Political Animal
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September 21, 2012 11:54 AM
Bad News On the Religio-Political Front
It won’t have any bearing on this election cycle, and isn’t making big headlines. But in the “struggle for the soul of American Christianity” that has long been a subtext of our political culture, the selection of an obscure man to an unimportant-sounding post by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops could be a pretty big development. Amy Sullivan explains at TNR:
The appointment of a new executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development doesn’t sound like earth-shaking news to most people. But social justice Catholics (as opposed to the abortion-firsters) have been awaiting the announcement ever since the bishops’ longtime anti-poverty lobbyist John Carr announced in June that he would be leaving after 25 years in the role….
Earlier this week, the USCCB announced that Jonathan Reyes would replace Carr at the conference. Reyes has most recently led Catholic Charities in the Denver Archdiocese. But in Catholic circles, he is better known for having co-founded and served as the first president of the Augustine Institute, an unaccredited Catholic graduate school in Denver that has no women on its faculty. However, the institute does have a number of faculty with degrees from Steubenville University in Ohio, the Liberty University of Catholicism. Steubenville made national news in May when it became the first Catholic institution to sue the federal government over the contraception mandate, even though the school would almost certainly be covered by the administration’s “religious employer” exemption.
Perhaps the most relevant piece of Reyes’ background is his position as a protégé of Archbishop Charles Chaput, who served in Denver until his recent appointment to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Chaput, you may remember, was one of a handful of Catholic clerics who declared in 2004 that John Kerry should not receive communion because of his support for abortion rights. The archbishop gave an interview to the National Catholic Reporter last week that all but endorsed the Romney-Ryan ticket, and he joined a small group of Catholic leaders who have sought to defend Paul Ryan and his enthusiastic support for cutting funds to social programs.
After noting that Reyes has nothing remotely like the stature of his predecessor, National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters commented:
[A]t a time when there are obvious divisions within the hierarchy regarding which public policy issues should be emphasized, and how those issues should be framed, it seems to me imperative to have selected someone who was not so obviously aligned with one wing of the current ideological divisions within the Church.
It’s another step down the road to a political alignment of the Catholic hierarchy—if not necessarily the clergy or the laity—with the political Right.
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dweb on September 21, 2012 12:05 PM:
Boy those bishops sure do know how to line up with losing causes, and just at the right time too.
c u n d gulag on September 21, 2012 12:08 PM:
The only thing, and I mean THE ONLY thing, that has earned the Catholic Church any respect in the last centuty or so, has been it's support for social and economic justice and the organization of workers.
The Church has always hated women, and didn't do much to end their subjugation. Women accomplished what they've accomplished without the Church's help.
Now, it appears their hatred for women, and their icky lady parts, takes precedence over social and economic justice and the organization of workers.
What good is the Catholic Church if it sides with the rich and oppressors, even if it's supposedly only over the issue of women's health?
There's overlap there. They just hate women so much, they don't see it.
Then again, my Russian Orthodox Church isn't any better.
That's why I'm an Agnostic bordering on Atheism.
If there really is one, I have nothing against God.
Except the people He/She/It lets do the PR, sales, and fund-raising. THEY'RE ASSHOLES!!!
Bob M on September 21, 2012 12:15 PM:
Dweb beat me to it: they're losers. I've known many good Catholic priests and a few awful ones, but the hierarchy, whew.
kindness on September 21, 2012 12:18 PM:
Well....all you Catholics who can't stand to see how your church is being hijacked....you don't have any voting rights to select your bishops or the Pope. That is a closed circle and you are purposefully being left behind.
No offense but maybe it's time to select another church. The Anglican's did it. Granted the Episcopal Church in the US has the same issues that the Catholic Church is struggling with but at least you can actually have some say over your leaders in other branches of Christianity.
Me? I'm a hodge podge who can not be defined, particularly since I do not think humans are God's highest creation and that we share this universe with many many sentient life forms that my God loves equally.
cwolf on September 21, 2012 12:21 PM:
If the catholics want to get into politics and suing the people of the United States because American morality doesn't dovetail with the papist antediluvian dictates,,,
Fine,,, let them.
And also let them pay some TAX into the US, and local treasuries so they have some real skin in the game.
inkadu on September 21, 2012 1:21 PM:
Imagine if the CEO of Walmart, the third-largest employer, was considered to speak for all of his employees. Hey, everybody, Michael Duke supports Romney's policies! It must mean Obama does not have the support of all that Walmart workers. CEO Duke speaks for the downtrodden working class!
Sounds ridiculous, right? The employees of Walmart have exactly the same amount of influence selecting their CEO as Catholics do of selecting their Bishops: none. Yet the media treat the pronouncements of Bishops to reflect the views of their parishoners. By any interpretation of polls, Catholics vote pretty much like everyone else. The Bishops speak for themselves, not for the laity.
That being the case, why is it front page news when a bishop has something to say? The media gives them more importance than they are due as dignitaries appointed from Rome.
Much of this Catholic nonsense could be mitigated if the media stopped treating the pronouncements of a single bishop as the Voice of the Catholic Church. Bishops do not speak for its members. It speaks for the top brass. If the point is to say it has some political pull with its members, it does not. Lazy journalism, thrilled to have an authoritative (authoritarian) voice speaking for a large group, give it a lot more weight than otherwise.
The secular media are the ones who decide Bishops are important.
schtick on September 21, 2012 1:49 PM:
I am so glad I shed that annoying Catholic skin so long ago. And in searching for a skin to replace it, I found they all belong together. They are hypocrites at their finest and if anything, they all should taxed and taxed double when they stick their nose in politics.
I like being a heathen. I don't have to donate 10 percent into a rich organization that makes me puke. If there is a God and if there was a Jesus, I don't think they would support these lying hypocritical rich churches we have.
I'm a practicing agnostic. Please take your religious rants to another door.
emjayay on September 21, 2012 1:59 PM:
In 1958 the cardinals chose a fat old Italian guy to be a sort of caretaker pope who wouldn't be around that long. He wasn't around that long, but long enough to convene Vatican II. The result was a shift in the overall direction of the church in the direction of being more humanistic, open, ecumenical, people oriented etc.
Then a succession of reactionary popes since then have managed to turn the ship around again into the bad old ways of being doctrinaire and repressive.
American bishops for a while were fairly socially conscious and in church terms, progressive. They and all the other officials have at this point been replaced by the doctinaire and repressive variety. Kind of like Republicans appointing Scalia and Thomas and Alito to the Supreme Court.
This appointment is one more step in that direction. Kind of like sending John Bolton to the UN, this guy will make his Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development have a meaning like some government department in Orwell's 1984.
Mitch on September 21, 2012 2:14 PM:
@kindness
"... I do not think humans are God's highest creation and that we share this universe with many many sentient life forms that my God loves equally."
I am a committed atheist, and I totally agree with your statement. Indeed, I will take it further:
We share this Earth is other sentient life forms that any God would have to love equally alongside us.
I am counting our fellow Great Apes (Gorillas, Chimps, Bonobos and Orangutans), elephants, African Gray parrots and several species of cetacea (dolphins and whales) as sentient beings. All have incredible mental capacity and solid concepts of self, as far as my studies of science have confirmed. To treat them as less than equal beings is an insult to their creator, whether you call that creator God, or Natural Selection.
Bob M on September 21, 2012 2:41 PM:
Interesting approach, Mitch -- a long way from my Catholic education where I was told they were machines put on earth by a benevolent God for Man to use at will.
sebastian on September 21, 2012 2:52 PM:
Does anyone know how the Church's coffers have fared since the Bishops began their "Fortnight of Freedom" and other political actions?
Mitch on September 21, 2012 2:55 PM:
@Bob M
It's just as long of a distance from my own Southern Baptist Fundamentalist upbringing. So I feel you there, bro.
Frankly, I have little respect for Bronze Age mythology. Why don't we all study the Four Elements and Four Humors in lieu of modern science, or predict the future by examining bird guts like the augers of old, or bleed ourselves to relive illness?
I totally feel that everyone has the right to believe in whatever they choose. But that does not mean that anyone else has to take those beliefs seriously, unless supported by evidence.
TCinLA on September 21, 2012 3:37 PM:
Someone is surprised that an organization run by the reactionary Ratzi the Nazi is retreating to its Pius XII-and-previous roots? The revolution of John XXIII has long been over, this is merely the final nail in the coffin.
The Borgias were right when it came to the true nature of the organization they ran.
Anonymous on September 21, 2012 3:43 PM:
We share this Earth is other sentient life forms that any God would have to love equally alongside us.
All of whom are more decent and honorable than we are as a species. When was the last time any animal ever lied to you, cheated you, robbed you, tried to kill you (for any reason other than last-ditch self-defense), or in any way harmed you? The truth is that Homo Sapiens is the failed species on this planet.
TCinLA on September 21, 2012 3:46 PM:
Once again, Anonymous above c'est moi.
boatboy_srq on September 21, 2012 3:59 PM:
@Mitch on September 21, 2012 2:55 PM:
You've been keeping track of the Texas Board of Education, haven't you? Those courses are right behind ID/Creationism (and four-humour biology and P&A), geocentric cosmology, young-Earth history (and chemistry and physics) and replacing social sciences with Teh Book.
Peter Principle on September 21, 2012 9:52 PM:
John Paul II may be dead but his shadow -- or rather, sidekick -- Pope Ratzo Rizzo lives on. And so does the Curia's betrayal and destruction of Vatican II.
It's as if the 1991 coup in the Soviet Union had succeeded, and the Politburo had spent the next 20 years erasing all evidence of glasnost.