Two Virginia governors with different estimations of various things Catholic

As a Catholic Virginian, it was somewhat jarring to read in the same sitting Thomas Jefferson's correspondence from approximately two hundred years ago and a statement of Terry McAuliffe's spokesman reported in Friday's Richmond Times-Dispatch. From Jefferson there was condemnation of various dogmas of the Catholic faith, while from McAuliffe's spokesman there was confusion about Catholic teaching.

Governor McAuliffe's spokesman publicly professed him to embrace what Jefferson privately condemns-- Catholic faith. But it remains unclear what the governor's professed faith has to do with his actions in office. The spokesman portrays Catholic teaching on the protection of unborn human life and the definition of marriage to require a man and a woman as improper for implementation in public law: "The governor is a lifelong Catholic who takes his faith very seriously. . . . He also believes in keeping government out of decisions that should be left to women and their doctors, or to consenting adults who love each other.” 

As for Jefferson, it is difficult to know which of his many expressions on matters of false faith would be the best to quote for a flavor of his thinking. But an aside in his Halloween 1819 letter to William Short includes a helpful list of examples of the "imputation of imposture, resulting from artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by [Jesus]," from which Jefferson believed it desirable to rescue the enlightened teachings of Jesus (whom Jefferson described in the same letter as the "greatest of all reformers of the depraved religion of his own country").

Jefferson's list of imputations of imposture contains "[t]he immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, &c."

Given this list, Jefferson would presumably be disappointed to find the spokesman of the present governor of Virginia professing Governor McAuliffe a "lifelong Catholic who takes his faith very seriously." But this disappointment would probably be offset by attention to Governor McAuliffe's public actions with respect to the law over his spokesman's public words with respect to the governor's faith.