Lex Anteinternet: We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. ....

Lex Anteinternet: We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. ....: 

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.

And let the rampaging Anti-Catholicism begin. . .

From, Klansman, Guardian of Liberty, by Alma Birdwell White.

It was only a matter of time.

Trump’s likely RBG replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, is a Catholic extremist with 7 children who does not believe employers should be required to provide healthcare coverage for birth control. She wants the rest of American women to be stuck with her extreme lifestyle.

Documentarian Arlen Parsa.* **

Anti Catholicism has been termed the last acceptable prejudice in the United States and there's a great deal of merit to that claim.  In certain quarters, anymore, there's a subtle to not so subtle anti Christian prejudice in general that people express more or less openly, however, so to at least some degree that statement isn't fully true.  And its certainly the case that people will openly express disdain to some religions in some regions.  The LDS faith, for example, is often a topic of some disdain on the margins of its territories.  Islam is definitely subject to widespread public disdain in the United States.***

The thing that's really different about anti Catholicism, however, is the degree to which its visceral and blisteringly open.****  Additionally, it's rooted in falsehoods of the Reformation even as its advanced by those who reject all strong tenants of Christianity in general, even if it's in their ancestral background.  Descendants of Puritans and near Puritans, whose ancestors hated Catholic based on lies that were told by the founders of their faiths in order to justify separation from the only body of Christianity that had existed continually since the First Century, still hate Catholics or disdain them in spite of the fact that they've often completely shed the religions that gave rise to their beliefs.

The United States is really a Protestant country in culture, although that culture has weakened massively in urban areas.  The retained belief, however, is that Catholics are a dangerous "other" to be feared, believing in strange dangerous beliefs.  That's about to come out in public in spades.

Observant Apostolic Christians continue to believe in a religion that's Christ centric in the way that Christianity was from its onset.  A significant aspect of that is a belief that God's laws are immutable and his Church hierarchical in aid of that.  All Apostolic Christians, including the Orthodox of every branch and all types of Catholics, if they are observant, hold that.  The essence of the Reformation rejected that, although even the first rebels against the Church in the Reformation actually didn't, or didn't at first.  Even today, five centuries after the Reformation, some Protestant churches worry about Apostolic succession, still viewing it as necessary to their authority.

Because Catholics, as Apostolic Christians, hold that, it has always been used against them in those European cultural regions where the churches of the Reformation were strong.  In English speaking countries, even though the Church of England and the Anglican Communion claim Apostolic succession, it's always been a way to vilify Catholics.  In part this was because of the English Established Church's strong animosity towards Catholicism and in part it was because dissenting Protestant English churches took an even more extreme position than the Church of England did. Those latter churches were also heavily invested in concepts of individuality and, moreover, they were very strong in early American history.  Some have claimed, although the claim suffers on analysis, that the individualism of those churches helped give rise to American democracy.

While that claim is strained at best, it has become the American Civil Religion that there's no inconsistency in holding your religion close to your heart but not acting upon it in public.  American Catholic politicians, always held back by prejudice against their faith at the ballot box (but interestingly not so much at the Supreme Court, where they'd been a presence since the middle of the 19th Century), adopted that view with John F. Kennedy's declaration that:

I am not the Catholic candidate for President [but a candidate] who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me.

In retrospect, Kennedy was a pretty bad Catholic in general, but his position was embraced by American Catholics in a way that brought about sweeping changes.Catholic politicians, rapidly followed in Kenney's wake and adopted his formula, rejecting prior Presidential nominee Al Smith's position that:

I do not want any Catholic to vote for me . . . because I am a Catholic. . . . But, on the other hand, I have the right to say that any citizen of this country . . . [who] votes against me because of my religion, he is not a real, pure, genuine American.

Smith didn't walk away from his faith the way that Kennedy did, but thousands of Catholic politicians did to be followed by thousands of rank and file Catholics.  In essence, Kennedy advanced the position that a person's religion only really mattered as to what he did on Sundays.  Smith didn't state that.

A similar view was incorporated into the American Civil Religion after a time which at first came to hold that there general Judeo Christian values that we all agreed on, and what a person did beyond that was their own business, with everything else being co-equal.  This position is of course absurd on its faith.  Religious convictions are an individual's deepest convictions and should inform everything they do.

It's that knowledge that, in some ways, forms the basis for the societal hatred of Catholicism and the spreading disdain for Christianity in general.  It isn't that Christians in general or Catholics in particular "want[] the rest of American women to be stuck with [an] extreme lifestyle".  Rather its that they acknowledge that there's something greater than the individual and that Christians have to pick up their cross and carry it.

Moreover, the real fear isn't that a single Catholic judge is going to somehow impose her values on American society.  Liberals of all stripes, including non observant liberal Catholics, know, or at least should know if they stop to think about it, that not a single conservative judge on the Supreme Court proposed to impose any religious belief on society.  What liberals really fear, and won't acknowledge, is that for jurisprudential reasons, not religious ones, those justices will hold that there's a lot of things the United States Constitution doesn't address and therefore its up to the states to address them.

Nearly all of the recent and old hot button issues in front of the Supreme Court fit into this category.  Indeed, as we've stated elsewhere, there really aren't any jurisprudentially conservative justices on the bench or proposed for it.  That really shows in their approach to these issues.  Abortion is one such issue that is cited all the time, although most typically with the term "a woman's right to choose", by which is meant a person's individual right to choose on a matter of life or death for another person.  A jurisprudentially conservative jurist would hold that life was a matter of natural law, and that no person had the right to decide on matters of life or death for a third person except for individual self defense, a natural law paramount.  That would truly make abortion illegal, irrespective of the Constitution. That's not what a conservative justice of the type who will be on the bench, or who already is, will hold.

That sort of conservative, of which Barrett is part, would instead hold that its just not in the text, and therefore its up to the states.  In terms of supposed deep philosophical statements, that's really weak tea.  Its just being politically and textually conservative. That's it.  Likewise, on the issue of same sex marriage, the conservative justices simply dissented that it wasn't in the text.  They didn't opine on the nature of marriage in an existential or metaphysical or even biological sense.

Given that, the real fear on the part of liberals like Parsa and the thousands like him is that his fellow Americans of all stripes might hold the same conservative views.  It isn't that the court is going to make something illegal, it's that the American people will.  That's democracy.  That doesn't fit into a secular world view, however, of radical self definition and a "progressive" world, which most of the world actually rejects, which is even more radical than the anarchist "No Gods, No Master" ideology, as it takes the view of "I'm my own god and own master and nothing else matters".

The knowledge that something else does matter, and we know it, is inside of all of us however.  And that makes most people feel that they have a right to voice an opinion on really important matters rather than have nine elderly men and women of high but limited legal education and liberal values decide those matters for us.^  It isn't really the Catholic hierarchy or dogma that's feared here. The language of the Reformation remains, but it's the spirit of radical individualism in the tone.  What Parsa really meant was he wants American men and women to be stuck with no ability to put their beliefs into practice, both in their own lives and at the ballot.  If Americans, or even American women, the latter of which is the majority of the population, share his views, this presents no threats to those views at all.

One thing we can be assured of, as this matter progresses, is that Senators who previously were openly hostile to Catholicism at the time that Barrett was nominated to assume her current role on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will struggle not to come across so openly that way again.  Diane Feinstein's blisteringly hostile comment will not be repeated by her, and she's even stated that at least to her, Barrett's religion is off limits.  Kamala Harris, who likewise felt free to make anti Catholic comments during Barrett's prior hearing, will have to be careful lest she damage the campaign she's currently in.  Durbin's petty comments, perhaps inspired by the fact that his Bishop has denied him Communion rights due to his stated positions, may well come back. But the hostility is going to be there just under the surface.  Out in the public and through pundits, it'll be on the surface.

*Parsa is a documentary film maker, but I can't say that he's a well known one, at least to me.  I picked up his quote from an article by C. E. Cupp.

**An interesting aspect of Parsa's bigotry is that he associates large families with conservatism and by extension small or no families with progressivism, although I'll be that in the case of families born out of the United States but which have immigrated into the US, his view is the reverse. At any rate, the question of whether or not an employer can be mandated to pay for health care raises moral questions for Catholics, to be sure, but beyond that it raises other philosophical and fiscal considerations that are completely outside of religion.  Whether or not society at large, for example, through mandated health care, should be required to subsidize individual acts and when they should  is the larger issue.  When a society has strongly divergent beliefs regarding this, it raises further questions pertaining to participatory democracy and such choices.

***Islam presents a challenge to liberals in that the religion can demand strict adherence to its tenants and always demand public observation of them by the faithful.  Indeed it shares that characteristic with the Apostolic Churches and conservative Judaism, in that some of those tenants cannot be ignored by their members.  Muslims may not ignore the daily calls and periods to prayer nor the season of fasting, at a bare minimum, must as members of the Apostolic Churches may not ignore periods of fasting or the obligation to attend Sunday Mass.  Mormons, mentioned in this paragraph, likewise have a series of tenants that they can't ignore or shouldn't ignore.

****In fairness, this is also true of Islam.

Antipathy towards Islam to date has been strongly concentrated in conservative circles, but as the Muslim population increases this is almost certain to present very strong challenges to liberals. Already strongly observant Muslim women are relatively frequent callers into Catholic radio on the topic of abortion, where they'll routinely note that Muslims are opposed to abortion and they seem befuddled that people don't realize that.

In Europe distinct Muslim dietary practices that are shared with Judaism have made Muslims and conservative Jews unlikely allies against laws pertaining to slaughter in some countries.  Moreover, while so far Americans are mostly familiar with Muslim women who have taken the opposite view, conservative Muslims have a strict dichotomy of roles and behavior as to men and women. This has also presented itself in Europe where various nations have attempted to ban Muslim female veiling and headdress.  The challenge in the United States will be to see if American society can accommodate to itself to conservative Islamic practices which fall outside the American norm.

^One of the refreshing things about a Barrett confirmation would be that she's not a graduate of Harvard or Yale, which have had a lock on the Supreme Court for some time.