Catholic Bashing:

Politically Correct Bigotry

(www.RemnantNewspaper.com) One of the most interesting things about The Remnant's web page, which I visit daily, is the number of linked news articles and editorials that fall into the Springtime Updates category. The ancient Greeks understood that hubris guarantees nemesis, that overweening pride and arrogance produce blowback and worse: that inherent in hubris is its antithesis, that the rosy, blinding optimism of the hubristic entity invariably is diametrically wrong, close to 180 degrees wrong in some cases. The hubris that animated the convening, running, and implementing of Vatican II, with warnings pooh-poohed as the babblings of spoilsports or chastised as the rages of Neanderthal brutes ignorantly trying to prevent the dawning of the second Pentecost age of love, must be exposed, isolated as a bacillus under the microscope (to tap a phrase from Walker Percy), as part of the cleanup of the nemesis. And so The Remnant provides the Springtime Updates that infuriate both Catholic Liberals/Progressives and those who jealously 'conserve' a vision of a newly perfected orthodox Catholicism that came by Vatican II and will blossom all over the world any second.

We are in a year of Presidential election, when people are triply stroked to profess faith in Anglo-American democracy as the last, best hope of mankind, to believe that their ballots have real meaning, that somehow their votes for common sense and decency can reverse the tsunami of secularist sexual and cultural-relativist revolution that the Elites intend to cram down every throat in the sacred names of Tolerance, Diversity, and Choice.

That being the case, the Springtime Update link that recently has spurred me to the most reflection is the one titled 'Springtime in Ohio: Catholics Vote Mormon.” The link is to a CNN article by Dan Gilgoff titled 'Loudly Catholic Santorum Loses Ohio Catholics' ( http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/07/loudly-catholic-santorum-loses-ohio-catholics/#s736045=&title=Family). Gilgoff's article is one of many of its type during this election cycle, when the Obama administration is flexing its muscles to force the Catholic Church to accept its anti-Catholic and Mainline Protestant-friendly mandates under the guise of health care for women. The approach taken most often is to emphasize that the majority of Catholics oppose the Church and/or the Bishops on some issue. The underlying call is for those Catholics who dissent from the Church on morals issues to continue to do so, because such is the democratic Anglo-Saxon-American way of thinking for yourself and doing what feels right in your own heart.

The reality, of course, is that there is no such freedom. If you are not being led by the Church, you are being led by something that is opposed to the Church in at least key ways. For example, a Catholic who rejects the leadership of the Church on the defined morality of homosexual marriage and abortion has replaced one master for another. Rather than accept being led by the Church, he has chosen to be led by the Sexual Revolution and the various and sundry organizations that promote it. He has freed himself from the shepherding of bishops and the Magisterium to be enthralled by the spirit of non serviam. As one folkie/rocker of Jewish ancestry who has dabbled with Protestantism says, “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody.”

The two key sentences in Gilgoff's article are back to back paragraphs: “According to CNN’s exit polls, Romney took 43% of Ohio Catholics on Super Tuesday, compared to 31% for Rick Santorum, and Romney beat Santorum overall by 38% to 37%.”

 “Catholic voters accounted for a third of Ohio’s Republican electorate, the largest share of Catholics in any Super Tuesday state.”

Whether Rick Santorum is the ideal candidate for Catholic voters for the office of President is not the issue. The issue is what it means that the plurality of Catholics in a state that tends to be indispensable to getting the slightly less liberal candidate into the White House prefer a Mormon, which is not even a fairly normal Protestant group with largely orthodox doctrines, a Mormon who has been all over the board morally and culturally to a Catholic who is unapologetic about his faith and orthodox in his adherence to historic Christian morals.

The excusers and promoters of Vatican II, many of whom continue to reveal that they see it as a super-council that largely displaced all that came before it (and fail to see that the degree to which that is true is the degree to which Vatican II crossed lines and acted like a Protestant council, creating anew to march in step with the prevailing winds of the zeitgeist of the era), will be bleating at this point about the Latin Mass crazies who blame Vatican II even for voting patterns.

Vatican II is not the answer to what caused this, not fully, and certainly not in origin. But it is central to the problem in a way that is far more complex than the predictable excusers of the post-Vatican II fiasco can allow themselves to face.

The matter ultimately is one of assimilation. The work of scholarship that best makes the case for how American culture was formed and in turn shapes newcomers is David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Fischer sees American culture as having two main divisions, each of which was forged by a pair of migrations from the British Isles. The four groups are: Anglo-Saxon Puritans, Quakers, western England (and northern England) Anglo-Normans, and what Fischer calls Borderers but what  everybody else recognizes as Scots-Irish or culturally Celtic Protestants from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The first two groups together formed Northern culture, and the latter pair coalesced to form Southern culture, with each of the two basic American cultural divisions in place by the time of the American Revolution.

Note that all four groups are Protestant. Fischer, and I think he is dead right, is asserting that American culture is Protestant; American culture is not neutral, is not some general 'Christian' in which Catholicism is a fully respected equal. American culture, Yank culture, is Protestant, and the melting pot boils all non-Protestants so that they will serve the interests and prepossessions of the WASP Elite. Assimilation means becoming a cultural WASP at least to a significant degree.

I also agree with Fischer that all other peoples, such as the waves of Irish, German, Polish, and Italian Catholics, eventually assimilated in the main to one of the two primary branches of American culture. As those Catholic immigrants settled overwhelmingly in the North, they began the process of assimilating to Northern culture; they began to become Catholics who retaining ethnic awareness and even pride were basically, after three to five generations, Yankee WASPs in cultural terms. Fischer best highlights his case with John F. Kennedy. Fischer acknowledges that Kennedy was raised with a definite Irish cultural sensitivity and pride, both of which were necessary to be elected to political office then and there, but “he was also a New Englander {meaning Anglo-Saxon Puritan} in his education, associations, prejudices, dress ways and even his speech ways” (873).

Catholics in 19^th and early 20 century America wanted to assimilate to American ways and identities because that would allow them to build their churches and make lives without facing active persecution. But the cost of assimilating to Protestant culture compounds at an increasing rate. In the case of the Kennedy clan of Massachusetts, the cost would be increasing assimilation to the point that Ted Kennedy's politics, public moral pronouncements, and operative prejudices would be indistinguishable from those of Boston Unitarian-Universalists of unadulterated Anglo-Saxon ancestry, save that Teddy occasionally would invoke Catholic social teaching, necessarily understood in the spirit of Vatican II, as whelping and girding his positions.

All four of the groups that Fischer sees as determining American culture are Protestant, but the four of them came to North America with wildly differing political perspectives and cultural proclivities, as well as contrasting and contradicting doctrinal emphases. Understanding that, and thus the resulting differences down to this day, is necessary to understanding why Catholics across the northern states will tend to prefer more liberal candidates, why, for example, Catholics in states in the north were necessary to sending Barack Obama, the most pro-abortion and pro-homosexual marriage President yet, to the White House.

The Puritans I always designate as Anglo-Saxon for two reasons: they overwhelmingly came from the southeastern and south central areas of England in which there was virtually zero admixture with non-Germanic peoples and their theology became ethnically obsessed. Many different groups in religious terms comprised the general Puritan grouping, certainly at the time of the Puritan Revolution, but the ones who came to New England were preponderantly pure Anglo-Saxon in bloodline, and their theology was predicated upon faith in their being, in effect, the new covenant Chosen Race. For them, Calvinist notions of election before the foundation of the world were national and ethnic as well as individual. Various antagonists of Puritans, such as playwright Ben Jonson, saw them as Judaizers of the worst sort, as seeing the Anglo-Saxon as the new Jew: God's chosen people who were, in effect, justified sinners no matter the sins because of who they were.  Jonson, writing before Puritans had amassed the power to effect a revolutionary overthrow of an already revolutionized anti-Catholic nation, lampooned them for another characteristic that they would bring to New England: a materialistic theology in which they tended to equate wealth and the acquisition of power with God's blessings and approval, therefore also with the high probability of being among the Elect.

They were quintessentially a people driven by a passion to purify every eye that had a mote that they could identify based on their own understandings of Scripture and their faith in being chosen to identify and take care of motes. Their purification meant violence; you gave up your eye willingly, or they would take it, killing you as needed. Naturally, their doing God's purification work meant at least their leaders became filthy rich, which proved to them that they all were Elect. Add to the self-righteous justification of all their murderous violence and cultural trampling their never-ending anti-Catholicism, seeing it as the source of all corruption that required their purifying, and you have half of the groups that formed Northern or Yankee culture in America.

Like Puritans and virtually all other Protestant heretics demanding a new world order, Quakers were certain that they were restoring the purity of 1^st century, or at least pre-Roman tolerance, Christianity. They differed from Puritans in that the violence that effected Protestant successes horrified them and that they rejected all inherited order. While Puritans, at least through the early 18^th century in New England, remained largely orthodox in matters such as Trinitarianism, Quakers took Protestant notions of individuals led directly by the Holy Spirit to an extreme that most Protestants recognized as utterly chaotic if adopted by the entire society. Quakers came to avoid all sacraments, even communion and  baptism by water, because they felt that all of life is sacramental. In the name of making everything holy, they made nothing holy. Like Puritans, especially in their theologically decayed state (which was complete by the 1820s), Quakers could be counted on not merely to support but to lead all radical reform causes. Like Anglo-Saxon Puritans, Quakers instinctively intuited the peoples whose culture meant they must be warred against (at least culturally and politically) for the soul and mind of the new nation, and foremost on the enemies list were Catholics.

It is a given that any national or regional culture based on and largely determined by those two Protestant cultures will serve the cause of ever-progressing Liberalism, especially cultural and moral liberalism. Catholics who assimilate to a national or regional culture born of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism   melding with Quakerism will start the process of their descendants thinking and acting in all areas of life like predictably Liberal Mainline Protestants.

And that process is not restricted to laymen. It guaranteed the large number of Catholic bishops who think and act far more like Episcopalians spawned by or aspiring to the Ivy League than like Catholics at the dawn of the 20^th century.

If, as I assert, Catholics assimilating to American culture, specifically to the much more liberal northern part of American culture, is the reason behind, first, Catholics playing the indispensable role electing Barack Obama and now the more 'conservative' Catholics playing the key role in choosing not the unabashed Catholic Santorum, who stands rather steadfastly with the Vatican on morals issues, but the culturally and morally liberal Mormon Mitt Romney, the son of a flaming liberal Republican governor who endorsed atheist revolutionary Saul Alinsky, a mentor of Obama, to face off against Obama, then how can Vatican II be at fault?

The defense of Vatican II and its implementation by those who are largely orthodox, as opposed to the promotion of the spirit of Vatican II by Liberals, is that changes in the world necessitated pastoral changes in the way the Church should, even must, interact with the world in order to prevent an increase in lost sheep. There is a common sense basis to that assessment, which requires that the common sense be continued in evaluating whether the pastoral changes worked and therefore whether  they should be maintained. And that is the way in which people should be able to ken what an unmitigated failure Vatican II was.

For example, of the pre-conciliar church and the Vatican II church, which significantly retarded Catholic assimilation to an utterly liberal anti-Catholic culture like Yankee WASP and which seemed from its inception like gasoline tossed ceaselessly on the smoldering embers of Catholic assimilation to even the most perverse Modernist cultures?

Which Mass, Tridentine (Extraordinary) or Novus Ordo (Ordinary), best steers Catholics to discern the differences between the Apostolic Church and the rotten fruits of the Reformation that in their most orthodox forms have only the appearance of godliness?

Which Mass is a rock against Catholics embracing the basic fruits of Feminism and thus of the Sexual Revolution that is endorsed by the vast majority of Protestant denominations and is the cornerstone of Modern revolution to obliterate even the vestiges of Christendom, and which Mass signals many Catholics that they should demand that the Church get with the times in regard to Feminism and thus the Sexual Revolution: Tridentine or Novus Ordo replete with altar girls and female Eucharistic ministers and lectors?

Christ declares, “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men.” Catholics who think and act like Liberal Protestants surely have lost most of their savor. Extraordinary measures, such as the Extraordinary Mass, are required to restore the savor, without which we can be certain that Catholics will continue to promote the same things that Liberal Protestants promote.