More Catholic than the Pope.
I’ve got my differences with his Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, but at least I feel he is a consistent man as to placing the utmost value on human life. He opposed the Iraq War as unjust and spoke out about it frequently. He is against the death penalty. He is against stem cell research. And undoubtedly, he is against abortion. On two of the four recent political issues I mentioned, right wing social conservatives find themselves allied with the Pope, and they have used that agreement to demonize liberals and Democrats as evil over the last 25 years, even though they themselves do not agree with the Pope on the death penalty, Iraq, and the aspects of Catholicism that focus on poverty and social justice.
In the April 29, 2009 issue of the Vatican’s own newspaper, the L’Osservatore Romano, there was an opinion piece by the newspaper’s foreign affairs contributor on President Obama’s first 100 days in office. And he was insufficiently accusatory and condemning for the right wing’s tastes.
To the dismay of many conservatives, the Vatican’s own newspaper […] has offered what one antiabortion Catholic blog called “a surprisingly positive assessment of the new president’s approach to life issues” — so positive, in fact, that a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee was moved to criticize Pope Benedict XVI’s daily.
[…]
The April 29 essay by Giuseppe Fiorentino […] painted Obama as a moderate on many fronts. “Some have accused him of practicing excessive statism,” Fiorentino wrote, “if not even of making the country drift toward socialism.” But “a calmer analysis,” he said, suggests that Obama “has moved with caution.” […] On abortion and the other life issues, the article concluded that Obama “does not seem to have established the radical changes that he had aired.”In loosening the rules on federal funding of stem-cell research, the paper noted, Obama did not go as far as many in the antiabortion movement feared he would. “The new guidelines regarding embryonic stem cell research do not in fact follow the [prospective] change of route laid out months ago,” Fiorentino wrote. “They do not allow for the creation of new embryos for research or therapy purposes, for cloning or reproductive ends; and federal funds can only be used for experimentation with surplus embryos.”
Then came a carefully worded sentence declaring that “these measures do not eliminate the reasons for criticism in the face of unacceptable forms of bioengineering that work against the embryo’s human identity, but the new regulations are less permissive than expected.”
In response, the legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee said the assessment was “not helpful” and “there’s nothing middle of the road about the substantive policies that this administration is pursuing on life issues.”
Not helpful. That begs the question, helpful to what ends? Helpful to protecting “life” in America? Or helpful in opposing President Obama? EJ Dionne goes on to make the point that right wing conservative Catholics have no credibility when it comes to life issues, for they refuse to criticize Republican politicians who fail to fulfill their promises on abortion. Further, right wing social conservatives have no problem with supporting the death penalties and wars of choice. And they have no problem with taking from the poor to give to the rich. Yet they criticize the Vatican for being “not helpful” on opposing President Obama. The Vatican is not supposed to be “helpful” in opposing President Obama. It is not an arm of the RNC.
I have said this before and I will say it again. The biggest mistake that social conservatives made was to choose sides in the partisan war. Now they have no credibility, and that is sad.
Tags: Obama
To an outside observer, one can only come to the conclusion that their believe structure is nothing more than bi-polar.
Maybe those nutjobs just should roll a hundred-sided die in order to decide what they believe in next….
If you’re not with them (RNC), you’re a terrorist, and deserve torture.
I feel he is a consistent man as to placing the utmost value on human life.
Until it comes to preventing AIDS using condoms.
Or valuing the lives of mothers and their babies suffering or starving to death in conditions of abject poverty because contraceptives and family planning are immoral and unavailable.
And forget about saving lives by stem cell research because that is murder.
believebelief structure….ugh
“Right wing conservative Catholics” are a fundraising operation dedicated to supporting the “Right wing conservative Catholics” executive salaries.
The “pro-life industrial complex” has very little to do with trying to reduce the number of abortions in this country and everything to do with self-interest.
As a practicing Catholic, I have to say I’m encouraged by what I read from the Vatican newspaper (I tracked down a translation online). The article seemed to get my major argument for a long time, if you want to stop abortions, making it illegal is maybe the worst way to go about it. Helping mothers who have abortions only because of financial situations should be something that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on, but things that can actually be accomplished do not help elect Republicans, so they oppose the idea on “principle”
I agree Jim. I am a practicing Catholic also.
making it illegal is maybe the worst way to go about it
And making contraception readily and easily available is probably the best way, however, the Pope and the misogynist Catholic Church are against that, too.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124165510131594083.html
Of course any bridge-building requires folks to agree that birth control should be widely available …
Listen, no one is as critical of the Catholic Church’s position on contraception as me, but I think it is slightly misguided to call it misogynistic. These sorts of policies find their root in the Catholic Church following the lead of guys living in the middle ages who were more afraid of their own penises than anything else. Misogyny would imply that a hate for women leads to the policy. The truth is that the people who like this policy just hate sex, no matter who is involved, unless it is making little Catholics.
JimD,
You think it is only “slightly misguided to call it misogynistic”?
Talk to me when they support equal rights for women and allow women to enter positions of senior management.
And as far as hating sex, well, many priests seemed to enjoy it with children and they conspired to perpetuate and cover-up for its pedophiles at the highest levels of its management for decades.
How anybody can still believe that this business has any special claim to the sacred is beyond me.
What is a practicing catholic?
Is that like every tues and thursday you go out practice your jump hook? then on Wednesday’s you work on your crossover dribble?
I kill me!
I cannot, and would not if I could, defend how the Catholic Church responded to having pedophiles in their ranks. However, to say that “many” priests were the ones enjoying the sex with children is misleading. Many as compared to what? As compared to the number of priests there are in the world, the percentages are right there with Little League Coaches, teachers, and faith leaders of other faiths.
Also, I’m not sure why so many people around the world who are not Catholic care so much about the leadership of the Church. I mean, I care but they’re the leadership of my Church. I feel there should be women involved in every aspect of the Church and I hope that some day those changes will come to pass.