"Catholics, Democrats & the GOP"

John McGreevy, professor of history at Notre Dame, has an article in the September 22 Commonweal:  "Catholics, Democrats & the GOP".  (Clik here to read the whole article.)  An excerpt:

Trolling much of the Catholic press now means drowning in screeds. Sermons on the “crisis of fatherhood,” the “decay of family life,” and the need to check the “deceptive charm” of a culture unwilling to cultivate the virtue of “obedience” substitute for empirical analysis. We “slouch toward Gomorrah” in Robert Bork’s heated phrasing. In retrospect, the 1996 imbroglio at Neuhaus’s First Things over the “judicial usurpation of politics” marked a sectarian warning shot. (The magazine’s editors warned that recent Supreme Court decisions on abortion, especially, meant that matters “have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.”) More recent attacks by the neocons on the Jesuits, on those Catholics, including some bishops, who upheld traditional end-of-life teaching during the Terri Schiavo melodrama, and on the new archbishop of San Francisco as overly sympathetic to gays are only the most recent volleys.

Part of this rhetorical overkill stems from disappointment. John Paul II, despite his extraordinary charisma, did not stem the drift away from official church teaching on most of the hot-button sex and gender issues. More Catholic couples now use birth control than at the beginning of John Paul II’s papacy, and the Greenberg/Hogan polling data highlight the sympathy of Catholic voters, even practicing Catholic voters supporting President Bush, for same-sex civil unions.

Within the church, John Paul II’s frequent condemnations of contraception, his fiat against discussion of women’s ordination, his refusal to appoint as bishop any priest not willing to defend Humanae vitae, and his characterization of the modern United States as a “culture of death,” fostered a more sectarian mood. Just this August, Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford, Illinois, solemnly (and offensively) listed the “sacraments” of the Democratic Party as “abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation.” These Democratic positions, Doran cheerfully informed Rockford Catholics, “place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people.”

More politely, Denver archbishop Charles Chaput described Catholics as “timid” in a “culture that grows more estranged from the gospel with every year.” Or, as Chaput explained last year to the New Yorker’s Peter Boyer: “We’re at a time for the church in our country when some Catholics-too many-are discovering that they’ve gradually become non-Catholics who happen to go to Mass. That’s sad and difficult, and a judgment on a generation of Catholic leadership. But it may be exactly the moment of truth the church needs.”

To Chaput and other like-minded Catholics, the primary obstacle to a new evangelization is a “liberal culture” entrenched in the media, the universities, and, crucially, within the church itself. In an eerie echo of the 1960s, these spokespersons urge their coreligionists to reject not just the mainstream media but the Catholic mainstream as well: Protect your children at Steubenville, instead of throwing them to the wolves at Boston College (or Notre Dame). Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum even blamed Boston liberalism-instead of, say, Cardinal Bernard Law-for that archdiocese’s implosion during the sexual-abuse crisis, a dubious claim given what the Philadelphia district attorney has recently told us about sexual abuse in that archdiocese....

The Italian priests standing with John Kerry in St. Peter’s Square [at John Paul II's funeral] did not, one imagines, admire Kerry’s almost inarticulate position on abortion. Instead, they opposed the American invasion of Iraq, or the mores of a society that allows economic inequality to reach unprecedented heights. These issues, too, admit of no easy solutions. But engaging the nitty-gritty of, say, what just-war theory requires of Congress and the president, or how we evaluate the relationship between economic growth and inequality, remains more consonant with the most enduring strains of Catholic social thought than issuing partisan manifestoes (see Eduardo Moisés Peñalver, page 20).

Can we do better? How should we actually decrease the abortion rate, given that federal policies on access to abortion matter less than the socio-economic plight of women seeking abortions? How should we understand low abortion rates in Western Europe (where abortion is legal) and high rates in putatively Catholic Latin America (where it is not)?

These questions signal realism, not evasion, certainly for anyone hoping to decrease the actual number of abortions occurring in the United States. Perhaps this campaign season, and the presidential election cycle in 2008 for which it is an inevitable warm-up, mark a test. If so, here’s the final exam question: Can Catholics and other people of goodwill agree to make abortions rare, and mean it, or will the issue remain a rhetorical ploy Republicans exploit and a moral scandal to which Democrats are blind?

Let’s hope we pass.

Want to put some questions to McGreevy?  Thanks to dotCommonweal, you can--on Monday, September 25.  Click here to find out how.