Catholics - I rarely get

Catholics - I rarely get as much feedback as I did when I tackled the Catholic notion of the just war, and the Catholic Bishops' and Pope's positions on war, the the catholic concept of the Just War.

It's clear the most American catholics disagree with the Pope - as Jason Lewis said the other night, "even if you are a Catholic, the Pope is not infallible on matters of politics".

So this article, in The Tablet (a British theological magazine) on catholic Americans' dual loyalties, is interesting:

Many of those outside St Perpetua’s [the pseudonym chosen for the Long Island parish the magazine visited] wore little metal lapel pins of the stars and stripes, and they told me they were prouder to be Americans now than for many years. No one I spoke to doubted the justice of the American cause, although some worried about the consequences; all seemed braced by churchgoing for the fight. “If it’s a crusade, then it’s got be our crusade”, said one youngish mother. And a thoughtful middle-aged man told me: “You know, throughout history, standing up to evil has been the Catholic way.”

But it is not a way endorsed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which recently pronounced that this war did not and “would not meet the strict conditions of Catholic teaching for the use of military force”. It is a way forbidden by the Vatican, which calls the war “a crime against peace”, and which sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to warn Bush off. The cardinal issued a statement boasting that there is “great unity on this grave matter on the part of the Holy See, the bishops in the United States, and the Church throughout the world”; the White House riposte was that the war “would make the world better”, and that the President’s first duty was to protect his people.

Still, a quarter of his people are Catholics. Must not the enmity of their Communion to the President’s great enterprise impede it, or at least threaten his hold on half the Catholic vote?

Well, no. Dan Bartlett, Bush’s communications director, shrugs off the Church’s condemnation of the war: “There are many Catholics who support it; I am one of them.” Polls showed American Catholics in favour of a unilateral assault on Iraq by two to one: much the same proportion as non-Catholics. Laghi is right that the Pope and his bishops stand united against the war. But this episcopal unity does not matter. For most American Catholics the dilemma of divided loyalty is simply not much of a dilemma.

I love this next part:

ohn Paul, despite his approval of forcible intervention in East Timor and Bosnia, is widely perceived as a pacifist, and therefore not a serious commentator. “It’s the Pope’s job to shake his head over the wicked way of the world”, I was told by another white-haired, loyal worshipper at another parish, forthright and cheerful in sensible shoes and medal of Lourdes. “And it’s our job to do something about it.”

And with that remark we come to the core of the matter.

It has often been observed that American Catholics sound more like American Baptists or Presbyterians than like Old World Catholics. They share with their Protestant compatriots an intensely privatised religiosity, an intensely privatised conscience. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, has given an amazing interview to the National Catholic Reporter explaining that, despite her views on women priests and abortion, she remains a conservative Catholic because she enjoyed a “strict upbringing in a Catholic home where the fundamental belief was that God gave us all a free will and we were accountable for that, each of us”. In the United States, that does not seem an eccentric definition of Catholicism.

I'm not in the least bit Catholic - although the main governing body of my church, the Presbyterians, may be farther to the left than the American Bishops, and unlike the Catholics, may have a congregation to match. Which is interesting - mainstream Catholics in the US are probably more unabashedly pro-liberation as a group than are most mainstream Presbyterians and Methodists, whose leaderships aren't as irredeemably anti-war as the Pope and the Bishops.

It's a never-ending conflict.

(Via Sullivan)

Posted by Mitch at March 22, 2003 10:10 AM