Why not a Catholic Party?

Shortly before the election, a friend sent me a copy of a message her parish received from its pastor.

In the introductory paragraphs, the pastor wrote something to the effect that it's unreasonable to expect the platform of any political party to match up exactly to the teachings of the Catholic Church. And as long we think in terms of the Democratic, Republican, Green, Peace & Freedom, American Independent, etc., etc, parties, that's bound to be true.

But what if there were a political party whose entire purpose was to match up with the central Magisterial teachings of the Church?

It wouldn't even have to be a party in the sense of fielding candidates of its own. It could exist primarily to provide a single organization to which Catholics and others could attach themselves, knowing that this party would never compromise when examining the claims of other parties' candidates.

The original "Catholic Center Party" arose in Germany in 1871, to counter growing anti-Catholicism pressure, and soon persecution, by the triumphant secular state brought into being largely through the work of Otto von Bismarck.

As we face a similar situation today, which will only intensify in the near future, I think we need to give some serious consideration to following the example of 1871 -- and then act.

More on this, anon.

In the wake of today's Supreme Court decision...

Thomas More, and all of us

Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons is one of the 20th century's great dramas, but if you've only seen the movie -- splendid as it was -- you really owe it to yourself to read the original play (or see it, of course, if you're lucky enough to have a production nearby). That's because the play included a very important character who was left out of the movie screenplay: us. The Common Man. The Little Guy who never sticks his neck out. 

I'll write at tiresome length about this at some later time, but for now, here's a snippet of dialog. The Jailer character is one of The Common Man's personae in the play, and he has just genially declined to undertake even a small personal risk to give the imprisoned Sir Thomas More five more minutes with his family.

JAILER (Reasonably)  You understand my position, sir, there's nothing I can do; I'm a plain, simple man and just want to keep out of trouble.

MORE  (Cries out passionately)  Oh, Sweet Jesus! These plain, simple men!

Religious freedom? Oh, never mind.

The State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights doesn't include the usual sections on religious freedom this year. Just refer to last year's report, says State.

So glad to know there's nothing new to be concerned about. For example, that summons for all 1,000 remaining Christians to leave the Syrian city of al-Qusayr within a few days, delivered from the minarets of the city the other day -- you see, that's not really a problem, because most of the Christians had already left al-Qusayr in early spring, when they were attacked by multiple Islamist factions. So, it's old hat, water under the bridge, old news.

Besides, they're only Christians.

H/t Catholic Culture.

You can read the State Department's report here.

Pelosi: Bishops don't speak for Church

The increasingly indescribable Nancy Pelosi has now informed us that in suing the Federal Government over the HHS/ObamaCare insurance mandate, the Catholic bishops of our country are not speaking for the Catholic Church.

As usual, words are important, because they are the framework for thought. Consider how that phrase "speaking for..." is used by sane people. When President Obama says something, he speaks for the executive branch of government. No one would say, "Yeah, but I talked to a guy in the EPA, and he disagrees, so Obama's not really speaking for the administration." We'd retort, "What you really mean is that not everyone in his administration agrees with him." That's because by virtue of the office that he holds, we all know that Mr. Obama can indeed speak for his administration, regardless of internal disagreements.

In a similar way, the bishops speak for the Catholic Church within their dioceses, and when gathered together under the constitution of the USCCB, they speak for the Catholic Church in the United States.

Nancy, please go home and spend what time you have left on this Earth enjoying your grandkids. And repenting for your longtime rebellion against the Church. And for your decades of complicity in the murder of millions of unborn children.

Everything not forbidden is compulsory

A New Mexico court has ruled that a photography business owned by Christians may not legally refuse to photograph a gay couple's "wedding."

The title of this post is drawn from T. H. White's The Once and Future King, in which it figures as the motto over the door of the local... ant hill.

Words for that Sunday -- and this one

Seventy-two years ago, at the same milestone in the liturgical year at which we currently find ourselves, Winston Churchill made his first radio address to the British people as Prime Minister. The situation was terrible: German armies were pouring into France, and the overmatched British Expeditionary Force was reeling back toward a little Channel port called Dunkirk.

But Churchill knew how to marshall the English language to serve his nation's need. I urge you to read the entire address here, but for the moment, here is his stirring conclusion:

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: "Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be." 

Catholics, in particular, should ponder those words on this Trinity Sunday. Especially so since the grand sentences he quotes are from the First Book of Maccabees, a book still proudly contained in Catholic Bibles, but consigned to the "Apocrypha" in Protestant ones. They'll be good to recall, when the storms on our own horizon break -- soon.

Something to do this weekend

See it.

Bishop Jenky hits the mark

I had never heard of Bishop Daniel Jenky before, but listen to this snippet of the stirring words he recently spoke to a group of Catholic laymen:

The Church survived and even flourished during centuries of terrible persecution, during the days of the Roman Empire. The Church survived barbarian invasions. The Church survived wave after wave of Jihads. The Church survived the age of revolution. The Church survived Nazism and Communism. And in the power of the resurrection, the Church will survive the hatred of Hollywood, the malice of the media, and the mendacious wickedness of the abortion industry. The Church will survive the entrenched corruption and sheer incompetence of our Illinois state government, and even the calculated disdain of the President of the United States, his appointed bureaucrats in HHS, and of the current majority of the federal Senate.  

May God have mercy on the souls of those politicians who pretend to be Catholic in church, but in their public lives, rather like Judas Iscariot, betray Jesus Christ by how they vote and how they willingly cooperate with intrinsic evil.

Wow.


You really should read the entire text, because he doesn't forget to counsel a charitable approach and attitude. But start with this article at Catholic Culture (which is a darned good outfit to support, by the way).


This is the kind of appeal that can galvanize Catholic men to action. The namby-pamby stuff we're usually offered is useless to bringing men back into the service of the Church. All of us, but we men in particular, long to give our lives to something worthwhile in God's eyes, and to feel that we're in the company of our Catholic heroes of the past. 

You can always get them back

How perennial sin is! The more history I read, the more it seems that there's hardly any evil in our modern world that the Church hasn't had to tackle many times already, in its past.

One of the most telling moments in C. S. Lewis' Narnia books comes in Prince Caspian, when a ghostly old woman hears the Narnians refer to the White Witch, who appeared to have been killed at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. She scoffs: "[W]ho ever heard of a witch that really died? You can always get them back."

And we do.

The other First Amendment

Now that we've been treated to the news that a Tennessee school district (Tennessee, for cryin' out loud!) has cautioned public-school coaches and teachers not to bow their heads to join in student-led prayer, it's time to re-read Amendment 1 of the U.S. Constitution. All of it, this time.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Now, everyone refers to the first part part as "The Establishment Clause." They read to the first comma, and stop. Case closed. Chalk up another victory for removing Christianity from the public square.

But just beyond that comma is a very important counterbalance: "... or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

It's that balancing phrase that no one seems to remember these days. And we Christians ignore it at our peril.

I think our Founders understood very well that the sense of the first phrase could eventually be used to banish the practice of religion from the public square, although the danger must have seemed remote in that time of strong Christian consensus. But that consensus is no more, and many now seem to think that all religion is dangerous and suspect. It's a setup for repression.

So it's time for us to rename that clause, as a first step in reclaiming its central message. Can we please start referring to it as the "Free Exercise" clause?

And then exercise the freedom it recognizes, in public?

The Culture of Death gives the envelope another nudge

It's good to see the USCCB pushing back against the efforts of the Obama administration to force Catholic entities to pay for contraception and sterilization in their health insurance benefits. It's even better to see that our parish's bulletin contained the bishop's flyer about this issue.

Rather than cave in to this latest Progressive pressure -- if it succeeds, which it could well do -- Catholic employers should drop health insurance coverage out of their compensation packages. Give their employees the same money as was being paid for their insurance premiums (yes, I know it'll amount to less in total, because it'll be taxed), and have them secure their own insurance.

Some will argue that this will reduce the ability of Catholic organizations to compete with secular ones in attracting good job candidates. My question to them would be: exactly what constitutes a "good" candidate for a Catholic entity's jobs? One who has a nice shiny degree from Stanford or Harvard, for instance, but rejects most, if not all, of the Church's teachings?

Here we go again -- maybe

I've been reading A Popular History of the Catholic Church, by Philip Hughes. It's from 1949, when Catholics were still proud (and popularly, if sometimes grudgingly, expected to be proud) of their Church. This passage, about Julian the Apostate's brief attempt to restore paganism to the Roman Empire in the 300's, stood out:

Christians he persecuted, and this not by any frontal attack, but sinuously, by cutting them off from all the culture of the time, forbidding them to teach or be taught, by harassing them with vexatious regulations, and by conniving at the inevitable recrudescence of ancient Pagan hatreds.

Parts of Julian's program are just what is being carried out right now in our own culture, are they not?

Progressivism and the Catholic Church

Well, that's a subject line that would merit book-length treatment. But today, for now, just this:

Why is it that several generations of American Catholic clergy and laity have concluded that the big-government solutions of the Progressive Movement are just dandy expressions of Catholic moral teaching?

Looking back through history, it seems to me that the Church generally has had endless trouble when governments were huge and powerful. First there were the persecutions led by pagan Roman emperors. Then, when the emperors turned Christian, there were the repeated interferences in favor of heresy (e.g., Arianism and the Iconoclastic movement), followed by heavy-handed persecution of heresy (e.g., of Monophysitism in the Eastern Empire, a bone-headed move that helped soften up Christian unity for the first waves of Muslim conquest).

In the West, as the power of regional governments grew, starting in the 9th century, we had the Holy Roman Emperors demanding to appoint their own bishops, and generally interfering with the Church governance. As the national governments of France and England grew in power and stability, they too sought to control the selection of the Church's leadership -- finally including the Papacy itself. The Tudor dynasty in England ended the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses and re-established the kingdom, only to have Henry VIII squander his father's legacy, plunder the Church's property to refill his coffers, then tear his country's Church away from Rome in his mania for siring a male heir.

When the "divine right of kings" gave way to the democratic revolutions of the 1700's and 1800's, the Church suffered again -- once again at the hands of all-powerful states which had undergone a change of masters but not a change in their lust to control every important feature of private life.

And then in the 20th century there came those twins of totalitarianism, Communism and Fascism, and their rich uncle Progressivism. These three huge-government movements have all sought to tame the Church to their purposes, and to persecute it when it dared to be uncooperative.

And now we're into the second year of the Presidency of Barack Obama, and of the overwhelming legislative ascendancy of the radical wing of the Democratic Party. Their hostility to core moral teachings of the Church, soft-pedaled during the campaign, is now clear.

And yet so many Catholics still babble about the importance of promoting "social justice" through bigger and bigger government, through the permanent triumph of the Progressivist cause.

If we Catholics really want to promote "social justice", perhaps we should work on making ourselves extraordinary examples of charity and virtue. When we arrive at our own particular judgments before God, I don't think he's likely to ask us how diligently we voted for socialist programs, so that the poor could be helped through the forcible taking of money from other people. Instead, I think He'll ask: "What did you give, freely and humbly, because your heart was illuminated by My grace?"