Father, Dear Father

I know "Father Richard", as George Bush calls him, very, very slightly. And I am highly familiar with his work. This article about him, and the one to which it links in the body of its text, are spot on about the hoodwinking and hijacking of the American pro-life movement by the Republican Party, which is not in principle any more pro-life than the Democrats, and is in practice rather less so because of the consequences of its economic policies, not to mention, of course, its record of warmongering and convict-killing even worse than that of the Democrats (which is quite a feat).

A key strand in neoconservatism, at least in America, is made up of Catholics who agree with the Pope and his predecessor about sex but not about economics, seem immune to the enormous amount of work that they have done and still do in explaining how these things are connected, and manage to present themselves, quite falsely, as somehow more orthodox than those who, with similar disregard, agree with the Popes about economics but not about sex. But alike, they are in fact inheritors of the misappropriation of the name of the Second Vatican Council. And alike, they hark back to the nineteenth-century Americanist heresy, which conceived of an oxymoronic American Catholic Church autonomous from Rome.

Alas, for all his gifts, Father Neuhaus has been a key figure in the sex-but-not-economics camp, and a leader in its support for the neoconservative war agenda. Might he now be shifting? I hope and pray so. And after (or alongside) him, who? Catholics of this hue are electorally indispensable to the neocons, just as Catholic opponents of abortion are electorally key to the actually pro-abortion Republican Party. If this shift is finally happening, then praise God!