Catholicism 'left' out

In the past month I have received several dozen e-mails from people complaining about how some journalists use their Catholicism as a rather self-indulgent vehicle for their own secular politics. What my correspondents object to is not writers who promote explicitly Catholic political principles such as the sanctity of the unborn, the precious nature of all human life or the essential defence of Christian marriage and family, but they object to Catholics who obsess about the fashionable and banal politics that so dominate the Canadian landscape — Jesus and the possibility of Sun TV coming to our screens, the Church and recycling policy, what does the Pope say about municipal arts grants or why being a good Catholic is pretty much the same as being a good socialist or liberal.

It’s all incredibly arrogant. We now laugh at the notion of soldiers in WWI marching off believing “God is with us” but the modern belief that God is a paid-up member of the NDP is far more hilarious. As I‘ve always responded when people tell me that they’re confused by my politics and can’t place me in a particular party, “Look neither left nor right but up.”

Having said this, there are some inescapable conclusions when we look at modern politics and to deny them is cowardly — yes it does make us unacceptable at dinner parties and with the chattering classes but that really shouldn’t be an issue when truth is at stake. Outside of religious disputes between rival Christians or between Christianity and Islam, the attacks on Catholicism have overwhelmingly come from the left. It began in the 1780s with the French Revolution and its commitment to equality, atheism and social transformation. Legions of priests, bishops, monks and laity were slaughtered and exiled.

The same occurred with leftist regimes in Mexico and Italy and in the 1930s the Spanish Republicans murdered 13 bishops and thousands of devout Catholics, most of them politically neutral and devoted to the poor and needy. Stalin annihilated millions of believers and outlawed Catholicism, Mao did the same in China and Communists in Vietnam, North Korea, the Balkans, eastern and central Europe, Cuba. Pretty much anywhere else socialism had power did the same.

The modern left is a little, but not completely, different. In Canada, for example, it is not the right that has used Human Rights Commissions to silence and persecute Catholics, not the right that is intent on removing public funding from Catholic schools, not the right that promotes same-sex marriage and marginalizes those who object to it, not the right who support art and acts that shame and abuse Christ, Our Lady and the Pope, not the right that generally insists that religion must be removed from the public square.

For goodness sake grow up! We might argue with conservatives about foreign policy, economic justice and any number of issues but this is Canada and even the Tories embrace social democracy and economic redistribution. What they do not do is despise genuine, serious and orthodox Catholicism.

Just recently someone in this very newspaper spoke extremely harshly of a municipal conservative politician in Toronto who has never to my knowledge criticized the Church. That politician’s main rival, however, did all he could to make sure a Catholic school was bullied into allowing a young man to come to a prom with his homosexual partner and, when politely challenged over this by a Catholic student in my presence, lost his temper, insulted the youth and stormed off. This is the same politician who asked a restaurateur to be moved when three Catholic priests sat at the next table.

So let’s not be glib and gutless about all this. All sorts of politicians have something of interest to say to Catholics but some political ideologies have become antithetical to Catholicism and intend, by logical consequence or accidental circumstance, to silence the faith and reduce it to a corner player.

We need to be fair and we need to be informed and we should never throw ourselves blindly towards any ideology. Yet that, tragically, is what some Catholics seem intent on doing and it is foolhardy if not positively dangerous.