Posted on 10/20/2004 12:25:57 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The presidential race is full of religious ironies, pitting a Protestant who quotes the Pope against a Catholic who rejects the Pope. The Protestant -- campaigning on opposition to abortion and homosexual marriage -- will likely get the Catholic vote. The Catholic -- campaigning on embryo-destruction, partial-birth abortion, and the alternative lifestyles of pagan antiquity -- will get the mainline Protestant vote.
In one more irony and historical marker of clerical decadence, the Catholic candidate will receive a higher percentage of support from the Catholic episcopate than the Catholic laity -- the very episcopate Kerry has made a point of saying that he will ignore on matters of morality. John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter writes that "if the Holy See were to vote in a secret ballot for the American president, Kerry would beat Bush 60-40." Polling of American bishops would even be higher. Priests like Richard McBrien have appeared in clerical collar on national television to justify voting for Kerry. The dean of Notre Dame, which the bishops regard as their Harvard, recently published a piece saturated with third-rate casuistry urging Catholics to vote for pro-abortion Democrats.
Incapable of transcending long-elapsed stereotypes, the secular media cast Kerry's Catholic problem as a conflict with a reactionary hierarchy. Would that it were so. A few bishops oppose Kerry, but many more privately support him and have whispered against the handful of brave bishops who threatened to withhold communion from him.
Kerry's Catholic problem started not with the clergy but with the laity. The Roger Mahonys of the hierarchy are Democratic activists and dilettantes, not guardians of the ancient faith. (For more on Cardinal Mahony, click here.) They have no problem supporting an open heretic like Kerry, because their faith in Catholicism is as ambivalent as his. Kerry is their idea of a good Vatican II Catholic -- liberal on economics, avant garde on morality. Indeed, a loss for Kerry represents a loss for them. He embodies the liberal catechesis they have tried to drill into the laity for decades. If a majority of the Catholic laity vote against Kerry, it will be one more rude confirmation to Roger Mahony and company that their post-Vatican II project to liberalize the laity has flopped.
''We are looking at a broader picture, a more global picture,'' said Bishop Gabino Zavala, one of Mahony’s auxiliary bishops, to the New York Times. ''If you look at the totality of issues as a matter of conscience, someone could come to the decision to vote for either candidate.'' For the Democratic bishops, infanticide and minimum wage are weighted the same. Kerry knew early on that most of these bishops wouldn’t confront him, given their passivity and weakness for Democratic politicians who make the right social-justice noises from time to time. Kerry’s allies in the Democratic Party scrambled to produce a "Catholic Voting Scorecard" to show that he and other pro-abortion Catholics have adhered more closely to the positions of the "U.S. Catholic hierarchy" than to their Catholic Republican counterparts. By highlighting Kerry’s support for the liberal politics of the bishops -- on the Senate floor, he once read from their inane pastoral letter on Reaganomics -- the Democrats had hoped to cancel out the perception that Kerry was a heretic no self-respecting Catholic could vote for.
Kerry's plans to hide his heresies under Roger Mahony's Seamless Garment were blown out the water by the lay Catholic equivalent of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Numerous lay Catholic groups have exposed Kerry's Catholicism as a fraud and have coaxed out of timid bishops a few words of rebuke toward Kerry.
Not that the bishops aren't still constructing rationalizations for Kerry even after a debate before millions in which he misrepresented Catholicism wildly, managing to reject at least a third of the Ten Commandments. On Tuesday The Drudge Report had one of those blood-red headlines titled, "Vatican Denies It Responded To Lawyer Seeking Kerry’s Excommunication." This was a life raft the bishops were trying to throw the Kerry campaign. The story came from the Catholic News Service, the propaganda outlet the bishops use whenever they want to muddy an issue to the benefit of a pro-abortion Catholic.
Kerry has rejected Catholic teachings Martin Luther didn’t touch, yet CNS was frantic to dispel the notion that he is a heretic. "One Vatican official contacted by CNS said no church official had seriously approached the point of declaring Kerry a heretic. 'No, Kerry is not a heretic,' he said."
The National Catholic Reporter, which also speaks for many bishops (they advertise in its pages for chancery jobs) even as it wars on Catholic orthodoxy , is advising Kerry "to talk religion." It denounced the "small and narrow" group of Catholic laity opposing him and noted that many bishops support Kerry. But if Kerry takes its advice and campaigns on heretical Catholicism, where can he go without getting booed? Perhaps Roger Mahony, who encouraged his congregation to give Bill and Hillary Clinton a standing ovation on Palm Sunday during Clinton's race against Bob Dole, could arrange a town hall meeting at the Los Angeles Cathedral. But then Kerry had that vote sewn up a long time ago.
George Neumayr Ping
WOW! Excellent article. Nailed it. Thank you, my friend.
Actually he will find that many "mainline Protestants" are like President Bush and reject their national church heirarchy on issues like abortion and same sex marriage. Since they do not hear their ministers speak of these things, they may not know where their church "stands" on the issues. Who knows which national heirarchy dictates to their church? Who knows how long their church will remain affiliated before breaking from the antiChristian hierarchy that perverts religious tradition by celebrating the cities of Sodom and Gomorah and calling abortion a "God given right".
Catholics are all clear on what the Pope/Catholic Church's stance is.
Harder for Catholic priests and bishops to defend voting for Kerry if he is excommunicated.
Rumors are swirling and reportedly the Vatican won't deny them out right.
Don't expect to hear anything directly from Karol Wojtyla. His scarlet lackeys will do the 'it ain't so' dance to cover themselves with the socialist marxist membership and unholy priestly orders of the New Church. His much publicized denunciation of seminary enrollment controlled by the 'third sex' hasn't changed a thing either. Why? Because heretical bishops are still running the seminaries.
So much the better for the faithful who have turned to the SSPX for spiritual guidance. Holy priests are in demand to meet the growth of those faithful who refuse to deny the Sacred Dogma and Traditions of The One True Faith.
Our Lady of La Salette, pray for us.
Saint Pius X, pray for us.
Saint Padre Pio pray for us.
I think by "mainline Protestants" here, he is using a shorthand for the WCC and those churches whose spokespersons support it, not those many members and individual churches who want out.
In one of his books, Chesterton has a chapter on the times in Church history that the episcopate has been utterly corrupt and renewal surged up from the laity. This would seem to fit that pattern.
There has been a bit of a kerfuffle lately on whether Kerry has been excommunicated. For those who are not au courant, last spring a CA canon lawyer, Marc Balestrieri, filed a Complaint for Heresy against Kerry with the Boston Tribunal. I gather that for a layman to file such a thing was almost unheard of. Should the Boston Tribunal reject it, there remains the option of appealing to Rome.
The Boston Tribunal has taken no action, but has put the Complaint in the hands of the Archbishop. Balestrieri (possibly to keep the pot boiling) went to Rome in an attempt to get an answer to the question of whether politicians who vote for abortion should be excommunicated. He did get a response from a Vatican Congregation to the effect that they have excommunicated themselves. Kerry's name was never mentioned in this exchange, and there are those in Rome who are denying the whole thing.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Boston Archdiocese has said that it has "thousands upon thousands" of such Complaints to go through. This sounded highly unlikely to me, but on Balestrieri's website, De Fide, I thought I saw a message to his supporters a few days ago not to do anything else except on his instruction. I can't find it there today, but there are instructions for joining the suit: Join the Class-Action Lawsuit. Connection with the "thousands upon thousands"?
Balestrieri has been fired from his post as a canon lawyer with the Los Angeles (Mahony) archdiocese.
Excellent article. And it gives me yet another reason to vote for Bush.
John Allen is an apostate and a Marxist.
What he doesn't know about the Holy See would strain the capacity of the Library of Congress.
More proof that the road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.
"Catholics are all clear on what the Pope/Catholic Church's stance is."
I know what the 2000 years of Church teachings say, but the Holy Father...hasn't exactly been busting heads to get these heretics off our backs, has he?
I hope he's doing the right thing.
Sign of the times! Nothing new under the sun.
Even the suspect internals of the latest ABC poll show that Catholics are voting Bush 50/47. I say suspect because most other polls show anywhere from a 13 to 19 point spread.
In May Pew said 46/43 Kerry. In Sept it was 49/39 Bush.
In Oct is it 49/33 Bush.
There is no "Faith and Morals" issue here. The bishops can express their opinions and their's are as valid as ours.
Our's at catholicsagainstkerry.com is that John Kerry is the clearest danger to American Catholic values since the
"Know Nothings"
Come to our site. Help us push our final "hits" up to 100,000.
catholicsagainstkerry.com is fighting this fight for all of us. Help us now.
This makes me so sad, but increasingly, anger and disgust are winning out.
Ping!
Disgusting.
Note that Allen said the 60-40 split involved all officials, including the curia bureaucrats. He added that if the vote were just among the bishops and Cardinals, the vote would probably flip 60-40 the other way for Bush.
I give Balestrieri an A+ for strategery. A media campaign is the only way to move this forward.
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