Sadly, Stuart Reid's unmissable, turn-to-first Charterhouse column on the back page of the
Catholic Herald no longer appears online. So, be you never so Paisleyite or Dawkinsite, you are just going to have to take out a subscription, at least initially to the specific end of reading him every week. This week's is on Libya, and it is simply brilliant. Track down a copy and buy it. Then subscribe.
You are his dauphin.
ReplyDeleteHe has no need of one.
ReplyDelete"Many Catholics, but especially "traditionalist" Catholics in America, put President before Pope and backed the Bush-Blair war." Spot on.
ReplyDeleteA 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.
ReplyDeleteBut 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.
It is no surprise that such a view is common among American Catholics at the height of American power. Simliar pseudo-Catholicisms were popular in eleventh-century Byzantium, seveneteenth-century France, eighteenth-century Austria and nineteeenth-century Britain. Doubtless, they will present themselves in China, India, Latin America (where the trends already exist) and possibly also Russia as this century goes on.