You Don't Know Rick

Christopher Hitchens was wrong about an awful lot. But he was right about the Kennedys. They may be judged by the motley crew that rallied to Bobby in 1968: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists; in the California primary, he denounced Eugene McCarthy’s support for public housing as a “catastrophic” proposal to move black people into Orange County.

The JFK attitude to the relationship between the Catholic Faith and political life was heretical in principle, and has duly proved catastrophic in practice. Since 1776 predates 1789, the American Republic is not a product of the Revolution, but nevertheless sits under a radically orthodox theological critique which, simply in order to function, would have as its first item of business the eradication of the concept of “the separation of Church and State”, almost the exact opposite of the original intention of the First Amendment, which was to protect the Established Churches of several states from the Deist hostility of the Founding Fathers, figures whom any theologically redefined Americanism must, to put at its very politest, reassess entirely.

That critique must draw on sources from the Continent, but its main source is the wellspring of doubt about the entire legitimacy of the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology. That doubt was passed down among Catholics, High Churchmen (and thus first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as well as Scottish Episcopalians), Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others, giving rise to the campaign against the slave trade, to Tory and Radical extensions of the franchise, to Tory and Radical uses of government action against social evils, to the emergence of the Labour Movement, and to the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars.

Those who would rightly locate the American experiment within a wider British tradition need to recognise that this is the wider British tradition in question, and that it necessarily includes the most searing critique of the Founding Fathers and of their Deism and their classical liberalism, which latter, at least, is the only ideology of the American Republic that they founded, not necessarily the only one that there can ever be. But there will and can be none of that from Rick Santorum, who embodies the tendency of a significant section of the Italian-American community to become Republicans because they found their local Democratic parties already run by the Irish; his battle against the Caseys in Pennsylvania encapsulates this old, old feud, and his view of the Kennedys is doubtless informed by it.

Those Italians thus participated in, and were influenced by, the developments within the Republican Party. At best, they have become more or less paleoconservative, which in turn brings them within the orbit of critiques, not least Catholic critiques, of capitalism. At worst, they have become Rick Santorum. Rather mirroring the battle for the Republican Party itself this year. Once and for all, is it the Party of God, or is it the Party of Mammon? The slow motion coronation of the candidate of big business in all its social liberalism and global military adventurism should settle that. To the surprise of nobody who has ever been paying attention.

But no, of course Santorum does not believe that “sex is solely about reproduction”. Paragraphs 2360 to 2363 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church teach that:

“Sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman. In marriage the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and pledge of spiritual communion. Marriage bonds between baptised persons are sanctified by the sacrament. Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realised in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death. The acts in marriage by which the intimate and chaste union of the spouses takes place are noble and honourable; the truly human performance of these acts fosters the self-giving they signify and enriches the spouses in joy and gratitude. Sexuality is a source of joy and pleasure. The spouses’ union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple’s spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family. The conjugal love of man and woman thus stands under the twofold obligation of fidelity and fecundity.”

The point is illustrated by a quotation from Tobit, indicating that the view of sexual intercourse within marriage as not solely concerned with procreation can only be defended from Scripture if one acknowledges the full Canon of the Old Testament, rather than the truncated one erroneously adopted by Protestants in imitation of Jews who had excised certain Books, including that of Tobit, specifically because they were likely to lead people into Christianity.

The American Church, especially, is riven between
“conservatives” who accept the Church’s Teaching on bioethical and sexual matters while pretending not to know that the economic and foreign policies that they excoriate are in fact the Church’s Teaching on justice and peace, and “liberals” who accept the Church’s Teaching on justice and peace while excoriating that on most bioethical and most or all sexual matters. Neither is any more orthodox than the other. How about reporting and commenting on Santorum’s enormous and startling departures from Catholic orthodoxy on economics and on wars, rather than his unremarkable adherence to Catholic orthodoxy on bioethical and sexual matters?

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