Church and State

 According to Vox, “Francis has gained a reputation for being relatable, approachable, and down-to-earth. Some have called Francis “The People's Pope,”  and the “Pope of the 99 percent.” Time named him their Person of the year in 2013, as did LGBT-interest magazine The Advocate.  ‘In a matter of months,’ read the Time profile, ‘Francis has elevated the healing mission of the church — the church as servant and comforter of hurting people in an often harsh world — above the doctrinal police work so important to his recent predecessors” I am sorry folks but the 99 percent of the people are not LGBT-nor do they read The Advocate. As far as the world being harsh, it has actually been awfully accommodating to many varieties of people.  People of difference have been included with equity built into many of the systems we plug ourselves into, including media, entertainment, and industry. Inclusion and equity are on the rise and were definitely cow-towed to by business and government agencies and even the US military. The problem is that the emotional needs of the few outweigh the actual needs of many. 

George Weigel informs us that the United States Catholic Conference “in its first decades came to be regarded in Washington as an adjunct of the Democratic majority in the Congress, even as the bishops took some tentative steps into the murky worlds of radical activism by creating the Campaign for Human Development, which began to support programs of community organizing modeled on or promoted by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation” (for those who do not know, Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals, used to train the massive movement of progressives) In a country run amuck with so many progressive agendas vying for position in the trillion dollar executive orders and bills passed by the progressives in Congress, it seems the Catholic Church is riding the blue wave of hand-outs into oblivion. Weigel explains, “Yet for all their occasional playing with Alinskyite fire, the politics of the bishops’ conference during the Bernardin Era were more reflective of a determination to position the Catholic Church as part of a liberal vital center than they were of the politics of the American hard left” Yes, indeed surely Francis is pleased with this scenario, with all the sneaky deals going down in the Church and government. 

Weigel explains that John J “O’Connor’s staunch and un-yielding pro-life activism as archbishop of New York was crucial in keeping that issue alive at a moment when the pro-life energies of the American episcopate showed some signs of flagging. In doing so, O’Connor, who had very little use for bishops’ conference politics, set in place one of the markers that would eventually help displace the Bernardin approach to the Catholic Church’s interaction with the U.S. public-policy debate”

These excerpts should inform us of how the Catholic Church has its hand in public policy. This is of major concern for me because I like to see the influences of institutions in the postmodern and postcolonial world on policy formation worldwide, but particularly in the US. 

Weigel explains that during the “(Bill) Clinton years, an increasingly polarized U.S. Church—a polarization that now seems, in retrospect, to reflect the further decline of the Bernardin Machine and the beginnings of an alternative correlation of forces within the American hierarchy”

As nauseating as theology can be, it is good to keep a finger on the pulse of what happens during POTUS Administrations as they relate to the Catholic Church.  So if you can read clips of this blog, more power to ya. Whether past influences or present realities, the day's exigencies push us along no matter how we like it.