Posted on 09/08/2004 7:32:59 PM PDT by sinkspur
NEW YORK -- The combined vote of "faithful Catholics" and "swing Catholics" will decide which presidential candidate wins a majority of the nation's 25 million Catholic voters. And perhaps the election.
That's the view of attorney Leonard Leo, the new head of "Catholic Outreach" at the Republican National Committee. Leo succeeds Crisis magazine publisher Deal Hudson, who resigned the post Aug. 18 after acknowledging having had a sexual relationship with an undergraduate student while he was teaching at Fordham University (NCR, Aug. 27).
"There are two key elements to the Catholic vote," Leo told NCR. "There are 'faithful Catholics,' by which I mean Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week and who believe in the magisterium of the church and the fundamental doctrines of the church."
The second group, Leo continued, are "swing Catholics," who may be less devout but remain sympathetic to church teaching on a range of social issues.
"Swing Catholics and faithful Catholics are often in accord on a number of the 'culture of life' issues," said Leo, "and I suspect that it is this combination of voters which will be pivotal in deciding who controls the Catholic vote in this election." He continued, "For example they are united on the issue of whether it is a good idea to have liberal federal judges who use the law as a means of rejecting traditional values."
Leo spoke from the third floor lobby of Park Avenue's Waldorf Astoria, where, inside the adjoining ballroom, hundreds of delegates and Bush enthusiasts were hearing from former Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed and Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback. Judicial nominations are something Leo, a Cornell law school graduate and Arlington, Va., diocese parishioner knows something about. As executive vice president of the conservative Federalist Society, the 39-year-old attorney has played a key role in promoting and defending conservative federal judicial nominees against opposition from liberal interest groups and Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
His first goal as coordinator (Leo eschewed a formal title when he took the post) of the Republican National Committee's Catholic Outreach "is to inspire and motivate Catholics to be an important part of the political process," said Leo, a member of the Knights of Malta. "It's their obligation and their vocation in many respects."
But with less than two months until Election Day, there are some more immediate concerns. "It is important to communicate to Catholic voters where this president has been on issues of interest and concern to Catholics -- issues involving the 'culture of life' for example."
"I think it's important that we inspire and motivate Catholics to go out and support our president, who has been a very faithful advocate for nonnegotiable issues in the church [such as] abortion, marriage, cloning, and other culture of life issues like that."
Leo favors an aggressive approach to Catholics, thinks Democratic nominee John Kerry will not necessarily have an advantage among his coreligionists, and supports involvement by churches and pastors in the political process.
"If it took place I would have no problem with it," he said of Republican National Committee efforts to gather parish directories and membership lists in order to target Catholic voters. "We reach out to all sorts of people in different ways. I see no problem with any groups reaching out to Catholics and trying to urge them to be an active part of the political process."
On Kerry's Catholicism. "There was a time when the fact that [a candidate] was a Catholic meant something to a voter and may have driven them to vote for that candidate. My sense is that voters today are more sophisticated -- they look behind the label. In the case of Sen. Kerry, I think Catholic voters will look not simply to the label, but to whether he has embraced the fundamental truths of the Roman Catholic church as a public leader. Many Catholics will conclude that he is not a candidate who is embracing the Catholic perspective on those issues and they will vote against him."
"Priests have wide latitude in discussing issues that are of importance in an election. I think there's nothing wrong with priests counseling their parishioners [about] certain nonnegotiable issues in the church and that as faithful Catholics they need to consider those issues when selecting candidates." Leo, along with Wall Street Journal Web editor James Taranto, is coeditor of a recently released book, Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and Worst in the White House. Contributing essays to the book are such conservative luminaries as Robert Bork, Kenneth Starr, Peggy Noonan, John McCain, and Paul Johnson.
Bump.
There is a third type of Catholic, at least here in the Bay Area, who I call "social Justice Catholics" and they are the ones who don't want to hurt anyone's feeling. I've met a lot of these. For example, they think that the Iraq war is an "unjust war" and that we shouldn't ever say anything against homosexuals, regardless of what the church and bible say, because their feeling might be hurt. I've even met a couple who think that we should let them marry because that would be "fair" and they don't see that it would do any harm. They love the verse "let he who has no sin throw the first stone" and use it to rationalize why they won't call most behavior sinful. In my experience, they are likely to vote for Kerry
Dear sinkspur,
Still posting from the National Crack Reporter?
sitetest
Yep. And I will continue to post from it where it makes sense.
Dear sinkspur,
How can ignoring the trashing of the Eighth Commandment make sense?
These people are dissemblers, prevaricators, detractors, and worse.
sitetest
They're not confined to the Bay Area. They're all over the place. But their ranks are aging and their numbers are diminishing. Just look at the Catholic religious orders. Apart from the neo-traditionalists, they are disappearing. Similarly, leftish Catholic groups (Pax Christi comes to mind) consist almost entirely of old people, while the religiously-inclined younger set flock to groups more spiritual in nature and more loyal to Church teachings.
To a large extent, the social-justice Catholics brought this on themselves. For example, they have wasted their talents and resources to publish a newspaper (NCR) which does everything possible to undermine Church teachings and ridicule Church practices. Catholics who take its message seriously just opt out of the Church altogether. Those Catholics who remain faithful have either missed the incessant anti-Church propaganda the liberals put out or else prayerfully rejected it.
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