Distinctly Catholic

As mentioned yesterday, this week at Q & A we are featuring participants in last week's panel on Catholics and the midterm elections, sponsored by Catholic University's Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies.

The video of that panel can be seen here.

Today, CUA politics professor Matthew Green looks at the Nevada Senate race.

Professor Green: The race I find the most compelling is the Nevada Senate race between Harry Reid and Sharron Angle. This election campaign has it all: a "Tea Party" challenger, tons of spending, amusingly gaffe-prone candidates, and the strong possibility that the most powerful Democrat in the Senate could be sent home packing.

What really surprises me is how close the race is -- especially given the many weaknesses of Angle, the Tea Party Republican challenging Reid. She has repeatedly made statements that are, shall we say, outside the mainstream: that Social Security should be eliminated (or at least privatized); that Obama and Reid want government to replace God; and that the city of Dearborn, Michigan is ruled by Islamic religious law.

The Washington Post's Arts & Style section this weekend had an article about a new exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library dealing with Henry VIII. The theater that adjoins the library is producing Shakespeare's play about Henry.

In discussing the dissolution of the monasteries, the author penned this sentence: "And as the exhibition demonstrates, while Henry's motives were amply mixed, he was also intellectually engaged in the formation of a new, more modern Christianity, a faith built upon actual knowledge of scripture rather than obedience to a distant, dogmatic and pedieval church." Huh?

Yesterday, at Q & A, we heard from Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox who discussed the role of social conservatives in the Tea Party. They pointed out that there is a great deal of actual overlap between the two groups, despite the obvious conceptual differences between them. The Tea Party presents itself as an anti-government, libertarian movement and social conservatives are far from libertarian. I do not think that essential tension can survive the long, thorough scrutiny of a presidential nominating process, when candidates can’t avoid debates and when individual candidates must develop a coherent, reasonably consistent public philosophy. But, in a midterm, when voters only focus at the end of a campaign and are unlikely to notice any inconsistencies except those on the surface, the tension between the “Don’t Tread on Me” ethos and the comprehensive moral compass of the social conservative movement may not prevent some Tea Party candidates from keeping them united through November 2.

Quick quiz from the religio-political estuary: What do Belgian archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard and Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck have in common? Bingo. They both recently made remarks about homosexuality that strike most others as foolish or worse.

Archbishop Leonard made a remark about AIDS being a “sort of immanent justice” for those who live a libertine lifestyle. This harkened back to a debate that I thought had ended in the late 1980s, when some religious leaders claimed AIDS was God’s punishment against homosexuality. For Americans, of course, the experience of watching one’s favorite bartender or neighbor or movie star die too early and die such a horrible death moved most Americans to sympathy with AIDS sufferers not judgment.

My story about Father Robert Sirico being a pioneer in the gay marriage movement in the 1970s raises many issues. But it also does not raise others. Distinctions are in order.

First, Father Sirico’s case is not like that of Bishop Eddie Long or Rev. Ted Haggard. They were hypocrites, preaching one thing while doing another. Father Sirico, clearly, had a conversion experience and changed his mind about same-sex issues. He is entirely entitled to do that. Father Sirico’s statement is evidence of integrity, not its lack, no matter what you think of his earlier activities or of his present stance on the issue of same-sex marriage.