Feel free to disagree with the polls all you want, but don't presume conservative Catholics make up anything remotely close to a majority of professing Catholics in the world today - and don't assume that your Pope agrees with your politics.
...let me once again share the four-pronged typology that a veteran priest here in Washington, D.C., gave me a few years ago. There are, he said, four kinds of Catholics in this country and, thus, four “Catholic votes” on almost any issue. Any news report that lumps these groups together isn’t worth very much.Related threads:* Ex-Catholics. Solid for the Democrats. Cultural conservatives have no chance.
* Cultural Catholics who may go to church a few times a year. This may be one of those all-important “undecided voters” depending on what’s happening with the economy, foreign policy, etc. Leans to Democrats.
* Sunday-morning American Catholics. This voter is a regular in the pew and may even play some leadership role in the parish. This is the Catholic voter that is really up for grabs, the true swing voter that the candidates are after.
* The “sweats the details” Roman Catholic who goes to confession. Is active in the full sacramental life of the parish and almost always backs the Vatican, when it comes to matters of faith and practice. This is a very small slice of the American Catholic pie.
Any one here want to agree with such an outlandish statement?
I know many (not all) Freepers are trying to purge anyone here who doesn't worship Sarah Palin, but it would be news to me if most Freepers agree with the statement that there aren't ANY conservative Catholics. Actually it would be news to a lot of people in my home state of Louisiana.
I put up with enough anti-Catholic bigotry from the likes of Maureen Dowd. If conservatives want to be the angry, white Southern Protestant party, it's going to be a minority party for a long, long time to come.
This may change in the next couple years. The reason being the economy. When our economy was strong it was a magnet attracting large numbers of immigrants from the south (legal & illegal). Now that the economy is in bad shape and bleeding jobs (unemployment 10.2 - 17.8% depending on which stat you use) a large number of these immigrants are going back. As the numbers shrink the % of native born RC's will increase. I think the conservatives in this church are found in this pool.