Over at Mirror of Justice, some of my fellow participants have been discussing what Greg Sisk calls "the prospect of a politician who dissents from fundamental church teachings on public protection of human life becoming the most prominent Catholic in America." See also Greg's earlier post Kerry, the Catholic Public Servant, and Catholic Teaching. (Update: Here's another interesting take.) I've stayed out of it, because I tend to use that blog mostly to write about Catholic social teaching and the corporation, doing my poliblogging over here.
A recent Time magazine article brought the issue into national focus, however, by quoting a Vatican official, who is an American: "People in Rome are becoming more and more aware that there's a problem with John Kerry, and a potential scandal with his apparent profession of his Catholic faith and some of his stances, particularly abortion." True to form, this brought out the best in Matt Yglesias, who went all Stalinesque (or would it be Maoesque? I can never remember which of them killed more people), opining that "the Vatican is the tenacious foe that the left can never quite seem to kill off." To the contrary, it was the Vatican - in the person of John Paul II - that played a key role in killing off the left's great 20th century experiment in Soviet communism.
In any case, as a number of those who left comments at Yglesias' blog pointed out, the US Catholic hierarchy is very hard to place on the standard 2-dimensional chart of US politics. If Yglesias had bothered to inform himself before spewing his bile, he might have found the thoughtful comments at Mirror of Justice of my co-bloggers Vince Rougeau and Mark Sargent, neither of whom think Catholics have a home in the American political scene as it is currently organized.
Oh well, at least the next time somebody asks me for proof of Philip Jenkins' claim that anti-Catholic bigotry is "America’s last acceptable prejudice," I can just point them to Yglesias.
Update: TM Lutas chimes in with:
I'm a Catholic. Clearly, I think that the idea that the Church is fascistic or otherwise 'not an admirable organization' as Matt Yglesias put it is simply false and insulting. But for those who do believe such things, how can they pull the lever for Kerry? Either they really don't believe what they say or they simply don't think that membership in a fascistic organization is all that bad. I'm not quite sure which is worse.Me either.
