Joan Walsh at Salon on the embarrassment that Rick Santorum (and I'd add, the American bishops and their "liberal" co-belligerents in their phony "religious freedom" war) have become for American Catholics who remember how hard the previous generation worked to emerge from defensive, sectarian tribal, ghettoized Catholicism following the election of John F. Kennedy and Vatican II:
I made a comment last week in passing that I’d like to elaborate on here: I’ve spent a lot of time, in the book as well as on Salon, pointing out the anti-Catholic Nativism that hobbled my people and that accounts for some of our pugilism, shall we say, in the public square. But Santorum makes me realize I haven’t said enough about why some people were and still are suspicious of Catholics. His disrespectful comments about mainline Protestant churches somehow being agents of Satan is just one example of the contempt for other faiths that has gotten us in trouble over the years. I came of age after Vatican II; my parents were devout Catholic ecumenicists, attending seders at our local Jewish temple and telling the neighbors, no, we’re not supposed to blame Jews for killing Jesus anymore, and Protestants love Jesus, too. Santorum is an example of the mind-set that liberal Catholics and lapsed Catholics have been fighting in my lifetime, and he’s really a disgrace.
And she's right. What Santorum and the bishops are doing is assuring that, for spiritual foundations, many of us are now choosing to look anywhere except our Catholic church. Because what we had come to understand our church is all about is not what Santorum and the bishops (or their "liberal" co-belligerents) stand for.
The graphic is a photograph of a bronze sculpture from Bocklady's The Bock blog.
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