..and you will see the awful horror (sitting) in the place where it should not be.
My entire life I’ve been treated to explications on how Church teaching is neither Left nor Right, Liberal nor Conservative, neither Democrat nor truly Republican. It’s something higher, something ‘above,’ yes? It’s something other than, or outside politics; something of God, of theology. That’s garbage.
There’s nothing good or Catholic about liberalism and you know it’s true.
I was presented with an Easter family discussion where someone I love reiterated how it’s so wrong to use ‘religion’ as a reason to kill. It hurt me to have to defend the Church at the expense of this person’s ego, but unfortunately he was stuffed full of television and the New York Times, so his world was full of false facts and plied assertions. Garbage in, garbage out: the hermit’s rule is one of a clear mind and a pure heart.
Religion is not only a reason to kill sometimes, it’s a reason for everything – but that religion must be Catholicism. Everything done, every choice made, has either a reason or an excuse. This depends on whether it’s wrong or right, loving or careless, prudent or foolish. Only an atheist would try to separate reason from religion as if it were possible.
The same applies to politics because it is about power. Liberal churchmen like to pretend there is something true and good in big government but God has nothing to do with the usurpation of rights to life, property, and family. Such statist ideas, which you find in print, television, and in some contemporary papal encyclicals, contradict the Magisterium and the teaching of social justice heroes Leo XIII and Pius XI. Their ideas are new, and they represent a ‘rupture’ when taken independently.
Now we’re about to be oppressed with a global warming/sustainability encyclical. Don’t pretend it’s Catholic when you see it and don’t try to massage it. Measure it against the context of all (not simply recent) Church teaching.
In general this is a very poor era of popes who either enforce or permit a smothered, collapsing, and dysfunctional Church; a Church where ‘Catholic’ seems to mean all kinds of Protestants and heretics – people who show up on Easter like they’re doing God a favor.
Such ‘catholics’ vote liberal. Why confuse yourself by imagining there are any good reasons to do likewise?
An NBC affiliate reports:
The church attendance differences are most stark when you look at Catholics.
Yes, Mr. Obama won the overall Catholic vote in 2012, but Mr. Romney beat the president handily among Catholics who attended church at least weekly – 57% to 42%. In fact, those figures matched exactly the margins Mr. Romney had over Mr. Obama with Protestant Christians.
But among more casual Catholics, those who attend church less than once a week, Mr. Obama defeated Mr. Romney with similar ease – 56% to 42%. (There are similar differences among protestant voters, though Mr. Romney won both regular church attendees and less-frequent churchgoers.)
The message in these numbers? There will not only be more people in the pews around this weekend in your house of worship, there will probably be a different body politic.
Those Easter-people aren’t united to the Church Militant, and unless something changes, will not be united to the Church Suffering or Triumphant. Hence, they aren’t the Church.
The Vatican will count them as Catholics, the press will trumpet their politics, the Synod on the Family will survey them, and the Pope will chase them because they are truly his people; but they aren’t Catholics. They’re just liberals, and until we purge the Church of their ranks in the laity and the hierarchy, she will continue to wilt, and society to blacken.
To close, here is an Easter church-going family with whom Pope Francis and the U.S. Bishops find much in common.
