Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

“Catholic” Politicians Today

(Reprinted from the issue of March 11, 2004)

I often wonder what Hilaire Belloc, who died a half-century ago, would say about today’s world. He was scathing about the degeneracy of the West in his own time; he predicted it would become even worse; but would he have been ready for the things we are seeing now?

More on Belloc shortly, but what reminds me of him at the moment is the California Supreme Court’s ruling that Catholic Charities, a Catholic social service agency, is legally bound to supply contraceptives to employees.

This is simply a totalitarian blow against religion itself.

More specifically, I’m awaiting the reaction of California’s nominally Catholic new governor. Will this dauntless hero of the screen dare to use the word “impeachment”?

If a justice in Alabama can be removed from office for displaying the Ten Commandments, what happens to those in California who abridge the free exercise of religion? Nothing?

A friend of mine has written to Governor Schwarzenegger inquiring about a similar matter: Will he order the arrest of San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom (another nominal Catholic) for defying state law by issuing bogus marriage licenses to homosexuals?

One pundit observes that by endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban these mock-marriages, President Bush “has abandoned the middle ground on gay marriage.” I’m so glad I don’t have to explain that sentence to Belloc. My mouth would dry up at the attempt.

I’d especially hate having to explain that Bush is now regarded as the “conservative” candidate this year.

But is that any more absurd than Schwarzenegger and John Kerry passing for Catholics? If there’s any English word harder to pronounce than “impeachment,” it must be “excommunication.”
 
Just One More Protestant Sect?

And here is why I’m reminded of Belloc. In his book Europe and the Faith, he remarks that the term “Christianity” in its modern sense was unknown in the early Church. It stands for a post-Reformation ideology.

But in the early Church, while she was struggling under Roman persecution and finally gaining her freedom, to be a Christian meant something more concrete than an opinion or an “ism.” It meant actually belonging to a social body, the one we call the Church.

A man might fully believe in Christ, agree with Christian teachings, and read Christian literature (though the Bible didn’t yet exist as a complete and defined collection of sacred writings), yet nobody would regard him as a Christian unless he actually belonged to the specific, living community of Christians — again, the Church.

“Agreeing” with the New Testament no more made one a Christian than agreeing with the Old Testament made one a Jew. Religion was emphatically not a matter of mere opinion. Even heretics weren’t lone dissenters; they formed their own communities.

And religious communities could and did expel those they regarded as errant members.

American Catholicism today might almost as well be one more Protestant sect, if men like Schwarzenegger and Kerry can call themselves Catholics without contradiction. Technically, their Baptism makes them so, yet no fidelity to the Church is asked of them, even by their own bishops. They both actively and shamelessly support the “rights” of abortion and sodomy, without fear of even a mild rebuke from the shepherds of the Church today.

Sometimes it seems that the bishops are the only ones who don’t even have opinions.
 
The No-Show Christian Bigots

In the first week of its release, Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ has enjoyed a success that can only be described as humongous squared. Judging by its popularity, the faith of ordinary Christians is far stronger than we’ve supposed, in spite of the hostility of the ruling powers.

That hostility was directed against the movie while it was still in production. Every organ of liberal opinion from The New York Times to the Anti-Defamation League mounted the attack months before it was finished. Dire predictions of violence against Jews were broadcast.

Gibson wasn’t the only target of the attacks. If you accuse a man of plotting arson, you are also saying something about his flammable materials. In this case, the implication was that Christians would respond to the movie with fanatical cruelty.

Needless to say, it hasn’t happened, and nobody ever thought it would. All the “predictions” were really calumnies. Millions upon millions have bought their tickets, watched the film in quiet reverence (often in tears), and, afterward, behaved like the Christians they are.

The only “violence” the film has inspired has been in the rhetoric of some of its reviewers: “anti- Semitic,” “sadistic,” “pornographic,” “snuff film,” “torture flick,” and so forth.

The New York Police Department reportedly ordered its hate crimes unit to attend the film. This nasty bit of business only underlines the simple fact that there was never anything to worry about. There hasn’t been a single violent incident connected with the movie.

Notably, not all Jews have joined the smear campaign against the film, but the decent ones have been disappointingly silent, apart from Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition, who has eloquently defended Gibson.

Will Christian Americans receive any apologies from those who have calumniated them? Don’t hold your breath. The Gospels, the Popes, the Church, the clergy, ordinary Christians, and our Lord Himself have been libeled so often that nothing surprises us anymore.

One of the raps on Gibson is that he rejects the Second Vatican Council, which allegedly “reversed” the teaching that all Jews bear the guilt of killing Christ. Here the slanderous insinuation is that the pre-Vatican II Church ever taught such a thing. Of course she never did, and any intelligent person knows that she neither does nor can “ reverse” her settled doctrine.

A major theme of recent propaganda has been that Nazism is somehow linked to the Catholic Church. It is endlessly repeated, without evidence or specifics, that the Gospels, Church doctrine, and medieval Passion plays caused the persecution and deaths of countless Jews.

It’s one thing to bear personal insults patiently; that’s Christian forbearance. But there are times when the honor of our religion must be defended. Surely this is such a time.


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Joseph Sobran