By Denise M. Burke, Esq.
As a committed Catholic and as an attorney who has dedicated her legal career to the on-going legal and cultural battles to protect the sanctity of all human life, I have -- not surprisingly -- been following election-year politics very closely. Much of what I have seen and heard from the candidates and the campaigns has not been particularly noteworthy or surprising. What was unexpected was the Obama Administration's full-frontal assault on the Catholic Church and our right to faithfully practice and pronounce our faith in the public square.
Make no mistake -- the results of this election will have profound implications for the Church and for the faithful. George Weigel, the biographer of Blessed John Paul II and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has written an excellent piece for National Review that concludes:
"Whatever happens on November 6, though, the Catholic Church in America has been changed, likely in irreversible ways, by the experience of this campaign year.
A critical mass of U.S. bishops now understands the challenge of this
cultural moment, and these bishops are prepared to exercise their pastoral office in the prophetic way that the challenge of the culture requires.
The utter incoherence of the Pelosi/Biden/Sebelius form of Catholicism has created a situation that those prophetic bishops will not likely fail to address. For while it is true that the Catholic Church is big enough for Paul Ryan and Joe Biden (and Nancy Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius), it is also true, and far more urgently true from a pastoral point of view, that there are different pews within Big Church Catholicism. Many of those in the more distant pews are grievously uncatechized, which causes them to lead lives of spiritual
and moral incoherence. That situation will not be tolerated indefinitely.
As the Catholic Church once became the lead Christian community in
intellectually formulating the pro-life position, it has now become the lead church in articulating, through the arts of public reason, the defense of America’s first freedom, religious liberty. In both of these exercises, Catholics have found common cause with evangelical Protestants; and in the religious-freedom battle (and the battle to defend marriage rightly understood), Catholics have found new allies among Mormons. And as the Catholic-Evangelical alliance in the American culture war led unexpectedly to new and rich theological exchanges, so, it may be expected, will the partnership in battle
alongside Latter-day Saints. The ecumenical landscape in the 21st century will thus look nothing like the ecumenical landscape when the Second Vatican Council opened 50 years ago.
'Progressive' Catholicism in America once claimed the Church’s Vatican II defense of religious freedom as its proudest accomplishment — as well it might. Yet that, too, has changed. The abandonment of the religious-freedom issue by far too much of the Catholic Left in 2012 was a further indicator of what Francis Cardinal George announced years ago: the death of liberal Catholicism from what had become, in the post–Vatican II decades, its spiraling intellectual implausibility.
Should the Republican ticket prevail, Vice President Paul Ryan will be the new face of public Catholicism in America, and a bracing new debate will unfold about embodying the principles of Catholic social doctrine in American public policy, and in joint work by the public and private sectors, to empower the poor, reform health care and education, and build a cultural and legal architecture of life. This debate will set the intellectual pace for the Catholic Church throughout the Western world.
Should the Democratic ticket prevail, the Catholic Church in the United States will be compelled to confront the federal government as it has never done before in the history of the Republic. The Church will do that to defend its own. But it will also do that for the sake of American constitutionalism. For what prickly John Adams once facetiously referred to as 'Grandmother Church' has, in 2012, become the lead church in the defense of the constitutional order for which Adams and his contemporaries argued, fought, and bled."
Read the entire column at "Catholic Reflections on the Endgame of
2012" .
As a committed Catholic and as an attorney who has dedicated her legal career to the on-going legal and cultural battles to protect the sanctity of all human life, I have -- not surprisingly -- been following election-year politics very closely. Much of what I have seen and heard from the candidates and the campaigns has not been particularly noteworthy or surprising. What was unexpected was the Obama Administration's full-frontal assault on the Catholic Church and our right to faithfully practice and pronounce our faith in the public square.
Make no mistake -- the results of this election will have profound implications for the Church and for the faithful. George Weigel, the biographer of Blessed John Paul II and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has written an excellent piece for National Review that concludes:
"Whatever happens on November 6, though, the Catholic Church in America has been changed, likely in irreversible ways, by the experience of this campaign year.
A critical mass of U.S. bishops now understands the challenge of this
cultural moment, and these bishops are prepared to exercise their pastoral office in the prophetic way that the challenge of the culture requires.
The utter incoherence of the Pelosi/Biden/Sebelius form of Catholicism has created a situation that those prophetic bishops will not likely fail to address. For while it is true that the Catholic Church is big enough for Paul Ryan and Joe Biden (and Nancy Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius), it is also true, and far more urgently true from a pastoral point of view, that there are different pews within Big Church Catholicism. Many of those in the more distant pews are grievously uncatechized, which causes them to lead lives of spiritual
and moral incoherence. That situation will not be tolerated indefinitely.
As the Catholic Church once became the lead Christian community in
intellectually formulating the pro-life position, it has now become the lead church in articulating, through the arts of public reason, the defense of America’s first freedom, religious liberty. In both of these exercises, Catholics have found common cause with evangelical Protestants; and in the religious-freedom battle (and the battle to defend marriage rightly understood), Catholics have found new allies among Mormons. And as the Catholic-Evangelical alliance in the American culture war led unexpectedly to new and rich theological exchanges, so, it may be expected, will the partnership in battle
alongside Latter-day Saints. The ecumenical landscape in the 21st century will thus look nothing like the ecumenical landscape when the Second Vatican Council opened 50 years ago.
'Progressive' Catholicism in America once claimed the Church’s Vatican II defense of religious freedom as its proudest accomplishment — as well it might. Yet that, too, has changed. The abandonment of the religious-freedom issue by far too much of the Catholic Left in 2012 was a further indicator of what Francis Cardinal George announced years ago: the death of liberal Catholicism from what had become, in the post–Vatican II decades, its spiraling intellectual implausibility.
Should the Republican ticket prevail, Vice President Paul Ryan will be the new face of public Catholicism in America, and a bracing new debate will unfold about embodying the principles of Catholic social doctrine in American public policy, and in joint work by the public and private sectors, to empower the poor, reform health care and education, and build a cultural and legal architecture of life. This debate will set the intellectual pace for the Catholic Church throughout the Western world.
Should the Democratic ticket prevail, the Catholic Church in the United States will be compelled to confront the federal government as it has never done before in the history of the Republic. The Church will do that to defend its own. But it will also do that for the sake of American constitutionalism. For what prickly John Adams once facetiously referred to as 'Grandmother Church' has, in 2012, become the lead church in the defense of the constitutional order for which Adams and his contemporaries argued, fought, and bled."
Read the entire column at "Catholic Reflections on the Endgame of
2012" .
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