The presidential race is full of religious ironies, pitting a
Protestant who quotes the Pope against a Catholic who rejects the
Pope. The Protestant — campaigning on opposition to abortion and
homosexual marriage — will likely get the Catholic vote. The
Catholic — campaigning on embryo-destruction, partial-birth
abortion, and the alternative lifestyles of pagan antiquity — will
get the mainline Protestant vote.
In one more irony and historical marker of clerical decadence,
the Catholic candidate will receive a higher percentage of support
from the Catholic episcopate than the Catholic laity — the very
episcopate Kerry has made a point of saying that he will ignore on
matters of morality. John Allen of the National Catholic
Reporter writes that “if the Holy See were to vote in a secret
ballot for the American president, Kerry would beat Bush 60-40.”
Polling of American bishops would even be higher. Priests like
Richard McBrien have appeared in clerical collar on national
television to justify voting for Kerry. The dean of Notre Dame,
which the bishops regard as their Harvard, recently published a
piece saturated with third-rate casuistry urging Catholics to vote
for pro-abortion Democrats.
Incapable of transcending long-elapsed stereotypes, the secular
media cast Kerry’s Catholic problem as a conflict with a
reactionary hierarchy. Would that it were so. A few bishops oppose
Kerry, but many more privately support him and have whispered
against the handful of brave bishops who threatened to withhold
communion from him.
Kerry’s Catholic problem started not with the clergy but with
the laity. The Roger Mahonys of the hierarchy are Democratic
activists and dilettantes, not guardians of the ancient faith. (For
more on Cardinal Mahony, click here.)
They have no problem supporting an open heretic like Kerry, because
their faith in Catholicism is as ambivalent as his. Kerry is their
idea of a good Vatican II Catholic — liberal on economics, avant
garde on morality. Indeed, a loss for Kerry represents a loss for
them. He embodies the liberal catechesis they have tried to drill
into the laity for decades. If a majority of the Catholic laity
vote against Kerry, it will be one more rude confirmation to Roger
Mahony and company that their post-Vatican II project to liberalize
the laity has flopped.
”We are looking at a broader picture, a more global picture,”
said Bishop Gabino Zavala, one of Mahony?s auxiliary bishops, to
the New York Times. ”If you look at the totality of
issues as a matter of conscience, someone could come to the
decision to vote for either candidate.” For the Democratic
bishops, infanticide and minimum wage are weighted the same. Kerry
knew early on that most of these bishops wouldn?t confront him,
given their passivity and weakness for Democratic politicians who
make the right social-justice noises from time to time. Kerry?s
allies in the Democratic Party scrambled to produce a “Catholic
Voting Scorecard” to show that he and other pro-abortion Catholics
have adhered more closely to the positions of the “U.S. Catholic
hierarchy” than to their Catholic Republican counterparts. By
highlighting Kerry?s support for the liberal politics of the
bishops — on the Senate floor, he once read from their inane
pastoral letter on Reaganomics — the Democrats had hoped to cancel
out the perception that Kerry was a heretic no self-respecting
Catholic could vote for.
Kerry’s plans to hide his heresies under Roger Mahony’s Seamless
Garment were blown out of the water by the lay Catholic equivalent
of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Numerous lay Catholic groups
have exposed Kerry’s Catholicism as a fraud and have coaxed out of
timid bishops a few words of rebuke toward Kerry.
Not that the bishops aren’t still constructing rationalizations
for Kerry even after a debate before millions in which he
misrepresented Catholicism wildly, managing to reject at least a
third of the Ten Commandments. On Tuesday The Drudge Report had one
of those blood-red headlines titled, “Vatican Denies It Responded
To Lawyer Seeking Kerry?s Excommunication.” This was a life raft
the bishops were trying to throw the Kerry campaign. The story came
from the Catholic News Service, the propaganda outlet the bishops
use whenever they want to muddy an issue to the benefit of a
pro-abortion Catholic.
Kerry has rejected Catholic teachings Martin Luther didn?t
touch, yet CNS was frantic to dispel the notion that he is a
heretic. “One Vatican official contacted by CNS said no church
official had seriously approached the point of declaring Kerry a
heretic. ‘No, Kerry is not a heretic,’ he said.”
The National Catholic Reporter, which also speaks for
many bishops (they advertise in its pages for chancery jobs) even
as it wars on Catholic orthodoxy, is advising Kerry “to talk
religion.” It denounced the “small and narrow” group of Catholic
laity opposing him and noted that many bishops support Kerry. But
if Kerry takes its advice and campaigns on heretical Catholicism,
where can he go without getting booed? Perhaps Roger Mahony, who
encouraged his congregation to give Bill and Hillary Clinton a
standing ovation on Palm Sunday during Clinton’s race against Bob
Dole, could arrange a town hall meeting at the Los Angeles
Cathedral. But then Kerry had that vote sewn up a long time
ago.
