterium clearly says: “abortion is intrinsically evil, do not vote for those who promote abortion.”
I don’t know about you, but I heard this and the call for “religious liberty” loud and clear for several months prior to the election.
If the individual refuses to see and hear and think, then the stain is on their own soul.
We saw the same thing here in Pittsburgh. After much huffing and puffing shortly after the mandate was announced, very little if any talk at election time.
My theory is that Obama’s union hack buddies got together and (very quietly) informed the Bishops that they’d be organizing a collection basket boycott if the Church opposed Obama.
Such a boycott would be highly effective in New York and these other rust belt cities. Can’t prove it but it sure smells that way to me. They sure shied away from the confrontation six days from Sunday.
Whenever any matter of high religious principle is at stake....follow the money.
Probably because Dolan didn’t see much difference between the two with regard to abortion and gay marriage. I always felt that even if Romney got our vote, he’d turn around and sabotage us to please the left once he got elected.
That said, there are many in the usccb who should have been retired decades ago. They represent the leftist old guard, and they kept the bishops’ collective message from being stronger. Also, a lot of the ledger clergy (lefties) opposed their bishops. Mine did; they didn’t evenread his very good letter.
But blaming Dolan is idiotic.
Folks——among Catholics who go to church on a regular basis and who are not hispanic——they voted OVERWHELMINGLY for McCain in 2008 and even bigger for Romney in 2012.
The practicing Catholic vote (ex-Hispanics) in this country is almost as reliably GOP as the evangelical Christian voters and Mormons.
I think the Bishops as a whole could have done a lot more. But some of them were terrific, and Dolan was excellent, I think. He agreed to give the closing prayer at the DNC, but then he embarrassed the hell out of them with a pro-life prayer.
And if you watch Mitt Romney’s speech at the Al Smith Dinner, it was terrific. The best speech he gave in his whole five-year campaign. If he had done that well in the debates, he probably would have won despite the voter fraud.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Cw-UdQNtw
I would agree that the Church could have done more. But it was not Cardinal Dolan’s fault.
66% of non-Hispanic white, church-going Catholics voted for Romney. While that is considerably lower than the 78% of white, church-going evangelicals who voted for Romney, it’s pretty down-right amazing considering that the Democrats were the champions of all the labor-reform laws that transformed the lives of Catholics to being industrial slaves.
One lifetime ago, Catholics were 80% Democrat. And today, most Catholics live in areas which are overwhelmingly left-wing-dominated. White, churched Catholics vote 40%+ more Republican than unchurched people of Catholic descent. That’s the effect of the Catholic faith.
One thing skewing the Catholic poll numbers is the humungous influx of illegal aliens, who are almost never churched. They are largely economic refugees from recently Communist Mexico, where U.S.-backed murderers slayed tens of thousands of priests, nuns and catechists in an explicitly anti-Catholic rebellion, and suppressed teaching of the Catholic faith for 90 years. And that is why the six English masses at local-area Catholic parishes overflow, while the one spanish mass per parish is usually half empty, despite Hispanics outnumbering non-Hispanic Catholics 3:1.