Weapons for the religious wars

[xpat]

Blumenthal remakes the case for separation of church and state, quoting American leaders from the Revolution to the modern era. Well worth the read. Tom Paine's "The Age of Reason", available free from Project Gutenberg, also contains priceless high-explosives.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042105H.shtml

Holy Warriors
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com

Thursday 21 April 2005
Cardinal Ratzinger handed Bush the presidency by tipping the Catholic vote. Can American democracy survive their shared medieval vision?

President Bush treated his final visit with Pope John Paul II in Vatican City on June 4, 2004, as a campaign stop. After enduring a public rebuke from the pope about the Iraq war, Bush lobbied Vatican officials to help him win the election. "Not all the American bishops are with me," he complained, according to the National Catholic Reporter. He pleaded with the Vatican to pressure the bishops to step up their activism against abortion and gay marriage in the states during the campaign season.

--snip--

Europe is far less susceptible than the United States to the religious wars that Ratzinger will incite. Attendance at church is negligible; church teachings are widely ignored; and the younger generation is least observant of all. But in the United States, the Bush administration and the right wing of the Republican Party are trying to batter down the wall of separation between church and state. Through court appointments, they wish to enshrine doctrinal views on the family, women, gays, medicine, scientific research and privacy. The Republican attempt to abolish the two-centuries-old filibuster -- the so-called nuclear option -- is only one coming wrangle in the larger Kulturkampf.

--snip--

For the first time, an American president is politically allied with the Vatican in its doctrinal mission (except, of course, on capital punishment). In the messages and papers of the presidents from George Washington until well into those of the 20th century, there was not a single mention of the pope, except in one minor footnote. Bush's lobbying trip last year to the Vatican reflects an utterly novel turn, and Ratzinger's direct political intervention in American electoral politics ratified it.

--snip--

The American Revolution, the Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were fought for explicitly to uproot the traces in American soil of ecclesiastical power in government, which the Founders to a man regarded with horror, revulsion and foreboding.

The Founders were the ultimate representatives of the Enlightenment. They were not anti-religious, though few if any of them were orthodox or pious. Washington never took Communion and refused to enter the church, while his wife did so. Benjamin Franklin believed that all organized religion was suspect. James Madison thought that established religion did as much harm to religion as it did to free government, twisting the word of God to fit political expediency, thereby throwing religion into the political cauldron. And Thomas Jefferson, allied with his great collaborator Madison, conducted decades of sustained and intense political warfare against the existing and would-be clerisy. His words, engraved on the Jefferson Memorial, are a direct reference to established religion: "I have sworn eternal warfare against all forms of superstition over the minds of men."

--snip Several quotes from Founding Fathers --

Benjamin Franklin? "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

--snip--

What did Kennedy say? "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ... I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."

--snip--

As both president and pope invoke heavenly authority to impose their notions of tradition, they have set themselves on a collision course with the American political tradition. In the name of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, democracy without end. Amen.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of The Clinton Wars, is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. thanks

for the information. Nominated and kicked!

[displacedtexan]

2. Hey, expat!

I quoted you in today's Blog Box.

You rock!

[xpat]

7. Thank you very much.

The enlightenment was a magical moment in our history and the world's. We owe an immense debt of gratitude to those 18th century freethinkers.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

3. Looks like the Catholics are going to have to take a stand

on which side of the religious wars they are on.

[imenja]

4. The numbers don't add up for this to have given Bush the election

Ratzinger tipped the election because of a letter. This smacks of a Republican plant. You all are falling for something that doesn't make sense based on the math. 52% of Catholics voted for Bush, the rest Kerry. So we are talking about 3% of the Catholic vote. Is 3% of the Catholic vote enough to have tipped the entire election to Bush? No. There are approximately 72 million Catholics in the US (of all ages, including children). Let's generously calculate that 50% of them vote. 3% of that number is 1.2 million. Bush won by over 3 million votes, more than double that 3% of Catholic voters.

Even that calculation assumes that the entirety of that 3 % of Catholic voters actually made their decision based on an idea that a Catholic politician should not receive communion, when the letter actually said that Catholics should base their vote on a range of issues: A Catholic would only be considered sinful and unworthy of the sacrament if he or she voted for a politician EXCLUSIVELY because of his stand on abortion.

This is an effort to play into anti-Catholic prejudice and divide the Democratic party base, and you folks are swallowing it hook line and sinker. The Republicans won't need to worry about raising campaign funds in 2006 when the Democrats get done eating their own. You've got to hand it to them. The Republicans are smart bastards. They know hatred is the most powerful force in American politics on both side of the isle. What is unfortunate is that most Democrats aren't smart enough to see through it. You've (plural) let them set the agenda on everything, to the point where Americans define politics in terms of GOP talking points: so-called "moral values" issues over social justice, peace, and poverty. That clearly is the case for most on this discussion board.


Then there is the obvious point that while Americans believe ourselves to be the center of the universe, we are not. The American Catholic Church is at best peripheral to the Vatican. The idea that they would be so concerned about an election of ours to try to sway it in favor of a candidate whose foreign policy and wars they frequently denounced is entirely absurd. It speaks to the tremendously inflated sense of self-importance Americans demonstrate with frightening regularity. There is a world beyond our own borders, and most Catholics reside there.

I'm copying a post by another DU member (Mehr) that contains a link to the text of the letter, on the off chance people are interested in knowing what it actually says. Link to original thread below.

*******

"The twisted interpretation of Radzinger's letter was used by some of the Catholic leadership, but not all. The Vatican's position was "if a Catholic thinks a candidate's positions on other issues outweigh the difference on abortion, a vote for that candidate would not be considered sinful."

Most priests misinterpreted this message (as did the yahoo story that has been all over the threads in the last couple of days). That was not Ratzinger's or the Vatican's position.

==============
Cardinal Ratzinger's note underlined the principles involved for the Catholic voter.

"A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia," Cardinal Ratzinger wrote.

"When a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons," he said.

http://www.jknirp.com/thavis3.htm

In other words, if a Catholic thinks a candidate's positions on other issues outweighed the difference on abortion, a vote for that candidate would not be considered sinful. (eg voting against Bush because of the war, his stance on capital punishment, his lack of support for social programs that help the less fortunate survive, his lack of health care for those in need, his support of torture and his endorsement of those that crafted the torture policy, et cetera.)

It was the US Catholic Church leaders that twisted Ratzinger's words and gave in the the weed, they sold out Catholics and our nation for 30 pieces of silver (faith based initiatives and tort reform to protect their dioceses from the litigation they faced due to their abusive and sick priests).

Basically, Ratzinger's letter said that Catholics should take responsibility for their actions, under Church law, if they are divorced, if they support programs that are not sanctioned by the Church (abortion, euthenasia, etc), then they should not try to receive the sacrament of communion. "

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1737427#1738518

[xpat]

6. I think you are right that Blumenthal's numbers don't add up.

The important thrust of the article, though, is the importance for a functionning democracy to maintain a hermetic seal between church and state.

That is what I meant by religious wars. The deeper paragraphs of his article make the point about separation quite strongly. His example - the president sought support from the priesthood to help him win the election - is damning evidence for Bush's disregard for the way our democracy works. Blumenthal goes on to quote numerous sources that explain clearly the need for democratic government to rest on a strong foundation of reason, while matters of faith be left at the door.

[imenja]

9. that I agree with entirely

What disturbs me is a tendency on DU to blame Catholics for the loss of the election.

[mopaul]

5. go sidney go!

he says it all for me.

[mopaul]

8. ......

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