Why 'liberal Catholic' is an oxymoron. With emphasis on the moron.

The self-hating Catholics who haven't the stomach for the fight to preach the Gospel of the Christ and save souls continue their descent into Hell by trying to remake His Church in the image of the world.

May God have mercy on their shriveled little souls.

Commonweal Magazine (via Catholic Online): Catholic political allegiances toward Democrats, GOP shifted over years
By John T. McGreevy

True story: It is the day before Pope John Paul II’s funeral, a year ago last April. Assembling in Rome are the members of the official delegation of the United States government, including President and Mrs. Bush and a number of Catholic senators and representatives. Two of those Catholic senators are Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois and John Kerry of Massachusetts.

As the two of them walk across St. Peter’s Square, bystanders stop Kerry every few steps to bemoan his defeat in the presidential election just a few months before. Some of these admirers – including a few Italian priests – drape themselves enthusiastically over Kerry’s lanky frame for group snapshots.

Then a single priest stops Kerry and Durbin. He warns Kerry that he will have to answer, perhaps in hell, for his position on abortion.

That priest is from Minnesota.

How did we get here? And are we stuck?

You do not have to read any more, kiddies. You can see where this is going.

To the alleged Catholics (I can call myself a Corvette all I want, but that does not make me a sports car.) of Commonweal (irony!) babykilling is an unfortunate necessity of living in the modern age. This type of believer (all faiths have them) are moral cowards more interested in being invited to the right cocktail parties (even bishops and priests!) than saving their own souls (never mind the souls of others).

Of course, if you are interested in reading another screed from a dying anti-Catholic Catholic sect for your amusement like I am, be my guest. I suggest you treat this nonsense the way I treat Nietzsche: It is the exact opposite of The Truth.

Unraveling the meaning of this vignette requires attention to three interlocking narratives. The first is the story of the once-happy but now troubled marriage between Catholics and the Democratic Party. The second is the history of the fight over public access not to abortion, but to birth control. The third is the emergence of a new generation of bishops, priests and lay intellectuals, suspicious of both theological and political liberalism, and eager to take a more adversarial posture toward modern society.

The first story of Catholics and Democrats is the most familiar. Most Catholics, clustered along the East Coast and in the Great Lakes region, voted Democratic in presidential elections for most of the 20th century, an alliance jump started by Al Smith’s failed 1928 presidential campaign and cemented by Franklin Roosevelt’s charisma, the early programs of his New Deal, and his sympathy for U.S. workers. (Roosevelt thrilled Catholic activists by quoting from Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical on the economy, Quadragesimo anno, at a rally in Detroit during the final days of the 1932 campaign.)

Oh, sure. Fellatio D. Rascalvelt is a great example of what left-fascist Catholics desire: A totalitarian capo who distributes power to his permanent underlings based on loyalty to The Leader and His Party. That is Old World Fascism, kiddies.

It is understandable when immigrants or even their children lack the courage to break from this totalitarian slavery, but today's Materialist Catholics have no excuse.

Many Catholic voters drifted toward the popular Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, but a remarkable 78 percent voted for Catholic war hero John Kennedy in 1960. (Would those Catholics have voted for JFK if his sexual sins had been known? BTW, this is the most important reason for advocating the destruction of the Antique Media. They hide the sins of the pols with whom they agree. - F.G.) As late as 1968, two of the three Democratic candidates for president, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, were serious Catholics on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and support from white Catholics in the North almost pushed the eventual Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, past Richard Nixon.

As Howard Dean recently put it, “The Democratic Party was built on four pillars-the Roosevelt intellectuals, the Catholic Church, labor unions and African Americans.” (Dean ignores white Southerners, the most reliable members of the pre-civil-rights era Democratic Party, but the observation is accurate for the party in the North.)

Howard Dean is an incoherent nincompoop. Quoting him is like quoting a dog, only less interesting.

George McGovern proved incapable of sustaining this Catholic backing in 1972, in part because the Democratic Party in the heady years between 1968 and 1972 became associated with a cultural liberalism that some Catholic voters, especially working-class whites, found unsettling. (Humphrey, during the bitter days of the 1972 Democratic primaries, inaccurately but effectively tarred McGovern as favoring “abortion, acid and amnesty [for Vietnam era draft evaders].”)

Nota bene: "cultural liberalism", "some Catholic voters", "working-class whites", "unsettling". This sort of obfuscation is everywhere in this article. When you see "liberalism", just substitute "mortal sin" and you will be fine.

Much of this uneasiness with the national Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s revolved around race, with working-class white Catholics appalled by Democratic support for forced busing programs to alleviate racial imbalance in the public schools, and suspicious of efforts to integrate lily-white (and heavily Catholic) construction and trade unions.

Now watch the Kerry Catholics prove that Catholicism = racism:

The sympathy for African-American civil rights displayed by many priests and nuns in the late 1960s evoked among some white Catholics a raw sense of betrayal. One segregationist priest in Chicago, defying his archbishop and the head of his religious order, became an alderman as an advocate for the “forgotten minority” of white homeowners. J. Anthony Lukas’s study of the busing crisis in Boston, Common Ground, pivoted on the role of the church, attempting to mediate between Catholic politicians and judges eager to end racial segregation (but often themselves living in suburban enclaves), and working-class white Catholics often incapable of welcoming African Americans, even African-American Catholics, into their midst.

As the racial tensions of the 1960s and 1970s ebbed, abortion took center stage. But not right away. Until the early 1970s most Democrats seemed more conservative than Republicans on abortion. Republican governors – including Nelson Rockefeller in New York and William Milliken in Michigan – signed or advocated laws loosening state restrictions on abortion. By contrast, Sen. Edward Kennedy assured his constituents as late as 1971 that “abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life.” George McGovern’s first choice for running mate in 1972, Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, held pro-life views as did McGovern’s eventual running mate, Kennedy in-law and Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver.

Roe v. Wade made everything more partisan. (No, you retard, Roe v. Wade wiped out the laws of all fifty states regulating babykilling. It was a naked power grab by the deracinated protestant establishment aided and abetted by Catholics in rebellion against the Natural Law like you. - F.G.) The unexpectedly (By whom??? - F.G.) sweeping consequences of the 1973 ruling – eliminating most state restrictions on the procedure, with the number of abortions rising to more than 1.5 million a year by 1980 – jumpstarted a grassroots antiabortion movement, arguably the largest social movement of the post-civil-rights era, led, funded, and supported in its first years by Catholics. At the same time, abortion rights became central to the modern women’s movement in the United States (more so than in most of Europe), and these activists called the Democratic Party their home. Now no politician could dodge the issue (as Robert Kennedy had in 1968) and a generation of Catholic Democrats, some principled, some pragmatic, adopted a pro-choice stance.

I see. As long as politicians can duck an issue, it isn't an issue. Brilliant!

They did not pay an electoral price. Catholic voters during this period were only modestly less pro-choice than the general population-a point worth emphasizing-and tended not to make abortion a voting issue. (Shame on those Catholics. A majority vote does NOT change a mortal sin into a venial one. This author and his ilk are suffering from americanism.* - F.G.) The number of pro-life Catholic Democrats holding high office dwindled, a decline marked by the 1984 Democratic Party platform, which described reproductive freedom as a “fundamental human right.” (The same year, New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor chastised Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale’s running mate, for her pro-choice views, and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo defended his pro-choice position in a widely publicized speech at Notre Dame.)

In 1992, leading Democrats notoriously prevented Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey, the country’s most prominent pro-life Catholic Democrat, from speaking at the party’s national convention.

The Republican Party moved in the other direction. Its most prominent congressional voice became an Illinois Catholic, Rep. Henry Hyde, who endeared himself to Catholic conservatives by attacking the use of Medicaid funds for abortions. (“I stand before you,” Hyde would tell Catholic audiences in the 1970s, “a 652-month-old fetus.”) More important, for the first time prominent Evangelicals, such as Jerry Falwell, threw themselves into the anti-abortion campaign, and their enthusiasm helped propel a pro-life candidate, Ronald Reagan, into the White House.

Bill Clinton stemmed this Catholic drift into the Republican Party during the 1990s, and the relationship of Catholic politicians to their bishops faded from the headlines. (A new cluster of pro-choice Catholic Republicans in states where pro-life politicians have little hope for election to statewide public office, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani in New York, also complicated the picture.)

But in 2004, Democrats nominated John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic, for president. A few bishops battered the Kerry campaign with prohibitions, or threatened prohibitions, on his receiving Communion. Kerry, himself, when asked about abortion in the second presidential debate, offered a windy soliloquy “about life and about responsibility” that begged the hard questions.

I would love to see this guy's list of hard questions.

In the aftermath of Kerry’s defeat, Democrats began to pick up the pieces.
As part of this effort, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg – famous for his analysis of Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, Michigan – and an associate, Matt Hogan, polled white Catholics. (The results are available at www.democracycorps.com. A more comprehensive analysis of the Democrats’ plight that draws on the Greenberg/Hogan analysis is The Politics of Polarization by Commonweal contributor Willam A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, available at www.third-way.com.)

Greenberg and Hogan paid special attention to Democratic defectors, the small but crucial group of white Catholic Democrats, especially in Ohio and other battleground Midwestern states, who voted for Clinton in 1996 but supported George W. Bush in 2004. (Clinton carried white Catholics by seven percentage points in 1996, Gore lost them by seven points in 2000, and Kerry lost white Catholics by 14 points in 2004).

In an election where notions about morality played an important role, these Catholic Democrats named abortion as their “single greatest moral concern.” Indeed, Galston, a onetime Clinton aide, recently argued that vetoing the partial-birth abortion ban was the “single worst political mistake that Bill Clinton made in his eight years.... If there was ever an issue to take off the table, that was it.”

"Notions of morality"? How creepy is that coming from someone claiming to belong to the last institutional barricade still holding out against the forces of antichrist.

The sick truth is "liberal Catholics" are merely fools who have been seduced by the Foolish One into loving the things of this world more than they love God Himself.

The Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito also testified to the durability of the abortion debate. A Catholic Kabuki theater marked Roberts’s confirmation hearings, especially with the liberal Catholic lions on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Kennedy from Massachusetts, Durbin from Illinois, and Patrick Leahy from Vermont, probing the Catholic Roberts on his views on privacy and individual rights, while Catholic conservatives tied to the Bush administration muttered about anti-Catholic litmus tests. (Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, a College of the Holy Cross graduate, has also donated her legal talents to the organization, Feminists for Life.)

Heehee! Lions? Senator Murder, Senator Dick, and Senator Leahy's a Catholic? Don't make me laugh.

Tim Russert on Meet the Press asked Durbin to explain how as a congressman he had once called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, but now, as a senator, termed opposition to Roe v. Wade “out of the mainstream.” Durbin, in turn, recalled that he came to Washington holding pro-life views but discovered that many opponents of abortion were unwilling to make exceptions for victims of rape or incest. Even more troubling, so many “opponents of abortion were also opponents of family planning. This didn’t make any sense to me.”

Dick.

II

Durbin’s last point is intriguing, if inevitably self-interested.
Understanding the contemporary American abortion debate requires a return to the dimly recalled history of the public debate about contraception. In 1930, Pius XI, the same pope who just three months later in Quadragesimo anno would condemn “individualist economic teaching,” chose, in Casti connubii, to define all contraceptive use as immoral.

Finally! NOW you know the anti-Catholic Catholics' major concern.

They wish to fornicate "without consequences" just like their upwardly mobile protestant neighbors.

Rubbers. May God have mercy on all souls.

By then, as Margaret Sanger and other birth-control advocates delighted in pointing out, Catholics remained the only sizable lobby opposed to liberalization of laws regarding birth control. (Sanger was a crazed fascist killer and a rabid racist. Good Catholics should wear her scorn as a badge of honor. - F.G.) The issue began to flare up: Should the Army issue condoms to Catholic soldiers? Should Community Chest fundraising drives contribute to Planned Parenthood chapters? The most heated debates took place in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where 19th-century laws (written by Protestants, not Catholics) that prohibited even married couples from purchasing contraceptives remained on the books. (Doctors evaded the law by prescribing contraceptives for “health” reasons.)

Catholics in Massachusetts defeated a first push to change the state’s laws in 1940. In 1948, reformers tried again and Massachusetts voters again pushed them back, urged on by an archdiocesan-funded effort, with a billboard and radio campaign, emphasizing that “Birth Control Is Still against God’s Law.” Sermon outlines distributed to all priests in the Boston Archdiocese explained that “the prohibition of birth control is not a law peculiar to the church any more than are the laws against murder, theft, perjury, or treason.”

Amen to that.

The Boston Archdiocese won this battle only to lose the war. Leslie Tentler’s Catholics and Contraception (Cornell University Press), now required reading for any bishop, priest, or layperson opining on this subject, details how confidence in church teaching on birth control collapsed over the next two decades. The causes included the increasing frustration of married couples, especially married women, wed in their early 20s after World War II and bearing six, seven, eight or more children; the conviction of priests, especially priests listening to their most idealistic and loyal parishioners in the confessional, and becoming convinced that obeying church teaching and the sexual abstinence it required damaged as many marriages as it helped; and the unease among theologians about a natural-law teaching presumably accessible to reason that only Catholics found reasonable.

Moron.

Just look at the devastated families all around you. Can you say this is merely coincidence?

Artificial contraception kills marriages and families by divorcing procreation from the marital bond. Any other position on contraception is a political statement, not a religious one.

By the mid-1960s many bishops hoped for a change in church teaching, and priests knew that their parishioners, some after agonized soul-searching, had abandoned it.

They will all pay the ultimate price for it. Let us hope and pray those still living will repent.

In 1965, a young Massachusetts Democrat named Michael Dukakis introduced a measure in the state legislature to legalize contraceptive use for married couples. Advised behind-the-scenes by Jesuit John Courtney Murray, Boston’s archbishop, Richard Cushing, declined to oppose the measure. Then laboring over the Declaration of Religious Freedom at the Second Vatican Council, Murray composed a statement for Cushing insisting that it is not “the function of civil law to prescribe everything that is morally right and to forbid everything that is morally wrong.”

Capitulation. A sin of omission or commission?

Given that contraceptive devices had “received official sanction by many religious groups within the community,” Cardinal Cushing, channeling Murray, urged Catholics to respect the religious freedom of their fellow citizens. Two years later, just before his death in 1967, Murray regretted that church teaching on contraception “went too far,” reaching for “too much certainty too soon.”

III

From a pro-life perspective, this debate over birth control, and the widespread rejection of Humanae vitae (By whom??? The destructive rebels who used Vatican II as an excuse to wreck 2,000 years of tradition? - F.G.) on its release in 1968, could not have been more ill-timed. As early as 1965, theologians such as Jesuit Father Richard McCormick, were privately alerting their colleagues that “there is going to be a strong play for widening acceptable indications for abortion” and asking for assistance in distinguishing, in both the public and the Catholic mind, between contraception and abortion. A few Catholic conservatives, such as William F. Buckley Jr., even (briefly) advocated a liberalization of abortion laws for the same reason, respect of conscience, articulated by Murray in regard to contraception.

Buckley is and was a fool. Anti-communism was just one battle in the real war.

Nota bene: See how Catholic opposition to rubbers is blamed for all those kiddies getting chopped up in abortion mills.

The alienation of many Catholic women from church teaching on contraception also provided pro-choice organizations with an opportunity. Groups like the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) self-consciously promoted Catholic women as spokespersons in the state battles over abortion in the late 1960s and early 1970s, exploiting the reputation of a church perceived as incapable of acknowledging women’s experiences. Even the bishops’ point man on the abortion issue, Bishop James McHugh, privately conceded that the credibility of the Vatican on sexual and gender issues, in large part because of the debate over contraception, was such that official statements on abortion risked aggravating “the problems of Humanae vitae.”

The problems are yours, not Catholicism's.

There matters stood until the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in 1978. Over a generation, John Paul II’s passionate pro-life stance did shape the American abortion debate, as did his opposition to capital punishment. Most Americans still support legal abortion in some circumstances, but since the early 1990s, remarkably, support for the position that abortion should be legal in all circumstances has declined, while support for making abortion illegal in all circumstances has increased. That George W. Bush, in his tribute to John Paul II on the pope’s death, sounded more like a Catholic bishop than a non-Catholic president, with references to his support for a “culture of life,” reflected the late pope’s influence as much as Karl Rove’s ongoing effort to sway Catholic voters.

So, the fascist Pole and BushMonkey's Evil Genius are to blame for saving children? How dare they!

In retrospect, John Paul II’s conservative views on abortion and sexual ethics generally mirrored a wider withdrawal from 1960s-style liberalism in American intellectual life, certainly in its Catholic variant. At the level of ideas, philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre attacked the “Enlightenment project” and a liberalism predicated on a false sense of moral neutrality.

At the level of policy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Mary Ann Glendon and James Q. Wilson cast jaundiced eyes on liberal social-welfare policies and no-fault divorce. In the narrow world of Catholic polemics, neoconservatives, such as Michael Novak, Father Richard John Neuhaus, and George Weigel, pushed Catholic liberals to acknowledge the achievements of market capitalism, the importance of the two-parent family and the unstable foundations of liberal church-state jurisprudence.

That some of these Catholic neoconservatives tied themselves to the Republican Party, attracting extraordinary financial support from conservative foundations as part of the bargain, made liberals understandably suspicious of neoconservative motivations. Still, the neoconservatives made empirical, not just ideological, arguments and provided an important check on liberal pretensions.

zzzzzzzzzzz...

The moment passed. 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.

Bork's a better man than you could ever hope to be, numbskull.

In retrospect, the 1996 imbroglio at Father Neuhaus’ 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.”) (EXACTLY! - F.G.) 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.

Since when did Catholicism teach it's ok to whack an invalid? I must have missed that CCD class. Maybe somebody can show me the page in the Catechism.

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.

Egads. "Gender issues". What a maroon!

Again, Catholicism is not a democracy. Americanism* is not Catholicism.

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 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.”

Listen to the bishop, fool. He's trying to save souls. Even yours.

BTW, why don't you "liberal Catholics" ever mention the salvation of souls? Could it be you do not really believe in anything other than man's desires? ( i.e “abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation”, for a start.)

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 Archbishop 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.”

Yep.

To Archbishop 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 U.S. Sen. 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.

They are one and the same, baby. Do you think Cardinal Law was somehow insulated from the world?

This more apocalyptic ecclesiastical mood blended with the waning of the Catholic subculture over the past 30 years, and the felt need of a significant minority of young Catholics for more familiarity with the faith they professed. Catholic leaders of the 1970s and 1980s, to their shame, ignored the plight of these young people, and never solved the larger puzzle of what serious catechetical education might entail in a mobile, fragmented society. At Notre Dame, where I teach, one colleague claims that some of her advanced students, almost all Catholic, cannot identify Pontius Pilate.

Pray for all souls, Our Lady.

The most committed of these Catholic young people now lurch between an attractive (even brave) love for the faith and the church, and a defensive circling of the wagons. Who can but admire young Catholics immersing themselves in serious study of Catholic intellectual traditions and choosing service to the church through volunteer programs? Who can but sigh when reading the following headline in a conservative Catholic student newspaper: “Can Women Be Priests? A Full Defense of the Authoritative Church Position, and Why It Cannot and Will Not Change”?

Don't you get it, kiddies? Catholicism is a wonderful thing as long as you are willing to ignore that whole religion thingee!

IV

Given these three contexts: the relationship of Catholics to the Democratic Party, the partisan cast of the abortion debate since Roe v. Wade, and the more sectarian tone in recent Catholic life, perhaps the real surprise is that the priest from Minnesota didn’t insist on escorting John Kerry to hell himself.

Very funny. You won't need an escort, pal. You are obviously in the fast lane.

Still, a new political moment and a new papacy do contain hints of change.
Emily’s List, the pro-choice fundraising operation, remains the most important source of independent funds in the Democratic Party-raising $84 million this past year. But Robert Casey Jr., a pro-life Catholic Democrat, has received the enthusiastic backing of chastened party leaders in his Pennsylvania senatorial race against Santorum.

Casey, if elected, will vote with the child murderers as his party's capos order him. He is not the man of principle his father was. He's running an absentee campaign, hiding behind his dead father's name. Heck, that almost makes him a Kennedy.

Democrats for Life now claims 32 Democratic congressional representatives as pro-life, many of whom have endorsed the organization’s 95-10 initiative, aimed at reducing the number of abortions in the United States by 95 percent in ten years. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, chair of the bishops’ task force on bishops and Catholic politicians, recently cautioned against importing the “intense polarization and bitter battles of partisan politics” into the church, and commended off-the-record discussions with and information sessions for Catholic politicians.

Pope Benedict XVI’s view about the relationship between religion and politics will become more clear over time. His record suggests (an entirely appropriate) skepticism about Catholic politicians claiming personal opposition to abortion but recording 100-percent NARAL voting records.
Still, the first year of his papacy also suggests a willingness to engage rather than merely admonish fellow Catholics about contested issues. Cardinal William Levada’s plea at the Synod on the Eucharist last year for more discussion of the problem of Catholic politicians, abortion, and Communion also reminds us that the abortion question is not simply an American problem. Instead, it is a case study for the universal church of how Catholics vote and work within societies which do not embody the norms of Catholic moral or social thought.

None of this denies the hypocrisy of many Catholic Democrats (and some Catholic Republicans) on the abortion issue. It simply recognizes that the hothouse ecclesiastical climate created in the last decade of John Paul II’s papacy, which endures in the bishops he appointed and some of the young people he inspired, nurtures a kind of romantic purity, a prophetic denunciation of an American society for which Catholics are, after all, in large part responsible.

The Italian priests standing with John Kerry in St. Peter’s Square 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. (Have you been to Bangladesh or India or Turkey or France lately, genius? -F.G.) 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.

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.

John T. McGreevy is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and author of Catholicism and American Freedom.

* The following, a description of "Americanism", is from Testem Benevolentiae, an Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII of January 22, 1899:

"If by that name ('Americanism') be designated the characteristic qualities which reflect honour on the people of America, just as other nations have what is special to them; or, if it implies the condition of your commonwealths, or the laws and customs prevailing in them, there is no reason why we should deem that it ought to be discarded. But if it is to be used not only to signify, but even to commend the above doctrines, there can be no doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it, as being especially unjust to them and to the entire nation as well. For it raises the suspicion that there are some among you who conceive and desire a Church in America different from that which is in the rest of the world."