Rewriting History: Rage and Praise

Part One:  Rage

In the last 4 days, I have read 2 revisions of history on the Op Ed page of The Washington Post that evoked completely opposite and strong emotional responses.

Michael Gerson (The Washington Post, June 13, 2007) described the distancing of the Republican presidential candidates from President Bush as “fleeing the [political] Center.”  He refers to Bush’s campaigning as a “compassionate conservative,” his positions on the role of government, education, medicaid prescription coverage, and immigration reform, and his assertions of “solidarity” with the poor and seeking the “common good” as “policies . . . borrowed . . . from Catholic social thought. . . .”

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s celebrated retort to Dan Quayle in 1988, “I know Catholic social thought, I am a friend of Catholic social thought, and George W. Bush is no proponent of Catholic social thought!”

Any real friend of Catholic social thought will be insulted and indignant at the claim!

Candidate Bush may have made some moderate-sounding claims in the 2000 campaign (thanks to the speech writing of Michael Gerson), but President Bush has governed as a right-wing ideologue employing the politics of division and derision so doggedly only a Rovian or a Machiavellian could admire him.  His clear and consistent option for the rich, embrace of preemptive war, record-setting use of the death penalty as governor, sending thousands of Americans to fight an unjust war on the basis of a lie and without adequate protections, hiding the human costs of the war for both Iraqis and Americans from the American people and then cutting veterans benefits on top of that, the Administration’s corruption and tolerance for corruption, its cynical attitude toward truth, law and integrity . . . .  (This is too easy; the list grows all by itself.)  “Centrist”??  “Catholic social thought”??

If he cares to encounter a more authentic presentation of policies inspired by Catholic social thought, Gerson should go back and reread the Democratic Convention keynote speech of Mario Cuomo (whom he dismisses as a purveyor of “liberal fundamentalism.”)

Security Alert: Code Red – There will be many more efforts like this to rewrite history in the months and years ahead.  It is a serious threat to the real security of this nation and the world community – just as the Bush presidency has proved itself to be.

Stay tuned for Part Two, the kind of rewriting of history that we desperately need.

Posted by Jim Hug, SJ, President, Center of Concern.

Comments

[moneylender]

As long as money is created out of NOTHING, from 'thin air'as interest bearing DEBT enslaving us from cradle to the grave, the problems are not going to go away.
log on to our website
www.globaljustice.net
www.binaryeconomics.net
You will get the light

[John Dwyer]

Very interesting that six years into the Mr. Bush presidency, we are finally hearing that his policies are antithetical to Catholic social thought. Are we finally past the single-issue political support of the "compassionate conservative" who opposed partial-birth abortions? Oh, he must be a good man if he's opposed to that. Who are these Catholic social thinkers?

The people in the pews and in the positions of lay authority in my parish are far more deeply devoted to Republican ideology and to supporting Mr. Bush's corporate benefaction and intolerance toward any view that opposes his own than to, for instance, the papal denunciations of first the sanctions and then the attack and finally the war on Iraq. The people in the pews of my church brushed off the papal condemnation of the treatment of Saddam like Mr. Bush brushed off street protests around the world.

The priests almost never emphasized Catholic social thinking during the whole six years of Sundays' homilies. Hardly a person in our parish opposes capital punishment, or the cutting away of practically every social safety net for the American poor.

Now it's suddenly popular to distance ourselves from Mr. Bush? Not here among the have mores, Mr. Bush's base. These folks are just looking for another person to put in the White House who will continue to support oligarchy, cut taxes and services and continue to allow corporations to maximize their profits at the expense of everything else.

Catholic social thinkers don't seem to have much of a voice at our Ave Maria University either. Denunciation of homosexuality is very popular as are The Chastity Team and Love Week, The Modesty Pool Jump, and The Modesty Fashion Show. Its location in the midst of Immokalee's environs makes little provision for the Catholic preferential option for the poor. People here are righteously indignant about illegal immigrants--which falls from their lips like N-word used to do.

Catholic social thinking is founded on rock, not on money. It tells us to always act with forgiveness and compassion toward even the sexual "sins" of others, especially those one considers prostitutes or profligates or homosexuals or women who have chosen to abort their pregnancies. Being unyielding and self-righteous about chastity or any other "virtue" is a sin against the Spirit. True Catholic teaching promotes Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount: tolerance, forgiveness, compassion, and peace.

It's as simple as writing in the sand: no one is worthy to cast the first stone. But I sure don't hear that from the altar.

The Christian Coalition and its various forms of "conservative" morality are deeply embedded in Mr. Bush's Washington and in places where he maintains his base. It has certainly infiltrated my church and my town.

I keep hoping that the Rapture will happen momentarily and take these hard-to-live-with folks off my back. Then we can get back to Catholic social thinking.

[(Rev.) James E. Flynn]

Thanks, Jim Hug, S.J., for telling the truth to this "powerful" one in the White House. As one priest who has consistently spoken out vs. the Iraq War, long before it began, I take courage in your response to such "rewriting of history" as Gerson has attempted to do. Catholic Social Teaching has for over a century been far away from Bush-kinds of policies and practices.
(Fr.) Jim Flynn

[moneylender]

Sorry folks the following www.globaljustice.net
should read,
www.globaljusticemovement.net

[Jean Eilers]

Remember - The US Catholic bishops in their 1986 pastoral letter on the economy state that "no one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself". This was a statement underscoring the many previous encylclicals honoring workers right to form unions. Now President Bush states that he will veto the Employee Free Choice Act which is well acknowledge as a step toward restoring workers' dignity and ability to talk about forming a union without the retaliation, that company's regularly carry out without fear of any significant penalty for violating the National Labor Relations Act.
Also President Bush and his appointees to the NLRB have excluded tens of 1000,s of workers from union representation. This flies in the face of bedrock Catholic social Teaching.

[Robert H]

I like moneylender's comments about Catholic social thought. I was wondering why, if Bush is a Christian, why the community he "worships" with does not hold him accountable for his actions, in light of the Gospel. Now I know.
I think the problem has to do with the dynamic that led a local pastor here to endorse Bush during the last election because of his endorsement of "moral values". Now we find that he is profoundly immoral.
I have not, nor will I ask what this pastor thinks of Bush now. I don't want to know.
I wonder if our Pope is not so bad after all, and in fact, American Catholicism is in a mess?
Have the self-righteous bought the propaganda of the religious Right?
Or are there more hypocrites than redeemed among the faithful? What is going on, anyway, with this perversion of virtue?
(Rhetorically put.)
A hidden pride is at the heart of the spirituality described at Ave Maria University and elsewhere. A lack of knowledge of God, the Gospel and the meaning of love as taught by the Lord in the Gospels.
Instead of "how good I am" it shold be, "have mercy on me, a sinner." I was asked by a well meaning priest in a homily to be both Publican and Pharisee a the same time. I don't think this will work. We are already a morally schizophrenic society at times, and flirting with this kind of duality is non-productive, to say not much.

[Robert H]

I like moneylender's comments about Catholic social thought. I was wondering why, if Bush is a Christian, why the community he "worships" with does not hold him accountable for his actions, in light of the Gospel. Now I know.
I think the problem has to do with the dynamic that led a local pastor here to endorse Bush during the last election because of his endorsement of "moral values". Now we find that he is profoundly immoral.
I have not, nor will I ask what this pastor thinks of Bush now. I don't want to know.
I wonder if our Pope is not so bad after all, and in fact, American Catholicism is in a mess?
Have the self-righteous bought the propaganda of the religious Right?
Or are there more hypocrites than redeemed among the faithful? What is going on, anyway, with this perversion of virtue?
(Rhetorically put.)
A hidden pride is at the heart of the spirituality described at Ave Maria University and elsewhere. A lack of knowledge of God, the Gospel and the meaning of love as taught by the Lord in the Gospels.
Instead of "how good I am" it shold be, "have mercy on me, a sinner." I was asked by a well meaning priest in a homily to be both Publican and Pharisee a the same time. I don't think this will work. We are already a morally schizophrenic society at times, and flirting with this kind of duality is non-productive, to say not much.