Why Democrats Are Blue
Very interesting.
Check out New Catholic Politics, a blog by Mark Stricherz, the author of Why Democrats are Blue:Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People's Party.
Acording to his Amazon blurb, Stricherz covers in great detail the behind the scenes political maneuvering "through which secular, educated elites, using a commission created at the 1968 convention in Chicago and later chaired by Senator George McGovern, took the Democratic Party away from working class and religious Democrats. This quiet revolution helps explain why six of the last nine Democratic presidential candidates have lost."
Amy Welborn is reading the book and has a long post on it here.
Although I am not a political junkie and don't often have the time to read anything that isn't immediately work-related, I am intrigued by how much behind the scenes maneuvering by people whose names most of us will never know, so often determines the candidates who are presented to us. And it was that sort of fundamental slogging in the trenches that I was referring to in my post below "Refuse to Choose".
We need an army of exceedingly tenacious and shrewd, well-formed pro-life Catholic politicos who are willing to pay their dues at the local level and earn the right to change the course of their parties where life is concerned. We need a new intentional national coalition, a coalition that transcends party, of politicians, constitutional lawyers, bio-ethicists, medical experts and practitioners, community activists, social entrepreneurs, journalists, and scholars who collaborate together - over the long haul - to recapture the power and influence centers of our nation for life.
That is what I meant by "refusing to choose", not freezing, ballot in hand, at the entrance of the voting booth because you can't stomach either of the two options before you. Options already determined by events that occurred decades before in some smoke-filled back room.
If every bishop in the US, if every bishop in the world, spoke loudly and unilaterally for life, it would not accomplish what is needed. This is our job. It is one of those quintessentially lay tasks that cannot never be done by the clergy.
It is something only the laity can do and yet it would have an immense impact on the life of the Church. It would be one of the great lay apostolates of the 21st century.
posted by Sherry W @ 9:18 AM
4 Comments
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4 Comments:
It's not only the life issue. In fact, before you can even get to the life issue you have to reconstruct a culture that is receptive to the life issue. And the experts you named cannot do it alone, even though they would be influential. It has to come from a congruent cultural ethos.
I disagree that the clergy are not intrinsic to this task. Viewing the sacred and the secular as two completely separated arenas is not helpful. The laity, if they are to be properly formed, will be properly formed only by the clergy and those in religious orders. For all the hype about the vocation of the laity, you have to get real about the relative amounts of time most of the laity have to be involved, not only in knowing their faith, but in acting in the public arena on behalf of their faith (other than modeling it in their daily lives, of course, which is not insignificant). And people still look to their pastors and bishops for guidance on moral questions, rather than to lay experts. People are sick of lay experts. They've been burned too many times. Just look at the controversies that some of the so-called Catholic lay experts have started over abortion this year, some of them with multiple advanced degrees and pages of publications.
But no matter how much expertise lay people acquire, they will never have the authority that the bishops have. Because this expertise is at the service of the Church ultimately and therefore, if it's honest, must defer to the Church. You cannot escape that amount of subordination.
Steven Florent
Steven,
I don't think Sherry is saying that the clergy can't have an impact on the issues at hand. They do have a role to play and the collaboration of clergy and laity is essential for the church to fulfill her mission in the world. What I believe she is refering to is the unique role of the laity to bringing about the transformation of society by means of their secular character.
A caveat: Canon law prohibits bishops and priests from running for office.
Bobby
You know, the National Right to Life Committee and its state affiliates have been doing most of what is advocated here for over 35 years. It's not just politics NRL is active in. Just peruse a few issues of the NRL News to see its educational work and the outreach to churches and religious folks. We don't need, for goodness' sake, to start new organizations or coalitions. Those come and go, and they just splinter the movement. We would do better to join with the organizations that have been doing what is recommended here for a while now and have the framework for a national presence and influence on the culture.
If you have criticisms of NRL, fine--join a state affiliate and begin to change things at your level, then take it nationally. Sure there are lots of things that NRL & state affiliates are not doing. If more folks would join their efforts, more would be done. All the state RTL organizations have room for anyone and everyone who wants to get good, solid initiatives underway.
I am privileged to have been an active volunteer with Missouri Right to Life for over 20 years and now serve as its volunteer general counsel, and I assure you, the opportunity is there in the mainstream pro-life movement to do good work in the manner that Mr. Wilberforce demonstrated.
Jim Cole
Steven said: "The laity, if they are to be properly formed, will be properly formed only by the clergy and those in religious orders."
It's not clear to me that that is accurate or true. Who formed the young men in our seminaries, for instance? Largely, their parents, I assume. I myself have been formed by many people, whose love, wisdom, and encouragement have shown me not only more of God, and not only how to respond to Him, but even how I could or should respond to Him. Some of these people knew me well enough to give very specific suggestions and encouragement on what they saw God might be doing in my life and how I could give Him more room to work.
Steven, am I misunderstanding what you wrote? I'm curious if you meant that statement as broadly as you wrote it. ?
~MargoB
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