Joan Desmond at the National Catholic Register conducted a very useful interview with Ross Douthat.
I find myself agreeing with what Douthat has to say about Catholicism’s realignment from Democratic to Republican (a very partial and complicated but real change). We face a challenge. Because the Democratic Party is increasingly dominated by a secular mentality at odds with the public role and influence of religion, religious people are moving to the Republican Party. The danger for Cardinal Dolan is that the Catholic Church will become Republican in the same way that some Catholic liberals of the old school are now apologists for the Democratic Party. The trick, it seems to me, is to get things moving in the other direction. If there is in fact a continued shift of Catholics toward the Republican Party, then we need to work to make the GOP different—in a Catholic sort of way, as Douthat says.
August 30th, 2012 | 1:30 am
No Change. Traditionalist, orthodox Catholics have been Republicans since Eisenhower/Nixon, 1952. Although I admit they might have voted for JFK in 1960.
If anything, fewer Catholics are voting Republican now than in the Nixon years, ’68 and ’72.
August 30th, 2012 | 11:10 am
That this shift, (which the laity recognized as essential long before our Church institutions) is only occuring now is a sad commentary on the usefulness of Catholic polity. The attacks still being made on this shift by the USCCB, LCWR Network, etc. have the sound of a priveleged class.
BTW: Is it true that the Nuns on the Bus are giving Sandra Fluke a ride to the DNC?
August 30th, 2012 | 11:59 pm
What is it exactly that the Church wants any political party to do? Wasn’t the immigrant mistake to make too much of politics? More than anything else wasn’t it the cycnicism and corruption and politicization of everything that drove Americans into the suburbs? But then the suburbs are now embracing the personal is political. And now the Church is unwelcome everywhere. I vote Republican and if what some Catholics think of I me I am also a “conservative.”
August 31st, 2012 | 12:13 am
Is being a Catholic just a specific way of thinking politically? Or is thinking like a Catholic similar to the way law school students are encouraged to think like lawyers? Douthat’ s context is far too political which is a problem with American Christianity in general. I wonder if it isn’t that rather than a demanding orthodoxy that is driving Americans out of the Church? Otherwise what is religious liberty and the free exercise clause for? The Catholic Democrat has more to do with place and time than principle. I would ask any Catholic, any priest, any religious, any bishop if they can name a single pro-life union. I can’t. And remember that most union jobs are government jobs. I want to end abortion. I want a radical restoration of family. I want the freedom to live Christ’s teachings. Everything in society today from work to education to civics to the bishops’ laundry list of economic and environmental and utopian priorities works against this. What exactly are Republicans going to do about that? I do know what Democrats are going to do or rather continue to do to marginalize the Faith.
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