October 31, 2008
For Catholics attuned to such things,
the recent vice presidential debate offered yet another chance to
witness the fallout from Vatican II in our environment. It was as
though a post-conciliar cloud overhung the long-winded affair.
Here were two candidates, both baptized Catholics as infants, yet
both in some sense estranged from their religious origins. In the
case of Sarah Palin, her mother, like many other confused Catholics
during the ‘70s, had defected with kids in tow to an evangelical
Protestant church up in Alaska. As for Joe Biden, a self-avowed,
life-long Catholic, he presents a study in self-contradiction.
While politically ultra-liberal, he courts the hard line “ethnic”
vote to the point of threatening to ram his rosary down the throat
of any jerk who says he is not religious! Or so goes a quote from
the Cincinnati Enquirer, echoed online in an article by Eric
Gorski. But the exact nature of Biden’s faith poses ongoing
problems. While he attends “mass” weekly, his stance on abortion
prompts the ire of even Novus Ordo prelates. According to Gerald
Warner of telegraph.co.uk, as many as 55 bishops have denounced
him. Archbishops Chaput of Denver and Burke of St. Louis actually
say Joe should not go to communion in their dioceses. Not that the
senator has actually been excommunicated. Not formally; not in
today’s politically correct Church.
Heaven forbid!
In defending himself, Biden tends to
hide behind the old barriers separating church and state — a
convenient way of circumventing the plain truth. During a Meet the
Press interview early in September, for instance, he told Tom
Brokaw that he accepts the Church’s position on abortion, but that
this is a personal matter. Officially he cannot, in a pluralistic
society, “impose that judgment” on those of other religions,
particularly Protestants or Jews, who could be “equally and even
more devout than I.”
To be sure, Brokaw put Biden on the
spot by asking when, as a Catholic, he would say life begins.
Asked a similar question by Pastor Rick Warren, Obama had said that
from both theological and scientific perspectives, to answer that
was above his pay grade. He, of course, could get away with
that. Not being a Catholic — or much of anything else –– he
was not asked to reconcile his views with the Church. House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi was, however, in her own interview with Brokaw,
and her answer annoyed certain bishops. As an “ardent,
practicing Catholic” who has studied the matter for years, she
concludes that no one can “tell you when life begins.” Citing
the example of St. Augustine, she said, “Over the centuries the
doctors of the Church have not been able to make that definition.”
What she failed to note was that despite their lack of modern
biological knowledge, they universally condemned abortion.
In his own interview, Biden told
Brokaw that he accepts the current Church teaching that “life begins
at the moment of conception” but that this too “is my judgment.”
Asked how he could then vote for abortion rights, Biden said he had
not voted for those, but, rather, against “curtailing
the right for others.” As though following Pelosi’s lead, he also
cited a doctor of the Church — Thomas Aquinas this time. In his
Summa Theologica the great doctor said human life began at
“quickening,” 40 days after conception. “There is a debate in our
church, as Cardinal Egan would acknowledge,” Biden asserted.
Note his use of the present tense, as
though we still lack the scientific means to decide such issues.
Needless to say, this is not the case. Even some Novus Ordo
prelates caught Biden on that one! In a statement to the press,
Cardinal Justin Rigali and Bishop William E. Lori, chairmen of the
U.S., Bishops’ Committees on Pro-Life Activities, and Doctrine,
respectively, said Biden was “wrong” to claim that the beginning of
human life issue is a “personal and private” matter of religious
faith. Rather it is “first a biological question and secondly a
moral question.” Nowadays embryology textbooks confirm “that a new
life begins at conception.”
Nor was this to be the final word.
Just days ago, a letter from Biden’s own bishop, W. Francis Malooly
of Wilmington, was published in the Wilmington News Journal
that calls the candidate’s picture of Catholic teaching on abortion
“seriously erroneous.” It is not true, the bishop says, that “the
Church has a nuanced view of the subject that leaves a great deal of
room for uncertainty and debate.” Echoing his confreres, he notes
that despite their limited medical knowledge of when human life
begins, ancient and medieval theologians “universally condemned all
abortions.”
On September 30, Bishop Joseph F.
Martino of Scranton published a letter that was circulated
throughout his diocese; this states that, given the moral
implications, a candidate’s abortion stance supersedes all other
considerations. It also tends to contradict a USCCB pronouncement
of 2007 which says: “A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who
takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or
racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. At the
same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an
intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other
important moral issues involving human life and dignity.”
Given such ambiguity, no wonder
Catholics are confused. How can the prelates equate whatever is
meant by the nebulous term “racism” with something so clear cut as
abortion? While not the only thing to worry about, surely the right
to life supersedes other equity issues of the moment.
This brings us to yet another
controversy, one the bishops do not address. Apart from his own
views, Biden fails to explain how he, as a Catholic, can share a
ticket with a candidate who supports not only abortion but also “gay
rights” to the hilt. Do we detect here a tendency, to waver — or
simply to equivocate?
Journalist Terence Jeffrey seems to
think so. Writing for townhall.com he notes that, during the debate
with Palin, when asked about such gay unions, Biden replied that
neither he nor Obama “support redefining from a civil side what
constitutes marriage.” More recently, however, on the Ellen
DeGeneres Show, when a related matter facing California voters came
up, Biden’s words belied any sort of conservative stance. For, if
passed, Proposition 8 would amend that state’s constitution so as to
ban same-sex “marriage.” Presumably anyone against that
would advise voting for the proposition. Asked what he would
do, though, Biden told DeGeneres, “If I lived in California, I’d
clearly vote against Prop. 8.”
For those who still might not get it,
Jeffrey goes on to cite a letter from Biden’s running mate to the
Alice B. Toklas Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club that was
published in the San Francisco Chronicle. In this Obama
articulates his opposition to any ban on gay marriage, and his
support for “extending fully equal rights and benefits to same sex
couples under both state and federal law.” He also favors requiring
states which do not allow same sex marriage to recognize the
legitimacy of such unions performed elsewhere in the country.
Meanwhile, Republican opponent Sarah
Palin, mother of five, including a Down syndrome baby, remains
staunchly and vocally pro life. Ironically, the young girl who was
led by her mother from the Church into evangelical Protestantism is
now attracting droves of conservative Catholics into the McCain
camp. And, like many of the post-conciliar stamp she also promotes
birth control as a component of modern life that is vastly
preferable to abortion. According to a recent article by John
Vennari, she is on record as saying, “I’m pro-contraception, and I
think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in
other avenues.”
Does this include public school — and
private? The decades-old battle over sex education wages on, and
has invaded, in various ways, the former bastion of the Catholic
school. Here, too, Vatican II proved the catalyst. John Vennari
says in his article that through 12 years of post-conciliar
Catholic school, he was never taught that contraception is
objectively immoral. During that entire time, he never so much as
heard the term “mortal sin!” He feels he “was fortunate not
to attend a modern Catholic university,” since he was thus “spared
the undermining of the Church’s anti-contraception teaching that is
now the norm in most Catholic colleges. . . ”
Sound familiar?
While old enough to have avoided much
of that in Catholic grade school, this writer did, as a young adult
living in Chicago, encounter many graduates of Catholic colleges — I
was not –– with similar tales. While at first skeptical, after
hearing their arguments and reading their books, I realized it was
all too true. One eager young Catholic woman I met even worked as a
community organizer in the movement inspired by the radical activist
Saul Alinsky. Nor was this incongruous; according to a Wanderer
article by Paul Likoudis, the Catholic bishops’ own Campaign for
Human Development (CHD) pumped millions into groups using his
methods. These included ACORN and the Gamaliel Foundation, an
institute linked to Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF).
During the 1980s Barak Obama worked for both –– and for the
Developing Communities Project, a “church-based community project
originally comprising eight Catholic parishes” on Chicago’s far
South Side.
Another quote in Likoudis’ article
comes from a biography of Alinsky published in 1992 and entitled
Let Them Call Me Rebel. In this, author Sanford Horwitt says:
“Except within certain religious and activist circles, it is not
widely known that the (Catholic) Church’s Campaign for Human
Development expends most of its $18 million annual budget in grants
to community organizing and related grass-roots empowerment
efforts. And many of the CHD largesse are IAF-directed projects.
The embrace of Alinsky’s basic ideas by both CHD and influential
Catholic bishops has lead Charles Curran, a leading Catholic
theologian, to credit Alinsky with having the most distinctive
impact on the American Catholic social justice movement of the last
22 years.”
How do those so-called bishops
justify this? Did Catholics then know where their money was going?
Do they now? Meanwhile, all those beautiful old churches deemed
“unaffordable” continue to be torn down. . .
Is this some kind of scam, or what?
During the late ‘70’s, I myself
attended a NOW workshop in Chicago run by Heather Booth, another
Alinsky disciple, former SDS activist — and future colleague of
Obama’s. Likoudis reports that the CHD also funded the Midwest
Academy that she founded. While unaware of all this at the time, I
did see through her not-so-subtle techniques. When she said women
should blame any bad thing in their lives on a society dominated by
men, she obviously wanted us to analyze ourselves according to her
rigid dictates –– and those of a socialist agenda. Never before had
I, in the space of a few hours, been force-fed such a pile of
collectivist bull. Sorry, that’s what it was. Besides lecturing,
she coached participants as they practiced doing “actions,” waving
their hands while jumping up and down, yelling like bratty kids at
imaginary employers or other targets. Like automatons we were also
made to sing the lyrics of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”
Half-heartedly I joined in, before concluding that the feminist
thing was but part of the same radical movement I had already
encountered — and rejected — in graduate school.
So I went home, and in but a few
months joined Eagle Forum, Phyllis Schlafly’s group.
Also disenchanting was my experience
as a volunteer teacher of religion to public school students in a
local parish program. Immediately, I found myself
being immersed in a watered-down pseudo-theology that contradicted
much, if not most, of what I had learned as a child in Catholic
grade school. Whereas I rejected the new stuff, other teachers, new
and old, appeared to swallow it. In this milieu I could hardly
teach much. If I brought books to sessions in order to argue points
of doctrine, I would be made fun of. Indeed, once my co-teacher,
along with the kids, threw popcorn at me!
As part of our training, we attended
a series of lectures held in a hall adjoining the local cathedral.
For one of these, a monsignor, no less, supervised the showing of a
film that distorted Church history by saying the vast cathedrals of
the Middle Ages only served to exalt the elite while removing
religion from the people. To demonstrate, it even showed an altar
receding back and up into the air! Having had a history course or
two, I contested this point. Such edifices, I said, required a huge
amount of labor, of expertise, from all sorts of skilled artists and
craftsmen. Whole towns must have been involved and thus identified
with the result, which hardly alienated the people!
Were my comments appreciated? No,
the only nun in class gave me dirty looks, and the monsignor did not
seem pleased. As soon as we were alone, he said coldly, “What do
you think you are, some sort of vigilante?” Aghast, I said nothing,
but thought it strange he should use that particular term, since I
had recently read that the English meaning for one of the Irish
names on my family tree is “descendant of the vigilant one, or
vigilante.”
Yet another time we teachers were
lectured to by a local obstetrician with a new take on the abortion
issue. Deploring the surge in those even among fellow Catholics, he
concluded that contraception was a viable alternative, and told us
so. This, of course, was a marked departure from Church teaching.
Only a few years before the legalization of abortion, contraception
had been the hot topic among Catholics, especially with the arrival
of the “pill” in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s. Catholics of my age
group knew what the Church taught about that.
Back then the U.S. bishops did not
hesitate to condemn all artificial contraception, and as a Catholic,
John F. Kennedy was made to confront the issue as it affected his
presidential campaign. At one point late in 1959, he actually found
himself caught in what the Time issue of December 7 called “a
Catholic-Protestant clerical crossfire on the incendiary issue of
birth control.” It seems the bishops had issued a statement
denouncing “a systematic, concerted effort to promote the use of
U.S. public funds” for birth control in “economically underdeveloped
countries.” Catholics, they said, would support no “public
assistance, either at home or abroad, to promote artificial birth
prevention, abortion or sterilization whether through direct aid or
by means of international organizations.”
In response, Episcopal Bishop James
Pike of San Francisco said such a policy would “condemn rapidly
increasing millions of people in less fortunate parts of the world
to starvation, bondage, misery and despair.” A “convert” from
Catholicism himself, Pike “demanded to know if the Catholic bishop’s
policy ‘is binding on Roman Catholic candidates for public office.’”
“Burned at being put on the spot,”
Kennedy said that same question “should be directed to all public
candidates and to all public men. Do they call up other candidates
when the bishops of their faith make some kind of statement? I
don’t want to be called up every time the bishops and priests make a
statement of some kind.” He added: “If anyone is trying to imply
that I reached my decision as a result of what the bishops say, it
is not true.”
While Kennedy did apparently oppose
the public funding of birth prevention overseas, with Election Day
nearing, he felt an increasing need to appease Protestants and
others who might see him as an uppity papist out to suppress their
constitutional rights. In a speech to the Greater Houston
Ministerial Association in September of 1960, he assured his
listeners that if elected president, he would not let ecclesiastical
policies affect his official actions. Significant lines go as
follows:
“I believe in an America where the
separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic
prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act,
and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to
vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds
or political preference. . .”
And: “Whatever issue may come before
me as President — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or
any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these
views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the
national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures
or dictates.”
In 1960, of course, Catholics in the
U.S. did not yet have to contend with domestic issues regarding
legal abortion or gay marriage. Today they must, but, ironically,
no longer are Catholic candidates put on the defensive the way
Kennedy was. Joe Biden is treated relatively mildly by the mainline
press. No one accuses him of being in thrall to pope or bishops.
On the contrary, in order to get some of that old ethnic vote, he
has to insist that no matter how he votes on abortion, he really is
personally a Catholic. Rather than fend off hard-line Protestants,
he has to contend with the verbal assaults of the more conservative
bishops!
There is a parallel with Kennedy,
though, in Biden’s appeal to what amounts to absolute separation of
church and state. Is such a thing really possible, however?
Note that Kennedy said he would make decisions according to what his
conscience told him to be the national interest. Does this not
imply, at the very least, the indirect influence of the Church that
helped form that conscience? Exposed as we are now to diversity at
every turn, we see that absolute neutrality on basic morality is
impossible. If all religions are to be treated equally, what about
God? How does He fit in? Can we allow Him to be banished from the
public sphere, leaving a vacuum to be filled with who knows what
devilish entity?
Is godless government the answer?
When Joe Biden says he cannot in all
good conscience impose his views regarding the sanctity of unborn
life on others in a pluralist society, we have to wonder. Does he
realize the implications of this philosophy? Taking it to its
logical extremes, how can officialdom forbid any activity that is
allowed, much less sanctioned by, someone’s beliefs, religious or
otherwise? Take the matter of human sacrifice: what if there are
immigrants out there, legal ones, of course, who, like the Aztecs,
believe that ripping out the hearts of live victims prior to eating
their roasted remains is the way to appease the gods? If this is
their ancient religious practice, and the victims willing — or
unborn — or dying –– how can we forbid it?
But if this sounds weird, what about
so-called “same sex marriage?” How the ancients would have howled
over that one! Seeing marriage as a source of lineage, a form of
immortality, would they not have seen the current twisting of the
term as the silliest of oxymorons? Of course they lacked our
sophisticated techniques of reproducing via test tube; or of
surgically emptying a womb of its unwanted contents without killing
the mother as well. Inevitably, with improvements in cloning, will
not old-fashioned methods of reproduction, wombs and all, be
rendered obsolete? Using the latter term in a purely figurative
sense, we can see how such scientific updating, properly funded, of
course, will enable our government to provide the ultimate in “womb”
to tomb security.
And if this doesn’t work, we could
follow the lead of Heather Booth and turn to the Cabala, which was
actually touted not too long ago by a guest on the Michael Medved
show. Like her mentor Saul Alinsky, Booth is Jewish, but while
he is deceased, she is still going strong. According to an
autobiographical statement posted online, she once yearned to be a
rabbi. Later, prompted by what she calls the “Golden Rule,”
she helped women get abortions while they were still illegal.
Breaking the state or federal law is okay, I guess, if she thinks it
is. Currently her aspirations are more esoteric: she espouses
a dedication to the cabalistic idea of tikkun olam, which means
“repairing the world.” That, apparently, is her ideal kind of
“change”. She says: “If we organize, we can change the world.”
Like Obama? Is this his kind of “change” too?
Frontline feature
“The
Choice 2008”
shows him at one point during his campaign telling a crowd in Iowa
how he hopes to
“heal
the nation, and repair the world.”
Ah, brave new world that has such
activists remaking it!
But rather than listen to us, those
who dismiss the specter of godless state as no big deal should heed
the words of the late Saul Alinsky. Generations of bishops and
other activists, Obama included, have, after all, idolized him. As
part of his legacy, Alinsky left a kind of bible for his followers
called Rules for Radicals. This features, at the front, a
page with quotes from Rabbi Hillel, Thomas Paine, and the author
himself. This last, a tribute to a figure he obviously finds
inspiring, goes: “Lest we forget, at least an over-the-shoulder
acknowledgement to the very first radical: from all our legends,
mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves
off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known
to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so
effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”
(To be continued)
Copyright by Judith M.
Gordon 2008