Posted on 11/20/2012 11:31:17 AM PST by jmaroneps37
The election of New Yorks Cardinal Timothy Dolan, bishop of the Archdiocese of New York, to lead the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was seen as a very hopeful sign by many who are concerned with the state the Catholic Church in America.
I was one of those hopeful Catholics, but alas I have had my nose rubbed in reality: Cardinal Dolan has proved to be little more than an affable dupe at best ; a dangerously misguided classic liberal at worst.
During the lead up to the presidential election Cardinal Dolan essentially abandoned the effort to bring the truth to the 30 million adherent Catholics who regularly hear Mass.
While one post- election survey found adherent Catholics had voted for Mitt Romney by wide margin Romneys total did not break 60% and that short fall can be directly placed at the feet of Cardinal Dolan for his failure to stand up for Catholic teachings. In his home diocese of New York City we heard NOT A WORD about the election.
Our parish of nearly 1000 people was supplied with a convoluted poorly written unreadable and barely more than apologetic pamphlet on why Catholics cannot vote for those who support abortion. No names were mentioned of course.
Since the election we have been asked to donate to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) which has a long strong history of connection to ACORN as well as abortion and Gay marriage supporting organizations.
Cardinal Dolan did not have the sense of awareness to at least cancel this collection in Staten Island which was devastated by super storm Sandy.
More than this, there was no clear explanation of what CCHD is really about which provides grounds for cynicism and emotional disengagement from the Church
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(Excerpt) Read more at coachisright.com ...
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.
That’s true-—factor out hispanics and nonpracticing Catholics-—Romney won the Catholic vote by a huge margin.
To just say Catholic vote means nothing. Do “Catholics” who were born into the faith but rarely or never practice it count as part of the Catholic vote?
And Hispanics now make up one third of all Catholics in the US, practicing and nonpracticing Catholic Hispanics vote very differently than white voters.
Ignore the blog pimp. A couple of weeks ago he was spitting mad, claiming that "the vast majority of Evangelicals stayed home on Election Day", assigning them blame for Obama's re-election because "they made a conscious decision to allow our Marxist enemy to continue ruining our lives rather than have Mormon Mitt Romney as our president....Evangelicals hatred of Romney burns so brightly it blinded them".
This same bloviator, on his profile page claims credit for "changing the course of the Pataki Coumo race in 1994 and helping to beat Kerry with Catholics Against Kerry in 2004." My guess is that he's mad at himself for failing to single-handedly get Romney elected in 2012, and he's going to blame everyone but himself for Romney's loss, to dilute the feelings of self-guilt.
I don’t get why some people want the Catholic Church to become an arm of the Republican Party.
I agree that the Church needs to do some sorely needing housekeeping, enforce orthodoxy and purge elements that are in defiance to its teachings.
However, it shouldn’t neglect its duties to Christ because the RNC is incompetent and can’t win elections on its own.
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.
They've been pushing for Federal welfare for a long time. I see no indication that Dolan believes anything else.
Its duties to Christ may involve telling people not to put tyrants into power.
But when they back so-called "social justice" politics, the Bishops support oppression.
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.
Ledger was supposed to be older...my iPad autocorrect does strange things...
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.
And most laity I know that buy into the “social justice” garbage are the types that never go to mass and pick and choose from the social teachings and dogma anyway.
Dolan’s been a very strong voice of resistance against this Administration and is one of the reasons someone like me was hired by the Church.
The Church is not going to go 180 degrees in a single day. It will take time. Things are improving.
I've heard that voice on the abortion issue but not much else.
As far as I can tell, the Bishops (led by Dolan) are still very much in the tank for "social justice" aka "tyranny".
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.
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