The post-modern answer to this last question is: We read
their emails. By their emails shall ye know them. When speaking among friends
and political comrades in emails, politicians sometimes discard their masks,
loosen their belts and tell the rest of us what they REALLY THINK. We owe these
freshets of honesty to hackers and hacker aggregators such as WiliLeaks.
Here we are listening in on a “private” conversation between
a few heterodox Catholics – Catholics In Name Only (CINO) – and Democrat political
operatives who usually busy themselves dressing thorny but honest political
thoughts in more proper, tenuous, highly ingenious and purposefully ambiguous,
Orwellian political garb – the sort of language one frequently finds in arcane
college theses. And, come to think of it, many of our post-modern politicians’
most memorable lines have been hammered out on academic anvils by recent graduates
of Harvard or Yale interning for Senator Blunderbuss, because the solicitous
attentions of Senator Blunderbuss have made it less likely that any of them will
find real jobs in the real world.
Sandy Newman,
president and founder of the progressive nonprofit Voices for Progress, muses
in a recently un-privatized email: “There
needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of
a Middle Ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect
for gender equality in the Catholic Church. Just musing.” Mr. Newman – No
relation, one supposes, to Cardinal John Henry Newman, author of “The
Development Of Christian Doctrine”? – is musing to John Podesta, presently the Chairman
of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
Newman, who is Jewish, modestly acknowledges that he doesn’t know much about the Catholic Church: “Even if the idea [of a Catholic Spring that would overturn a doxology Newman regards as Medieval and outmoded] isn’t crazy, I don’t qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would ‘plant the seeds of the revolution,’ or who would plant them.”
Fortunately, Mr.
Newman had addressed his e-mail to a revolutionary CINO. Mr. Podesta, responds,
“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment
like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics
United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.”
John “I’m Catholic” Halpin, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American
Progress, joined in the discussion. Halpin to Podesta: "It’s [Catholic
theology] an amazing bastardization of the faith. They [Orthodox Catholics; at
the time Newman wrote his “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” Orthodox Catholics were derisively called Papists, but modern anti-Catholic Catholics avoid the term] must be
attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and
must be totally unaware of Christian democracy."
Jennifer Palmieri, also a professed Catholic and Chairman of the 2016 Hillary
Clinton Presidential Campaign, weighed in: "I imagine they [some of the
conversant’s peers] think it [Catholicism] is the most socially acceptable
politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if
they became evangelicals."
A minor quibble
before we pass on: There are no such categories as “conservative” or “liberal”
Catholics; these are political terms. Within Catholicism, there are orthodox
and heterodox Catholics.
Naturally, the new theology, an attempt to update
Catholicism by purging it of its core beliefs, eventually trickled up to
soon-to-be-President Hillary Clinton. Speaking before the Women in the World Summit in 2015,
Mrs. Clinton peeled back the velvet glove from the iron fist: “All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights
have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with
resources and political will. And deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs
and structural biases have to be changed."
So far in her campaign, Clinton has shed half “the
deplorables,” that portion of the country that is irredeemably committed to
Donald Trump, Constitutionalists who think the First and Second Amendments
should not be administratively repealed by Presidential edict, evangelicals in
the South and Appalachia who cling to their guns and bibles for protection and
spiritual succor, young people who had flocked enthusiastically to the
Democratic primary campaign of socialist Bernie Sanders, who insisted correctly
during his primary campaign that the Democrat Party machine had fixed the
primary, a supposition since confirmed by hacked emails let loose in the world
by either European, Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean plumbers.
Catholics and Evangelicals now are feeling the recoil of an
aggressive progressive secularism. And, not surprisingly, orthodox Catholics put off by a) late term abortion, b) the
selling of baby parts by Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in
the nation, and c) putative Catholics who want to post-modernize the Vatica are
feeling bitten.
But these religious grouping no longer matter to the
post-modern, progressive, new-model Democratic Party that has written them off
as gauche and politically un-hip. The bright bulbs of the New Democratic Party
reject as outmoded the doctrine of subsidiarity embodied in the federated
government set-up by the founders of our Constitutional Republic, also
outmoded. And never having read Thomas Aquinas or his modern interpreters with
a jeweler’s eye, the hip-hop theologians regard the author of the “Summa Theologica” as an unlettered and
irrational boob. In addition, they suppose that the Catholic Church, which
regards Mary the mother of Jesus as its first and most faithful theologian, is
conducting a war against women, when historically it was the Roman Church that
freed women and slaves from a male centered culture that was, much like modern
times, indifferent to abortion and the exposure of newly born infants, shamelessly
immodest and virulently anti-Christian.
We now know what the progressive Democratic Party REALLY
thinks, as illustrated in the emails released by WikiLeaks and other disturbers
of the peace. The Obama administration, as of this writing, is now preparing
for a twitter war against Vladimir Putin, oil magnate, butcher of Ukraine, the
puppet master behind Bashir al Assad’s murderous regime and, possibly through
his intelligence services, the instigator of Hillary Clinton’s current unease.
But at least he’s not a Papist, an Evangelical or an Orthodox Jew. We should
fall to our knees and thank the Democrats’ post-modern God for small favors.
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