Posted on 05/01/2013 6:54:27 AM PDT by marshmallow
Reading Sherry Weddell’s excellent Forming Intentional Disciples is making me think about the American church and what ails her. Can anybody deny that there is a sickness in the body ecclesia? When 50% of Catholics vote for a man who stoutly defends same sex marriage and partial birth abortion can we say that Catholics in America are okay?
I don’t think so.
Thus a series of posts on what’s killing Catholicism. All the words begin with the letter ‘C’. I can’t help it. I was brought up as a Biblical Evangelical and our pastors always used alliteration to make their points memorable.
The first problem is cultural catholicism. The Poles, Italians, Irish, French, Czech, German and more Catholics came here from the old country and the bishops reckoned the best thing to do with them all was to allow cultural parishes. So in the same town the Irish Catholics went to St Patrick’s and the Poles to St Stanislaus and the Italians to St Anthony of Padua. Geesh, a man in my parish who grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania said that when he was a boy a girl from his Czech parish fell in love with an Irish boy and the Irish priest wouldn’t marry them because it was a mixed marriage.
I’m all for cultural customs and so forth, but the problem is that the immigrant Catholics–in a foreign land–clung to their culture for security and happiness and part of that culture was their Catholicism. The didn’t distinguish their culture from their Catholicism. Then, after a few generations, when they were all really American and stopped being Italian or Irish or German they also stopped being Catholic. The Catholic faith wasn’t much deeper than Mama’s special spaghetti sauce or stories of the Blarney stone.
Of course they didn’t.........
(Excerpt) Read more at patheos.com ...
Except that you offer welfare, food stamps, amnesty, obamacare, and they’ll flip over so fast your head will spin.
Nothing like fostering entitlement mentality to change a person’s political views.
I will not contest that half of the Catholics that actually cast their votes vote counter to the tenets of faith supported by the GOP, but the other half have to choose to vote against other tenets of their faith with respect to issues of social justice, immigration, capital punishment, etc.
The misplaced effort is the continual harping on the conservative Catholics (i.e.; the Catholic Freepers) about the one forth of Catholics who vote liberal. It is literally preaching to the choir. As therapeutic as a good anti-Catholic rant feels, if the antagonists were legitimately concerned with change they would be taking their case directly to the targeted voters, not to the Catholic Freepers. If the GOP wants to make progress it needs to give a solid reason for the half of Catholics who do not vote for either party.
......”they (Evangelicals) are the least worldly”.....
Imo there is nothing solid today....everything is in motion including the Evangelical Commmunity. The fact so many Rhinos are elected attests to the fact conservatives are not as many as one wants to imagine.
Thank you for including the links.
If conservatives adjust their outreach to subsets of the Catholic demographic they might be better off.
In short, there is no Catholic political impact in support of life in those states reportedly having the most Catholics. As Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia put it, after the 2008 election, “[w]e need to stop overcounting our numbers, our influence, our institutions, and our resources, because they are not real.”
Life and Marriage are the two big issues Catholics "hang their hat on" to claim they are a conservative church. Yet where they are a dominant force we see no policy changes. I think their church leadership has been a little more conservative as of late, but we see it really doesn't mean anything.
on the flip side I can't help but wonder if a lot of the Evangelical vote that didn't come out for Romney did this because he is a Mormon.
Who, what? Who will flip?
I can read your posts, you don’t need to put me on your group ping list.
You may have missed the point. The leadership of this church made it pretty clear they did not support obama after the heavy handed dealings they have had with him and his admn., but a majority of Catholics still voted for obama. If there really was a "Catholic vote" that vote would have shifted.
The vote that is being classified as "the Catholic vote" is really a large number of different groups and is not influenced in how they vote by their church leadership.
just as the Protestant vote is, in the other direction.
The Protestant vote is increasingly liberal. There are some conservative Reformed churches, but the bulk of conservative churches are the Evangelical churches.
If you want to continue focusing on the most conservative group in America as the problem, then you are free to do so, I don’t get it though.
Blame shifting again.
The failure for Catholics voting liberal lies with the church. It's the one claiming responsibility for their spiritual condition.
They're certainly quick enough to take credit when it's something that makes it look good.
It's about time for the Catholic church to man up and own what it's membership does and respond properly to it instead of washing their hands over it and still giving communion and funerals to baptized Catholic members who oppose its teaching at every turn.
I think most of them didn't come out for Romney because he's a true blue flaming liberal and has the track record to prove it.
I cast my NY throwaway vote for president for a third party candidate and did catch a lot of flack for it. However, I totaled up all the third party votes, added them to the Romney vote and there still wasn't anything near enough to come close to keeping NY from going to obama.
OTOH, when I knew my vote would count for something, like our House vote, it was conservative. I also made a vain attempt at getting Schumer and Gillibrand out and it wasn't because they were Catholic.
Is there any evidence to support this assertion?
You missed the point, after 150 years of the Catholic denomination voting, and always voting democrat, we can assume that there is a common Catholic vote, that is why it is predictable.
The Protestant vote is predictable also, since it has always been republican, and went 57% republican this time.
You don’t think that the left wrote the 1965 Immigration act to import voters to replace American voters and that the left fights tooth and nail to keep importing millions of Catholic voters from the center of the Catholic faith, Mexico and the Latin American nations?
You don’t know about the immigration hopes of the left forever eliminating conservatism from America?
"man up" That's funny when all voter statistics and demographic data clearly shows that women voters are the bigger problem.....What do you plan to do to get your fellow women to toe the line in stead of shifting the blame onto a minority of Catholic voters?
Looking at that fact, it's obvious that the anti-Catholic crowd on FR isn't the least bit worried about their fellow Evangelicals who vote for Barry and every other liberal that runs for any office. Given that fact, what they have to say about Catholics is is nothing but hot air.
The anti-Catholic crowd is just blowing smoke to try and hide the fact that what they profess does not always lead to more conservative voting patterns by ignoring a major portion of their own ranks. Why is that?
Do the anti-Catholic folks have some rule against confronting fellow Evangelicals or is it only an aversion to confronting black folks who are Evangelicals?
Where is, “around here”?
So many good straight lines; so little time.
I taught him well....
; ^ )
How do you approach a Catholic woman and get her to vote pro-life, can it be done?
Evangelical women do vote pro-life.
It matters which church that a woman is a member of.
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