We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. . . and we still can.

In trying to pressure Biden, the Catholic bishops forget the lessons of JFK

So runs an opinion headline in the Washington Post.

Well, as the sage Bart Simpson would have it, au contraire, mon fraire.

Or more accuaratley, I suppose ma soeur, as the author is Karen Tumulty.

The article by Tumulty is completely unoriginal, I'd note, with no brilliant insights whatsoever.  Rather, it follows the standard line of thought on this noting John F. Kennedy's 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, who were all Southern Baptists.  Kennedy, as Tumulty and others have noted, famously stated:

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; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

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; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

This speech has been hailed again and again as brilliant strategic move by Kennedy, which it truly was.  But the overall impact, on a really cosmic scale, has rarely been analyzed.  

It may have been good for Kennedy, but it was a disaster for Catholics, and continues to be.  What the US Bishops are doing in some ways is reacting to that disaster, but only at the pint at which they almost have no choice but to do so.

Let's start with Kennedy himself.  He was a Sunday and Holy Day Mass going Catholic and part of an extended Catholic family, but not too surprisingly his own family bore little resemblance to the the Irish Catholics of the Catholic Ghetto who identified with him due to his Irish surname.  The Kennedy's were, and are, extremely wealthy and while as Catholics they were on the periphery of American life, they were on it in the way that wealthy Catholics could be as any member of a minority who was wealthy could be.  I.e., they were part of the in crowed in significant ways.

And as a member of that elite group John F. Kennedy carved for himself liberties that the Catholic faith never sanctioned, and he did so promiscuously literally.  Kennedy had a string of affairs that went beyond that which a person might normally be tempted to somewhat trying to excuse away.  He wasn't Franklin Roosevelt with a long time paramour, something inexcusable but at least not libertine.  

Indeed, under modern definitions, at least one of his affairs in the White House started with what moderns would be tempted to regard as a sort of rape.  It's debatable whether this category is truly applicable or not, but it was shockingly disgusting.  His behavior here, however, didn't stop with that, in regard to this individual, who descended pretty quickly into shocking behavior more expansively.  

We'll forgo detailing this more as its not necessary to this entry.  The point is that knowing what we now know about Kennedy, his willingness to make such a statement really ought to be put in a different light.  If he was declaring that he'd never let his religion directly dictate his actions, well, he wasn't in regard to personal behavior in a significant way, already.

This isn't an attempt to judge the state of Kennedy's soul at the time of his death.  We don't know that.  But what we can say is that in regard to his overall character, Kennedy really wasn't whom he seemed to be.  

And frankly, the statement wasn't that bold.  Catholic leaders of numerous nations had been in power in various places (including, we might note, Rome) since before the time of Constantine the Great.  The Church had never laid claim to a right to tell leaders how to rule, which was the real fear that the Southern Baptists at the time had.  Much has changed in regard to how Protestants view Catholics since 1960s, but some evangelical Protestants at the time, and now, held highly erroneous views of how the Pope's relationship to average Catholics, including politicians, worked.  Indeed, the political cartoon with the Pope directly pulling the strings of American Catholic politicians was a common feature of political debate up until the mid 20th Century.

The irony was that in 2020 the average Catholic is a lot more in tune with the Pope's views, in knowing what they are, than in 1960s, even though the way the Church actually works seems to be no more clear now than as opposed to then.  The current example is a good one in this regard. The Pope seems concerned that the US Bishops are going this direction.  The US Bishops are going this direction anyhow.  The Pope hasn't stopped them.  This is pretty typical over the ages.  When the Pope actually acts in regard to local Bishops, something has usually gone wrong on an extreme level.

And so too with politicians, as for the papacy.  And this overall situation is highly instructive.

Since the Second World War there's been a lot of attacks on the Papacy of Pope Pius XII, even though the actual historical record shows him to have done a remarkably good job during the crisis and the attacks against him unmerited and, to some degree, to have originated in a post war Communist smear campaign.  The Pope did speak against the Nazis during, and before, the war, in the form of proclamations on moral matters with the most noted being Mit Brennender Sorge.  Often forgotten is that some of the most direct attacks on the Nazi regime, however, came from the German Catholic Bishops themselves, one such example resulting in the White Rose movement.

What the Church didn't do is to issue a list of instructions to Catholics in power on "do this".  It did provide stout moral guidance, however.  It is of note here that in both the White Rose instance, and the July 20 plot, the prime movers were Catholics and Catholics were heavily represented.

How's this relate to what we're now seeing?

Well, pretty heavily.

In 1960s, when Kennedy gave his speech, the social issues that exist today and which are so much in the forefront, didn't.  No fault divorce didn't exist until 1970.  Abortion was just coming in as a state issue and didn't become the forced law of the land until 1973's Roe v. Wade.  The millennia old definition of marriage was completely unchallenged anywhere.

Things were moving, to be sure, and that should have been a warning.  The Kinsey report started being popularized right after World War Two and was given serious treatment even though the statistical methodology was grossly inaccurate and the conduct used to generate the badly skewed data heavily skewed. This played right into the hands of a new breed of pornographer lead by Hugh Hefner.  Starting in the 1950s an assault on conventional sexual morality commenced that would explode in the 1960s, but this wasn't obvious to most Catholics. The warnings were there, but they were not fully nor naturally appreciated.

Given this, in the enthusiasm that there might be a Catholic President, most Catholics joined the bandwagon and the Church didn't pull Kennedy in and say "be careful". After all, he wasn't really saying anything that generally shocked Catholics in any fashion in the context of the times.  Charles DeGaulle was a sincere and devout Catholic, for example, and nobody had any thought that the Bishops in France or the Pope was running France.

This would have been harmless enough, and still would be, but for the fact that very rapidly Catholics adopted, due to Kennedy and his speech, something that many evangelical Protestants never did, which was the concept of a completely personal separation of Church and State.  Where as everyone agrees that there should be no state church, many in the evangelical Protestant community do believe that a person's faith should fully inform their political conduct.  Many Catholics do as well, with most sincere ones believing that, but Kennedy's massive popularity, combined with the concept of his being an Irish Catholic, caused average American Catholics to believe that a full separation was a okay.  I.e, as long as I don't personally engage in . . . . it doesn't matter what others do.

The Church has never believed that in any form.  The declarations during World War Two show that.  It was never the case that the Church took the view that individual Germans could participate in the atrocities of the Third Reich and have a clean moral conscience as long as they had purity of heart.  Knowing that is what caused some to attempt tyrannicide.  But in the United States, which had no such overarching moral issue at the time, and where Catholics were on the side of liberal civil rights efforts, it was easy for things to became blurred pretty quickly.

By the 1970s there were liberal Catholic religious in political office.  And liberal Catholics began to side with things that seemed to square with at least some aspects of Catholic thought.  Where as some Catholic clerics had urged Catholics to participate in the fighting in Vietnam in the U.S. military early on, as it was a struggle against Communism, some Catholic clerics were openly opposing it by the late 1960s. And you can see how either view can be squared with the Faith.

But what never could be were developments in social issues that attacked marriage and the nature of sexual conduct, and which were contrary to Catholic views on the sanctity of life.  None the less, acclimated by the 1970s to a personal separation of Church and State, and being Catholic only on Sunday, lots of Catholic politicians went right along with these developments.  Pretty soon, in the tumult of the times, and with other developments inside the Church itself in the 1960s, average Catholics also did.

Unexercised muscles atrophy.  But failing to exercise for somebody who has, doesn't come overnight.  Any single man who used to have an exercise routine is probably aware of that.  The pressures of life and busy schedules, and just the thought that you'll stay home and watch TV lead to a situation sooner or later in which the former athlete has put on fifty pounds and is pretty tired just getting through the day.

Moral authority works the same way.  Things that should have been said decades ago weren't, and after awhile an entire body of Catholics convinces themselves that they're really good and observant Catholics even while omitting anything the Faith that's personally difficult.  Any Catholic with Catholic associates knows this.

At some point, however, there's a point at which you reach that you have no choice.  A person has a heart attack and is sent home with doctor's instructions.  People who smoke are told to knock it off.  You get the point.

And with moral authority, you reach some point where you have to exercise it as you have no other moral choice. That's where we are, and that's what I noted the other day in this entry:

Lex Anteinternet: A Corrective Warning.: We started off to comment on a couple of newsworthy items from the Catholic news sphere the other day but like a lot of things here, we only...

The Pope is saying be careful.  He isn't saying don't.  That's up to the Catholic Bishops in the United States. And looking at where we are now, they really have no choice but to act.

Individual Catholics, of course, also have individual free will.  The history of the world shows that people make difficult choices only when somebody is backing them up, and only when others are obviously doing the same.  There are exceptions, but those exceptions are heroic for that very reason, they're exceptions against the tide.  Observant orthodox Catholics have nearly been that exception for some time now, but things seem to swinging around to them.

Standing in their way, really, is the generation that came up in the 1960s, or just behind them. A lot of them have had nice lives riding the high point of American economic exceptualism, an era that's now really over, and are really not in tune with the world as it is. They're comfortable with the American Civil Religion, which is basically Christian as long as it isn't too hard, and which still, in spite of the Trump assault on democracy, holds that God basically listens to our vote on thing where we find it too hard.  As Catholics, they've acclimated themselves to the erroneous belief that they can omit big chunks of the Faith, as they have for so long.

That isn't Catholic, however.

The Church never acts very quickly.  So what the US Bishops will do, they won't do until fall.  That gives Joe Biden, who attends Mass every Sunday and on Holy Days, and who is openly Catholic, lots of time to comport his conduct to the tenants of the Faith.  But like men who go home from the hospital with instructions not to smoke, not to drink and exercise, that won't be easy.  Physicians state that most people don't actually clean up their personal health issues, but simply carry on.  And that doesn't involve the issue of pride that comes with decades of going down a certain political path that now needs to be corrected.

A path that John F. Kennedy started us out on.

A Corrective Warning.

We started off to comment on a couple of newsworthy items from the Catholic news sphere the other day but like a lot of things here, we only got to one, the recent Prime Minister of the United Kingdom's wedding.  We posted on that, we'd note, on a companion blog, which is where we intended and still more or less intend to comment on another thing, which was a recent change in Canon Law regarding punishments under the law for certain things.

The latter item created quite an odd stir on the Internet for reasons that are really unclear.  That was what the second post was going to more or less deal with.

Since that time, however, something we've dealt with here before has come up as a major news story, that being the almost certain move of Catholic Bishops to deny politicians the reception of the Eucharist if they publicly support abortion. This is in the news as it will impact the President, Joe Biden.

For sincere Catholics this news is both way overdue and the reaction to it incredibly surprising.  It's also had the impact of smoking out liberal cafeteria Catholics whose attachment to their faith is tempered by their politics and world view.  

To start off with, the Catholic faithful have long wondered why Catholic Bishops allow politicians to take the wishy washy "I'm personally opposed to abortion but. . ." cop out.  

The entire matter, as Canon Lawyer Edward Peters noted on, of course, Twitter seems pretty canonically clear.  Hence the surprise on the Captain Renault like "shocked shocked" reaction some liberal Catholics have been all atwitter with.

Here's the basics of it.

Catholics believe that every human being, no matter their condition or state in life, have a right to lift and that killing a human is homicide. This is the case whether or not a person is young or old, health or ill, intelligent or unintelligent, physically fit or dramatically impaired.

And it applies whether a person is born, or not. Catholics believe that a person's right to life is absolute, tempered only by the right of self defense.

Indeed, the last time the Church made news on this was when the Church modified the Catechism to provide that penal institutions and measurements had improved so much over the years that the death penalty was no longer morally justified.  This caused Catholic trads to be all atwitter in some instances.

That, however, was a mere development in a direction that Pope St. John Paul II had started decades ago.

The current controversy isn't even a new development in anything.  Catholics have held that abortion is infanticide since ancient times.  The sin has been regarded as so serious in more modern times that technically Canon Law precludes a confessor from forgiving it, requiring a Bishop to do that.  However, in many places, including the United States, the Church also has recognized that the sin is so common that this was unworkable and Bishops have extended permission to all confessors to forgive it.  A few years ago the Pope did that for the entire church worldwide, although I'm not up to speed on the current status that.

The Church has also always had a doctrine regarding "cooperation with evil".  Generally, "remote cooperation with evil" is regarded as inevitable. But direct open cooperation with evil can be a mortal sin.  For example, the driver of a getaway car in a robbery can't take the position that he's only a driver.  He's assisting in a great sin.  

Perhaps more illustratively, selling a handgun over the counter to somebody who intends to commit murder with it isn't a sin at all, if you have no knowledge of what he intends to do with it. But if a person specifically asks for somebody to provide a gun for a murder, a person can't morally do it.

This gets us to our current topic. The Church's concepts in this area, many of which tend not to be fully fleshed out, have long held that where politicians directly cooperate in an evil, just like where anyone else does, they bear moral responsibility for it and can be denied Communion.

For example, during the 1960s when desegregation was taking place, the Bishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Bishop Joseph Rummel, took the position that segregation was a great evil and, in 1962, excommunicated three Catholics in the diocese for organizing protests against desegregation in the diocese.  More correctly the excommunications were for defying Church authority. Two of the three recanted and were then reinstated to communion with the Church.

All of that is instructive as actions of this type are designed to be corrective, not punitive.  The thought is that a person is committing a great sin and the action is necessary to instruct them in that fact in a way that can't be ignored.

That's the thought here.

It's openly and obviously the case that Catholic politicians who have openly allowed for advanced positions that the Church has regarded as gravely evil should have correction long ago.  Conservative Catholics have long argued for this, but many rank and file Catholics have been baffled by it as well.  Now its going to happen.

Liberal Catholics, in many instances, are having a fit, but they ought to stop and pause for a moment.  It's always been accepted by the Catholic Church that to be a Catholic wasn't going to win you any friends.  On the contrary, Christ warned and the Church still holds that it would instead draw to you abuse.  It's expected that to be a Catholic, and holding the tenants of the Faith seriously, means you'll lose friends, family and even up to your life in some circumstances.  No "health and wealth" gospel here.  Not by a long shot.

The Church, in may people's views, should have taken this step long ago.  However, the thought seems to have been that there was a fear that taking it would drive people in this category further away.  The risk, on the other hand, was what the title of one of the linked in items below notes, that being scandal.

Now it seems that the Church has finally reached the point where its decided to do what many faithful Catholics in the pews have urged be done for many years, that being to deny Communion, which is not the same we'd note as Excommunication, to public figures who are openly and obviously assisting an evil.  

Some Catholics who take a liberal view of theology are now busy making what amount to real misstatements about the Church's theology.  I saw, for example, somebody who represented themselves as a CCD teacher noting that to be a Catholic doesn't mean accepting Humane Vitae.  Oh, yes, it does.  What being a Catholic means is that your life will be more difficult than others, including other Christians.

The Church, in taking this step, is taking it, at a point in which in some parts of the globe, as is often noted, the Church has been in decline. It's rarely noted that its expanding at an exponential rate elsewhere.  Where its in decline are in those areas where it has sought to accommodate the world the most. The parts of the Church internally that have grown the most in recent years are those parts everywhere which are the most observant.  That's a lesson for every organization everywhere, but the irony of this act now, which really won't occur until at least the end of the year, is that the times actually give liberty for the Church to take the action.  If it doesn't win the Church secular friends, it doesn't have any, anyway.  And if it causes those who have light attachments to the Church's teachings to be upset, perhaps they should deeply consider the nature of a Pearl of Great Price, and if they expected to win Heaven easily.

And if it seems that the Church is now out of sink with the World, well, it's never been in sink with it ever. When its been most in sink with it, things have not gone well for the Church. . . or the world.

Will Biden recant?  Or Pelosi?  That's hard to say.  Decades of supporting grave evil will have built up a great pride that will be hard for them to overcome.  But that they need to overcome it is at least a warning they need to receive.  We can pray that they do.  We can pray that everyone does.

Related threads:

2020 Election Post Mortem VII. Joe Biden and the "Catholic vote".

Archbishop Chaput says what should have been said long ago. Scandal.

2020 Election Post Mortem VII. Joe Biden and the "Catholic vote".

I first used this photo back in 2016 when I wondered if Democrats would "choose to go with the Joe you know".  As it was later revealed, they very nearly did.  Now the inevitable JFK comparisons are going to be made.

Maybe no other group in the United States struggled more with how to vote this past Presidential election than dedicated Catholics, or at least Catholics that had a strong distaste for Trump.  Indeed, at least in states where the election was not close, and therefore a "wasted" vote on a third party candidate could be justified, quite a few opted this time, as with last, to vote for the candidates of the American Solidarity Party, the only party that they could vote for in such circumstances with a clear conscience.  Indeed, some notable Catholics, and Orthodox, just flat out noted their support for the ASP irrespective of whether this state was close or not.

And on Twitter, in forms, and on Youtube debates raged.  A Catholic Priest with a Vlog declared that Catholics couldn't vote for Democrats under any circumstance on pain of losing the soul.  His Bishop stepped in to suggest that he was going too far, while a Bishop from Texas came in and praised him.  Notable Catholics in the Ethersphere squared off against each other, with some such as Dawn Eden noting disapproval of Trump and getting rebuked by other Catholics including at least one Priest.  Bishops generally urged Catholics to consult voter guides put out by the American council of Catholic Bishops that urged their flocks to very seriously consider the moral implications of their votes, but nobody came right out and stated "vote for . . . "

Of course, some weren't troubled by such things at all.  Some people felt clarity in their decisions.  Once such person I know noted that it didn't matter how much he might fight Trump personally distasteful, he was going to vote for him no matter what due to his position on abortion.

And through it all, we'd note the the following.  Donald Trump is a Presbyterian, but one whose personal behavior in the past would have caused John Calvin to lecture him from the pulpit.  Mike Pence is an Evangelical Christian, but one who is a fallen away Catholic, something rarely mentioned.  Joe Biden, however, is a Mass attending Catholic.  Kamala Harris is a Protestant Christian, but not one of a denomination that I'm familiar with.  

I don't know about Harris, but its interesting to note that of the collection of these candidates, Biden is the most personally observant, followed by Pence.  Trump is the least.  As noted, I don't know about Harris.

That doesn't actually answer any questions, however, as we'll note below. And it didn't work the same way it did with the last Catholic President, and the only other one, John F. Kennedy, who was a Mass attending President, but personally very unobservant, which people didn't know.  Catholics in the 1960 election could go and and vote for him simply because he was a Catholic, if they the voter, was Catholic.  Observant Catholics familiar with  Biden's voting record couldn't do that, and indeed  many felt they had to do the opposite.  Probably, therefore, nobody voted for Biden because he was a Catholic.  Many observant Catholics did the opposite.

In spite of all of that, it was inevitable that when Joseph Robinette Biden was elected President that his Catholic faith would soon be mentioned, and, additionally, reference would soon be made to the only other Catholic President the nation has ever had, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

John F. Kennedy.  Presented as a young, vibrant, World War Two veteran of Irish Catholic background, Kennedy in fact was in extremely poor health and taking drugs that would preclude anyone from occupying the office.  He also had the sexual morals of an alley cat and was generally a pretty bad President.  No matter, his false image is still idolized.

Now, this is yet another one of the numerous posts here that should proceed with a cautionary tale first being introduced.  It's not safe to assume that the comments here indicate how a person voted. You can assume that votes were cast, but you shouldn't assume they were cast for Donald Trump. . . or Joe Biden. . . or whomever.  

Indeed, one of the features of rationality is to be able to hold two thoughts. . . or more in your head at the same time.  And the fact that the majority of human beings do not use logic, but emotion, for decisions, makes those who use logic subject to all sorts of abuse and misunderstanding.

The Presidency of Donald Trump was virtually a feast/torture for conservatives of logical thought.  Personally he was often detestable, but he also opposed abortion and appointed excellent Supreme Court nominees of the type Conservatives only dreamed of before.  We're unlikely to see either of those things out of Joe Biden, while at the same time he's likely to be much more personable and therefore tolerable in polite society.  Cynics are very much able to make the comment here that it seems people prefer presentation over effect.

Which brings us back to our main theme.

There's something going on in the Catholic world which is easy for those in the US to miss, but it's a big deal.

The Catholic Church is by far the largest Christian denomination in the world, and its growing like crazy.  It's far bigger than any Protestant denomination, and the American assumption to the contrary.  Indeed, the novelty of Biden being only the second Catholic to be voted into the Oval Office is likely to really cease being novel quickly, as Catholics are set to make up the majority of the American population in really short order.

Indeed, the thing going on in the Catholic faith had a role in this election.  We'll get to that thing in a moment, but one of the things that took pollsters way off guard is that the Latino vote has started to swing Republican, and not just in the Cuban American camp.  That was predicted here, but arrived much more quickly than we expected.

The thing, if you will, going on in the Catholic, and indeed Apostolic, world is that the generation of Church leadership that emerged from Vatican II and which took the Church in many places far to the "left" is dying off and retiring.  As it does, younger Catholics and Apostolic Christians are coming into their own. They're highly educated in their Faith, and they're highly orthodox.

Which gives them the problem of Joseph R. Biden.

The Press, remaining largely non Catholic and secular, doesn't really grasp this at all. To them, Biden is a Catholic. But to some younger Catholics that's so debatable that there's those who will dispute even that.  That being said, Biden is very clearly a Catholic that's way outside of orthodox thought in his public life.  Indeed, so much so that younger and older orthodox Catholics would generally regarded him as a very bad Catholic generally and one whose soul is in danger.

The press version of Biden's religion is the charming Irish American one that was told for Kennedy as well, but more so.  Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to an "Irish Catholic family".  Like a lot of American Catholics whose family roots stem back some time, in reality he's of mixed heritage, but Catholic heritage, descending from Irish, English and French roots.

Indeed his middle name, Robinette, was the last name of his mother, and is a French Canadian name.  The French version of the same name is generally Robinet, the difference in spellings being due to the Quebecois pronunciation of the name which pronounces the "t" at the end of the word.  The meaning of the name seems to be diminutive of the name Robert.  Biden, on the other hand, is a Saxon name meaning a button maker.

This background frankly fits the common American Catholic background more than the media version in which everyone grew up in tweeds eating Corned Beef.  Indeed, its somewhat reflective of my own background, which also includes French via Quebec and English, along with Irish.  

Biden was born in 1942 so he's a post Great Depression, and more or less post World War Two American Catholic.  That means he was born into an era in which to be Catholic didn't mean that you were limited in occupation, as it had been basically up until 1945.  It also meant that he grew up in the Latin Rite at a time it still used Latin, but he was a young man during Vatican II.  It also, more broadly, means he experienced, as a young man, the campaign of John F. Kennedy and the turbulent 1960s, both of which seem to have been hugely formative in his political views.

John F. Kennedy was portrayed as an Irish American Catholic during his 1960 campaign for the Presidency.  And indeed, JFK was an Irish American, although one of very different background than most.  As hinted at above, and as addressed elsewhere, it was only after 1945 that Catholics of any stripe really could hope for a university education, with some exceptions, and most took blue collar jobs.  The post war GI Bill changed all that rapidly.  But JFK himself had grown up in the prewar world when that had been true, but it certainly hadn't been true of his upbringing.  He was different right from the onset.

Irish Americans didn't see it that way, however, and neither did the Irish themselves, as one of the blogs we link in here on our feed recently noted.  As Mark Holan's Irish American Blog notes, the Irish intensely followed JFK's campaign and election in 1960.  The whole world has been watching the American election of 2020, but not because Joe Biden professes Catholicism or because he has Irish heritage.  Indeed, we've had another President, Ronald Reagan, who claimed the latter since then, although again how perfectly is a very large question.

In 1960 when JFK was running Irish Americans and other Catholic Americans were in new white collar jobs largely for the first time and also were, in urban areas, moving out of the "Catholic Ghetto".   They still were regarded with suspicion by a lot of Protestant Americans however.  JFK faced that in his election campaign of that year and the memory of Al Smith, the prior major Catholic contender for the Oval Office, remained strong.  Smith has been widely regarded as having lost the 1928 Presidential election as he was Catholic, and his religion was an open topic during the race.

Portrait of Al Smith as the Governor of New York.

Smith had addressed the religious issue he was presented with by declaring that he didn't want people to vote for him because he was Catholic, and people who would vote against him for that reason weren't acting as Americans ought to and he didn't want their votes either.  Kennedy, however, basically took the view that he was a Catholic only on Sunday.

We've addressed that before, but during his 1960 campaign Kennedy pretty much disavowed that his religion was anything more than a Sunday thing at a Baptist convention.  This satisfied worried Protestants who had an irrational fear of Papal control over the Oval Office, but it was gigantically destructive to American Catholicism.

Kennedy's views were rapidly adopted by American Catholics who too wanted to be seen as American first and Catholic second, something that's not really possible for adherent Catholics to do.  This didn't present an immediate problem but it soon would.  The Second Vatican Council was held from 1962 to 1965 to address problems that seemed to have come about due to World War One and World War Two and it introduced reforms into the Church and were associated, inaccurately, with reforms that were otherwise coming about.  Some of these were relatively minor, but by the 1970s, the "Spirit of Vatican II" was running amuck in the United States and changing everything from the language of the Mass to church architecture.  In 1968 the Pope issued Humanae Vitae, now largely seen as prophetic, which addressed artificial birth control, something running contrary to the Sexual Revolution which was then in full swing, but also a few years behind the introduction of artificial birth control.  1968, at the same time, saw massive social disruption on a global scale and, in some significant ways, ended the political order that had prevailed since 1945.

The net result was that in the United States the Church was enduring change everywhere, with it being everything from architecture to the views of younger Priest just coming in.

Well that era is over.

As addressed in a recent episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know, younger Catholics have taken back orthodoxy and re reintroducing it back into the Catholic mainstream.  These Catholics aren't your great grandparents by any means, they're smarter and better educated in their Faith. They also definitely aren't operating with the Spirit of Vatican II.  And they're not "cultural" Catholics.

And that's why candidates like Biden are a modern problem for Catholics.  More than Kennedy was to Catholics of his era.

Catholics didn't really know much about what Kennedy really thought.  We now know that he thought a lot about screwing every young woman who crossed his path.  We also know now that his blundering was complicit in the murder of a foreign head of state.  He had the morals of an alley cat sexually and was a rotten President otherwise.*

Not somebody to emulate.

And neither is Joe Biden for orthodox Catholics, although he's certainly not personally immoral like Kennedy was.  Rather, it's his political stands on some matters that are hugely problematic for Catholics.

Biden came up in the political era in which, as we've noted, Catholic politicians were allowed to be claimed to be that and pretty much ignore their Faith as long as they went to Mass on Sunday.  It didn't happen all at once. Ted Kennedy, for example, was an opponent of abortion.  But by the 1980s it was in full bloom and the "I personally believe, but" Catholic politician became the Boomer rule.  An example of that is Biden, and another Nancy Pelosi.  They both freely vote for and even implicitly support matters which Catholic orthodox thought hold to be impermissible.  Indeed, so much so that doing it may perhaps be regarded, if done knowingly and with appreciation of the gravity, that it may be a mortal sin.  Not only that, but full absolution for it would not only take Confession, something that would be all that most run of the mill Catholics would have to do, but actually repenting of it through affirmative acts to address the harm caused by your prior acts.

Within a decade it will start to be the case that Catholic politicians who take this approach are going to be denied the sacraments and this is in fact already happening in some places. But the damage done by Kennedy and his followers has been vast. Vast, but not irreparable.

For the time being, however, the 2020 election provided a real struggle for Catholics.  Many found Trump deeply repellant for a variety of reasons, but for largescale deeply held moral reasons, he was the choice they'd otherwise be inclined to follow.  He has been opposed to abortion.  He had not held to the "progressive" view that gender is merely a matter of choice.  He has withdrawn American servicemen from contested areas around the globe and not become involved in new wars, something that Catholic theology holds to be problematic.  Seeking to define him in relation to moral issues, some went so far as to compare him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian Emperor who definitely wasn't Jewish but who took actions that favored the Jews.  Such a comparison is a stretch of course, but trying to figure out how to handle a personally repugnant, to some, person who does morally laudable things, has been a struggle for many.

What is certain is that Trump's views anticipated those that are coming, as we've already addressed, while his personal behavior was often repellant.  At the same time, the old Boomer Catholics are often seemingly comfortable in their mental ambiguity and JFK "went to Mass on Sunday" views and seemingly certain in the belief that those views will prevail in the Church, and outside, going forward.  That's not going to be the case.

And in the meantime, we have Joe Biden, who will be the last of the Boomer/Pre Boomer Presidents.  For Catholics, he's the second co-religious in U.S. history, a second of questionable significance at this time, but may be retrospectively or, should he adhere to the tenants of his Faith, will be this term, a term which is probably the only one he'll serve.

One thing, however, that has developed in the short term.  Catholics who didn't like Trump due to his character and agonized over their vote and then went for Biden have had their choice more or less ratified by Trump's post election conduct.  At the time this was being typed out Trump was still attempting to prosecute efforts to have courts stop vote counting or otherwise challenge votes.  The Secretary of State of Georgia, a Republican, has claimed that Trump backer Lindsey Graham pressured him regarding votes in some Georgia counties.  Trump is still asserting the election was corrupt with nothing to back him up, meaning of course that he's advancing lies against his opponent and against democracy itself.  The overall look for those who worried about Trump's character has verified their actions.

For a vote that seems to be developing and coalescing in the future that will leave the GOP with a lot of near term damage to repair.

*I realize that, in spite of all the evidence supporting this, there's a lot of people who simply can't accept this view of Kennedy and regard him, and indeed the entire Kennedy family as some sort of benighted heroic clan. Well, so be it. They aren't, and never were.

Churches of the West: November 18, 1966. The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church relaxes the Abstention Rule.

Churches of the West: November 18, 1966. The Latin Rite of the Catholic ...: 

November 18, 1966. The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church relaxes the Abstention Rule.

Smelt being eaten by members of Congress and their guests.

On this day the Latin Rite Catholic Bishops of the United States relaxed the rule on abstaining from meat on Fridays throughout the year.  This followed a Papal direction in 1962 that the Friday penitential requirement be adopted to local conditions, reflecting  a move by the Church focused on that goal. The same move resulted in the vernacular replacing Latin in the Mass at about the same time.

In the case of the Catholic Bishops of the United States the removal has created some confusion.  Fridays retain their penitential character and Catholics are urged to substitute something for abstaining from meat but few do.  Indeed, there's debate on whether there's any requirement to do and the fine, orthodox, Catholic apologist maintains there is not.  Some others maintain there very much is, with those holding that view tending towards the Catholic Trad community.

To the surprise of American "Roman" Catholics, the rule was not done away with globally and it remains a matter of Church law in many other localities in the world.  It also remains one, of course, during Lent.

There are a lot of rumors in the Protestant world about this practice, a lot of which are frankly absurd.  Old anti Catholic myths regarding fish on Fridays were one of the things that I still heard in school when I was a teen, usually centered around some completely bogus economic theory.  The actual basic reason for the practice is that it was a remaining Latin Rite penitential practice of which there had once been many, but which had dwindled down to just a few in the Latin Rite over time.  In the Eastern Rite and the Orthodox Churches, however, they remain numerous and occur throughout the year.

Indeed, the practice in the Eastern Rite and Orthodox Churches is instructive in that their fasts often extend beyond abstaining from meat and to other things.  During Great Lent, for example, they ultimately extend to oils, dairy and alcohol.  

The reason for abstention from meat (there was never any requirement that people actually eat fish) reflected the logistical economy of an earlier time.  Today fish is readily available on the table no matter where you are, but in earlier times this wasn't so.  Abstention from meat limited diets and protein sources other than fish were regarded, and frankly usually still are, as more celebratory.  People like fish, of course, but not too many people are going to sit down to a big Thanksgiving dinner of flounder.  The goal wasn't to starve people, but to focus on penance while still sustaining their needs.  Limiting food to the plain, and fish for most people, if available, was plain, emphasized that.

As with a lot of things, over time in Protestant countries this practice tended to mark Catholics and also became subject to silly myths.  Even now, over fifty years after the practice was relaxed in the United States, you'll occasionally find somebody who will insult Catholics with a derogatory nickname from the era related to fish.  Likewise, like a lot of dietary practices that have long ceased, people born far too late to really experience "fish on Fridays" will claim they did.

Ironically, of course, fish has gone from a less favored food even fifty years ago to a dietary and culturally prized one.  It's one of the odd ways in which the religious practices of Catholics, to include fasting, has come back around as a secular health practice.  And as Catholic orthodoxy has returned as the Baby Boomers wane, fish on Fridays has been reintroduced voluntarily among some orthodox or simply observant Catholics, even where they are not required to do it.

Communications, Church, and COVID-10

When the Pandemic first started, I published this item on one of our companion blogs*:

Churches of the West: The Church and Pandemic.: St. Mary's Cathedral, Diocese of Cheyenne Wyoming. When this particular blog was started back in 2011 its stated purposes was...

I understand our Diocese's orders, to a degree, during the pandemic.  The Diocese had to close the door to public Masses.  It had no other humane choice.  Catholics are obligated to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days and our community, where Catholics are a minority, has a grand total of at least ten Catholic Masses per weekend. That's a lot.  A lot of those Masses are heavily attended.

Added to this, during normal period on the liturgical calendar there are still things going on in the Church or Parish as rule.  Confessions are held weekly more frequently than that.  There are meetings. And there are Baptisms and Marriages.  So a lot is going on in a Church.

During Lent, even more is going on.

So those voices that proclaim that nothing should have been done to disrupt normal Parish life are flat out wrong. 

Which doesn't mean that the critics don't have a point.

Those critics, of course, have to be understood in the context of the Catholic (the word means "Universal") Church being global, but the churches being local.  That is, the local Bishop of a Diocese impacts the daily lives of average Catholics a lot more than the Pope does.

And that's where, at least to some degree, legitimate criticism can be levied.

The response to the pandemic has varied from diocese to diocese around the globe and from diocese to diocese around the country.  And it is not uniform in any sense, nor would we expect it to be.  So any criticism about the Bishops doing this or that are incorrect from the onset.  A person probably only really grasp what the Bishop of their Diocese is doing, although quite a few of them have done very similar things.  Our Diocese took one of the most extreme, if a person cares to define it that way, approaches.

All the sacraments were cancelled save for Confessions where there was a risk of death.

I'll be frank that I feel the order went way too far from the onset.  In a discussion with a very Catholic friend, he posed the question of "well, what if priests had become ill and died?", which is a highly legitimate point.   And I'm not arguing that we should have ignored the state's order and simply charged on as if nothing was happening.  But shutting down all the sacraments was simply too much.  As I pointed out to my friend, what about those who were to be married and simply shrugged their shoulders in our era of weak fealty and started keeping house, something we observant Catholics regard as a mortal sin?  And what about people who would have gone to Confession and simply took Pope Francis' suggestion of "perfect contrition" lightly, and figured they were good to go. Some likely have passed and some who don't study such things will simply assume that perhaps that counts from here on out and they don't have to observe the Church's laws in regard to at least an annual Confession?  And what about those who have simply accommodated themselves to televised Mass or no Mass at all, violation of the Church's canons though they are in normal times.  Everyone has met people who have allowed their consciences to become elastic to accommodate their personal desires or laziness. 

Indeed, the Church, as opposed to Protestant Churches, has at least in part kept a set of canons requiring participation for that reason.  Catholics regard it as a mortal sin not to go to Mass, if they can, on Holy Days and Sundays not because it's in the Bible, but because its a law imposed by the Church.  Indeed, Protestants rarely grasp that Catholics don't regard Protestant failing to observe Catholic Canons as committing serious sins, which is not to say that there aren't serious sins everyone is to avoid.  I.e, Protestants aren't expected to observe Catholic Holy Days for instance.

None of which, again, is to suggest that the Church should have ignored the virus and kept the public Masses.

But it is to say that the cancellation of everything else, where it occurred, and it occurred here, was a mistake.  Baptisms could clearly have been handled with low risk and there was never any sort of state order requiring them to be cancelled.  Marriages could have been too if the couples were willing to go forward with hardly anyone in attendance.  That anyone would consider that in this era would surprise many but I personally know a young couple who were married of their own volition in just such a way, and I myself recall stepping into the Church years ago on a Wednesday night when there was a marriage going on, elaborate white dress and all, with less than ten people in attendance.

Likewise, people being brought into the Church as adults could have been.

Confessions under some circumstances should have been allowed.  Yes, I don't want a line to the Confessional on Saturdays going on right now but cancelling all private Confession in a time of crises was not the right thing to do in my view.  There were ways to accommodate that.

And failing to grasp communications in this modern era is, in my view, an enormous failure.

A friend of mine who is a devout Catholic in Oklahoma tells me that in his archdiocese they are getting weekly emails from that archdiocese.

We aren't.

Now, to a degree, that doesn't surprise me.  Catholic parishes are large and no doubt the diocese doesn't have hardly any of our email addresses.  But it goes beyond that.

Our Bishops original orders expired on Thursday, April 30.  That should mean that a continuation of them in some form should have been widely distributed prior to that.

Nothing was.

What happened instead was a press release.

Now, most people don't get press releases and the Diocese doesn't even publish its own press releases, for the most part, on its website.  Checking it this morning what remains as the case is that there's a press release from back in January regarding the Diocese's actions in regard to a Bishop who served long, long ago.  While that story is real news and while the Diocese took the proper and strong action regarding it, most Wyoming Catholic probably didn't live in the state back then or weren't alive back then.  It's the sort of attention headline grabbing story that deserves to be an attention grabbing headline story, and which if the Press applied its  focus more broadly, would show up a lot more in regard to other institution, particularly schools.

But as far as the lives of average Catholics go, Mass closures matter a lot more.

And we're learning the status of that on the second page of the Tribune, with a headline reading, if you just read on line:

Cheyenne diocese says it will continue to suspend Mass through mid-May

Or, if you read the e-edition or print edition:

Mass Closures To Continue

Now, in fairness, the proactive Priests of the diocese will contact those that they can, or answer questions from those who pose them, and post an announcement to their online bulletins, or make a Youtube or Facebook announcement.  So it'll get out that way.

But is that good enough?

I'm submit it isn't. 

Indeed, delivering a press announcement in 2020 in a state where we're a large minority means that most people are left without anything unless they're proactive.  Most people don't read the newspapers anymore.  And an announcement delivered so late that it comes out the day of the vigil of Sunday is not going to get to most people.

In an earlier time, when a lot of Catholics lived in the Catholic Ghetto in the United States, or in Catholic communities, or where most Catholics in communities like ours where Catholics are a minority, had a means by which such news traveled pretty quickly, and often by the parish priest.  Parish priests weren't moved much, if at all, and they knew their parishioners.  Indeed, even here, it would have been the case that a lot of priests would have been in a community for decades, would have eaten frequently at parishioners homes, would have gone to their high school sporting events, and would have stopped by the Knights of Columbus, where a lot of the men would have been members, nightly to make sure that things were in control at the bar and people were heading home.

Some of that still occurs, but I frankly think it's a lot less than it used to be.  There are indeed still small parishes, or even large ones, where parishioners are really tight with a priest, but as Americans have lost connection with their own communities, which they have, that tight bond isn't there to the same degree, in my view.  Indeed, I don't think that tight bond is there with anything, which is why a writer like Wendell Berry would write a book called Becoming Native To This Place.  It's one of the huge holes in modern American life.

So, circling back, how does an oilfield worker from Texas get the news?  What about a junior accountant who moved up from Colorado?  You get the point.

Indeed, at this time a lot of Catholic parishioners are in the category of "vagabondi", moving from parish to parish as convenient, which is acceptable in the Church.  They donate where they go, but they aren't really listed anywhere, and they probably aren't being contacted.  Indeed, as far as I can tell, written communication around here has been pretty limited during the closure.

An assumption that on a Saturday morning most people are going to read the news in a newspaper and then call anyone they know who doesn't get it is flat out wrong, if such an assumption was made.  Simply waiting until Friday to say anything at all is likewise not a very good way to communicate anything to a group of people who are morally bound to attend Mass if they can.  It makes no sense at all.

The same news also informs the readers, most of whom will  not be Catholic, that Confessions by appointment are now resumed, which is a good thing, and that Masses after the 15th will be resumed but the present restrictions on public gathering, which actually will expire on that date, will also be observed.  I'm not sure what that means, but the size of gatherings is now very limited so, if that holds, and means what it says, logic would presume that the requirement to attend Mass will remain suspended as there's no earthly way to do that for all the Catholics in most parishes, even if Masses were run all day long on Sunday, which they can't be as Canon Law restricts the number of Masses a Priest can say in a day.  Perhaps that latter restriction makes sense, but we're still being informed of this in a very poor way.

As noted, every Diocese is different and this isn't applicable everywhere.  But rising to his crisis does not appear to have been done very well in Cheyenne.

If this seems to be asking for too much,and I'd strenuously argue it isn't, other institutions haven't been similarly lacking. The courts, for example, have been excellent in sending out information.  And the Diocese, in this modern era, does have a website where an announcement could have been placed front and center.

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*I debated posting this comment at all as I'm not disloyal, and I also wasn't sure if I should post it first here, or on that blog.  Ultimately I decided to post it, and here, as it is a local item for one thing, and a communications matter, at least in part, secondly.