Blogs > Pope Orrin's Bull

Dec 27, 2003

Pope Orrin's Bull



There was a good column in the Post-Dispatch today by a former Clinton judicial nominee regarding the Republican claim that a  Democratic bias against Catholicism is behind the opposition to Bush's nomination of Alabama Attorney General William Pryor to the federal bench. According to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, "Pryor’s opponents display 'a prejudice against traditional religious beliefs. But I’m not saying Democrats are anti-Catholic … there is a developing hostility to religious Catholic beliefs.”

Hatch's concern is rather amusing, coming as it does from the party that once flayed the Democrats as the party of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion." There would be no GOP if the anti-Catholic (and anti-immigrant) Know-Nothings had not come first, smashing the Whigs and forming a major component of the new northern party, the Republicans, that soon replaced the Whigs in the two-party system. Going back to the early stages of Irish Catholic immigration, the Democratic party has been the historic home of American Catholics. Of course, times can change. The Catholic-Democratic relationship has weakened in the face of abortion and other post-60s social issues, and modern Republican know-nothingism is considerably broader in scope than it was in the 1850s, extending as it does to science, economics, international law, and basic standards of honesty.  Yet I am guessing that it remains true that heavily Catholic areas are still pretty heavily Democratic, though not always as reliably so.

The Clinton nominee, who is Catholic, points out the major reasons why this might be so. The Catholic Church agrees with the modern, Southern WASP-dominated Republican party on very little except on sexual morality, and even if you don't agree, the Church's position on abortion is actually much better grounded than the Republican one. Here are some quotations from the column by Michael D. Schattman:

I was opposed by Republicans because my adherence to Catholic principles of social justice put me at odds with them and their values of social injustice.

I helped a police chief prevent a race riot. I believed in the 14th Amendment, equal rights under the law, and the dignity of every individual. I questioned the wisdom of the death penalty but not its constitutionality. I rejected war's morality but recognized its historic unavoidability.

They did not.

Why? It begins, I think, with Pope Leo XIII. In his 1891 encyclical "Rerum Novarum," he taught the dignity of work, the rights of the worker to a living wage and the justice of organized labor. Since then, the principles of Catholic social justice have matured under successive popes and the leadership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to include:

  • An end to racial discrimination.
  • A minimum wage.
  • Equal employment opportunity.
  • Housing assistance.
  • A consistent respect for human life, encompassing opposition to abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, the death penalty, and war (with the current pope condemning the U.S. attack on Iraq).
  • More generous immigration and refugee policies.
  • An end to the embargo against Cuba.
  • Increased Medicaid eligibility.
  • National health insurance and a patient's bill of rights.

And the list goes on.

As the bishops (not Hatch) put it in the publication "Faithful Citizenship" before the 2000 election, America needs a kind of politics focused on "the needs of the poor . . . the pursuit of the common good" and a system designed "to pursue greater justice and peace."

Republican rhetoric aligns with Catholic teaching on abortion, but that is the only point of convergence.

Hatch's ploy reflects two major features of the current political and cultural landscape: the Christian conservative persecution complex, which impels many evangelical Protestants especially to seize the mantle of victimhood for themselves from those (the poor, racial minorities, political dissenters) they feel have unjustly stolen it; and the campaign to redefine such highly valued concepts as faith, tradition, family, and patriotism in the most narrowly Southern Baptist terms imaginable. So Orrin Hatch embraces Popery, and Tom DeLay thinks he's an Orthodox Jew. link



comments powered by Disqus