Short weeks ago, the political world was in welcome upheaval at
the news that Barack Obama’s latest healthcare fiat was being met
with great opposition, particularly by the Catholic Church. His
dictate that certain forms of contraception be covered by all
employers regardless of their religious beliefs had folks from both
right and left arrayed against him, outraged at his blatant
disregard for the First Amendment’s protection of religious
liberty. But then a funny thing happened.
Rush Limbaugh, influential in liberal as well as
conservative circles, read on air from a column written by Dr. Paul
Rahe, a professor at Hillsdale College, who basically said that the
Catholic Church deserved what it was getting, as a result of its
“Pact
with the Devil,” made decades ago. The piece makes numerous
contentions against the Church in America; most of them true and
some of them not so true, with further inference by Rush,
suggesting that the Church was indeed in league with the Democratic
Party and therefore rightfully deserving of its treatment by Obama
and friends. Sort of what I call the William Kennedy Smith defense:
that girl walked into the bar with me; ergo, she deserved to be
raped.
Have many U.S. bishops acquiesced to parts of the liberal
agenda in the last 70 or so years? Unfortunately, they have, as
have too many Americans. Yet to posit that the Church is in bed
with modern Democrats is a quite a stretch. The Church is the only
worldwide entity that stands athwart their main pillars: abortion,
gay marriage, and euthanasia. Yet, as the Rahe view gains
popularity, too many Americans have put the Church in their sights,
instead of the Obama Administration.
The distressing part of all this is that many
conservatives have now fallen prey to that most progressive of
diseases: the “everybody knows it” syndrome. This dreadful malady
takes hold when an appealing bit of personal opinion makes its way
into the mainstream, then metastasizes into the realm of public
acceptance. This nugget need not be factual, but it becomes an easy
way to deal with issues that deserve deeper
consideration.
Almost as disturbing as the “the Church deserves it”
theory, is Dr. Rahe’s claim that in 13 years of visiting parishes
across the nation, he has only heard three anti-abortion sermons,
and none on contraception, stating: “In the face of the sexual
revolution, the bishops, priests, and nuns of the American Church
have by and large fallen silent. In effect, they have abandoned the
moral teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in order to articulate
a defense of the administrative entitlements state and its
progressive expansion.”
Well, this surely comes as news to me and millions of
other American Catholics. Living as I do, in Fairfield County,
Connecticut, one of the most liberal enclaves of this nation, you’d
think that I too would have trouble finding a parish that teaches
the true Faith; that it would be impossible to find a spiritual
home amongst the modern dwellings of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course,
nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, within a few
miles of my home, there are at least five parishes so orthodox in
worship, that they would be fit to host a visit from Pope Benedict
XVI himself; indeed, my own parish church was recently named a
minor basilica where, during any given week, Dr. Rahe might hear a
few pulpit-pounding homilies dealing with abortion and avail
himself of one of the 15 Confession opportunities. And yes, there
is always a line.
The truth is, there are very many faithful Catholics in
this country who reject the liberal agenda: just look to the U.S.
Supreme Court, or to the many recent converts to the faith among
the conservative punditry, or to two of the four remaining
presidential candidates. The problem is, those who call themselves
Catholic yet publicly and repeatedly reject Church teaching are the
ones who get all the ink.
But, as they say, the times, they are a-changin’. Newly
named Cardinal Timothy Dolan — a classmate of my Pastor at the
Pontifical North American College in Rome — the jocular prelate
who is currently charming the pants off the liberal media, has been
gifted with the nauseating sobriquet of “rock star,” as they
celebrate his outward joviality while ignoring his rock-hard
commitment to the Church and her teachings; a mistake they will
hopefully come to regret. He is only one of many of the Pope’s
Panzer division of new hierarchy of the Church who will lead her
for many years to come.
So before folks decide in favor of an indictment against a
fading breed of 1960s bishops as representative of the Church in
America, they shouldn’t fall prey to the liberal media tactic of
blaming the victims. The Church, going forward, may indeed lose
many, many members who wear their Catholicism like a piece of
clothing to be changed and discarded at a whim, but those of the
true Faith will continue to uphold and defend it, come what
may.
