Saturday 21 February 2015

"And I Suspect I'm Not Alone"

I'd bet Amanda Platell anything she liked that every serving Catholic bishop in Great Britain was a lifelong Labour voter, and that that had been the case throughout living memory.

Practising Catholics are overwhelmingly so, Catholic schools turn them out like factories, and indeed those institutions employ Labour Party members on an industrial scale.

Being Australian, she ought to know all of this, even if her Home Counties editors and readers do not.

13 comments:

  1. The odd Catholic bishop in the States gets in the papers by attacking the Democratic Party but most Catholics still vote for it and always will. Somebody like Santorum or Ryan is treated as normal by sections of the British press but they are as far out on the fringe of the Church as they are of their own party, the party most Catholic would never vote for.

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    1. Only one such bishop springs to mind, and he has not lived in America at any point in the present Administration, nor does he even have a proper job in Rome these days.

      Those sections of the British press (one collapsing newspaper, basically) are even more eccentric in relation to the Church in this country than Ryan and Santorum are in relation to the American Church, and are arguably so in relation the Conservative Party, too.

      A whole post this evening, on how the left-wing stance is the inevitable consequence of the far more orthodox and less liberal theological stance of C of E bishops these days, and on how that in turn is down to being increasingly controlled from abroad rather than from England while increasingly made up of immigrants and of Evangelical converts, which latter are not cultural Anglicans in any "jumble sale" sense, and that is precisely the point.

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  2. Anon 14;36 you don't know anythig about American politics. I need only quote the following.

    Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, (a position he held until November 2014),Cardinal Burke said; "Since President Obama clearly announced, during the election campaign, his anti-life and anti-family agenda, a Catholic who knew his agenda regarding, for example, procured abortion, embryonic-stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage, could not have voted for him with a clear conscience."

    There you have it. Unlike here, their Church hierarchy stands up for moral conservatism.

    Every Democratic Party leader of recent times has been a declared supporter of procured abortion, Planned Parenthood, stem cell research and state funded contraception.

    As Cardinal Burke said, no proper Catholic can vote for that in good conscience. Voting for Leftwing parties is now simply a sin.

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    1. As I said, only one such bishop springs to mind, and he has not lived in America at any point in the present Administration, nor does he even have a proper job in Rome these days.

      Moreover, he was summoned to Rome, and thus removed from the American scene, by Benedict, not by Francis. In the year of Obama's election, funnily enough.

      He is now practically a schismatic, at a high and rising risk of dying excommunicate.

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  3. He was a close friend of Pope John Paul and Benedict. The fact this Pope has demoted him just before the upcoming Synod on the Family indicates how things are taking a turn for the worse.

    White Catholics in American overwhelmingly vote Republican. The fact you didn't know that, shows how ignorant you are.

    53%of white Catholics vote Republican according to PEW Research Centre.

    Only a majority of Hispanic Catholics vote Democrat, and only recently.

    Full figures below.

    http://www.pewforum.org/2014/09/22/section-2-the-religious-landscape-of-the-2014-elections/

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    1. That's still 47 per cent of white Catholics voting Democrat at what the Santorum-Ryan fringe would have us believe was a Faith-defining election, and the majority overall.

      Burke is another fringe figure, a Novus Ordo Lefebvre dressed as Liberace, whom Benedict had to transport five thousand miles like a convict in time for Obama's entry into the White House.

      He looks increasingly like the leader of a schismatic sect organised, as they always are, as and around a personality cult. He mirrors many a bitter old liberal in giving the strong impression that he was promoted far beyond his natural abilities in the first place.

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    2. You do get all the bishops opposing individual policies like the HHS mandate, but you get all of them opposing individual policies in any country including the UK, that doesn't alter the main point. Nobody could accuse them of believing with the RNC that the sanctity of life began at conception and ended at birth, not in the US, not in the UK, nowhere.

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  4. "White Catholics"? Half Dems still, and a declining proportion of Catholics overall against the Latinos who are solid Democrats.

    You are right, Benedict probably thought the kindest thing for Burke was to call him to Rome before Obama got in. Kindest thing for the American Church, too. Burke is a very silly old man now, so self-awareness at all, thinks he should be Pope.

    Anyhow, I reckon Bishop Emeritus Crispian Hollis of Portsmouth is probably a Tory or at least not a "lifelong Labour voter", he voted Tory as a younger man.

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    1. Yes, I'll give you that as a possibility. Although you never know: his nephew who ran MI5 was a Communist, or at any rate a Soviet agent, which admittedly was never the same thing.

      "All my old Irish/Italian/Polish buddies and me, we've been Republicans since 1968/1972/1976/1980/1984/whenever"? And there were twice or three times as many of you then, but the rest are dead. The American Church just doesn't look like you, or vote like you, these days.

      Yes, practically half of even white Catholics voted Democrat even in 2012. Funnily enough, they saw no reason to prefer a man who derived an income from the taxpayer-funded abortion that he had introduced in an old Irish Catholic stronghold.

      Nor were they impressed by a running mate who, although a Mass-goer called Ryan, was a devotee of Ayn Rand.

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    2. Yeah, in many ways Ryan was the last straw, the only Catholic the GOP could find and it was an Ayn Rand worshipper, they were so arrogant they thought we would fall for it.

      The attitude of the white Catholic right (and neocon Jews) to Latinos would be funny if it weren't real, you would think their families had been WASP elite since before the Declaration of Independence.

      Their distortion of historical references to mainline Protestantism as defining American culture, to mean some "Judeo-Christianity" broad enough to include even a Mormon President without any apparent problem, that is just as bad.

      But they are the past.

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    3. It sometimes turns up on the Old Right as well, although less often, as I am sure that you know. The difference is that no one there can scream "liberal!", as if that ended the debate, whenever someone points out that "They didn't mean you" or "That doesn't mean us".

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  5. As Mr. Lindsay puts it, we'll see what colour the map of the Catholic heartlands is the day after the Election. Same as now, same as always.

    Likewise, if we have to take out the Hispanics for no apparent reason, the "white ethnic" Catholic heartlands (Italian, Irish, East European, German) on the day after any election in the United States.

    Same in Australia. No nostalgia for Menzies among Catholics there, they never voted for him anyway. No nostalgia for 1950s Republican America among Catholics, no nostalgia for 1950s Tory Britain among Catholics.

    Definitely none for 1980s Tory Britain, when whole towns full of Catholics were put out of work along with at least one heavily Catholic city in England and at least one largely Catholic city in Scotland.

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    1. And plenty more of the same is being served up right now.

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