Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

Another anti-Catholic screed by a disaffected former Catholic, whose ideas indicate that he was never well-versed in Catholic doctrine and teaching in the first place. As the preacher said, "There is nothing new under the sun."

Said former Catholic decides he no longer believes what the Church believes,

and that he won’t come back until, there are "women at the altars; gays and lesbians worshipping openly with their children in the pews; and everyone gets invited to Communion"! The idea that "everyone gets invited to Communion" obviously indicates that this guy simply does not believe what the Church believes (and has always believed) about the Eucharist and Transubstantiation. Apparently we are supposed to take some great lesson from this guy’s rant against the Church and see it as a call to reform of some sort, but the fact is that disaffected former Catholics are a dime a dozen, so why do you find this rant interesting? Does he think the Church will read his rant and say, "Oh dear you’re right, everything the Church teaches is wrong. We should be more like you and what you want. Please come back! We’ll change to suit your ideas! How could we have been so wrong for 20 centuries until you came along!" Bah – good riddance is the only sound response.

As the list above shows, this guy’s fundamental problems have nothing to do with the policies of so-called reactionaries, JP II and Benedict XVI and the Bishops they’ve appointed, but with fundamental issues of doctrine.  His problem is not with JP II or Benedict XVI, but simply with the Church itself. This has nothing to do with being pre- or post-Vatican II – no Pope or Bishop in history would have endorsed such a view of the Eucharist as merely communal dinner to which "everyone gets invited". The same goes for this guy’s horror of Bishops cleaning up the rampant liturgical abuses that have taken hold in so many US parishes. What he’s really angry about is that the Church refuses to endorse liberal Protestantism!

Further, the guy’s claim that Benedict XVI has never met a Post-Reformation idea he’s liked is indicative of a profound ignorance of Benedict’s thought and writings. Probably no Pope in history has as extensive a pre-Papal publication history as Benedict, and only the most obtuse and willfully ignorant could dismiss him as someone who has failed to engage or understand modern ideas.

Comments Update

A reader writes:

No. You don’t need them. See your own honest and chastened posts on bandwidth-saturation and obsessive-compulsive tendencies in blogging and blog consumption.

Comment threads can be revelatory (cf. the essential avalanche of scathing and incredulous responses to Sean Wilentz’s bizarre reverse-racism essay at The New Republic’s website). But more often they are blathering and toxic sumps. I like the lean, mean linear simplicity and lone-d.j. voice of The Daily Dish. Don’t open up rabbit holes along the excellent trail of breadcrumbs you’re already giving us.

"Lone DJ." That metaphor has occurred to me recently, as blogging continues to evolve as a medium and as a profession. It is a little like DJing: you wrote your own tunes, but you’re always sampling others, and mixing it all up with the techno potentialities of the new media. Yep: DJing is a pretty good way to look at it. Oh, and don’t forget to vote. Latest results available here.

Where Are We?

A few thoughts: that red phone ad is working. It’s not that Clinton would make better decisions on national security. She has scant experience in foreign policy, and is guided primarily by what will be least vulnerable to Republican demagoguery (it’s the only common thread over the years when you look closely). It’s also going her way because she’s familiar to people – and blue-collar voters in Ohio associate familiarity with security. (One reason they narrowly backed an untested governor from Texas was his last name.) The anti-Muslim smears may also have worked, and Clinton delicately managed to keep them alive last night. And the press has gotten cold feet – caving to the Clintons’ preposterous idea that somehow the field is tilted against them. Howie Kurtz gets to regurgitate Hannity’s smears as if they were legitimate matters for press inquiry, while the press essentially gives the Clintons a pass on their continued refusal to do the most basic act of transparency: providing their tax returns. Clinton has also dominated every news cycle in the past week. And there’s some anecdotal evidence that Republicans are planning to vote for Clinton to kill off the Obama candidacy before it destroys them in the fall.

On the other hand, it’s important to remember that the delegate math is still heavily stacked against Clinton.

She has to win all four states tomorrow by very healthy margins just to stay viable. Her husband and co-candidate for president, Bill Clinton, has openly said that she has to win both Ohio and Texas for the two of them to stay in the race. What matters tomorrow night will be delegates. If Obama maintains or increases his delegate lead, she should withdraw. But, of course, she will never withdraw of her own volition. And that’s part of her strategy. She will gladly hold her party hostage to her own narcissism. She did it with her husband for much of their last second term.

I get the feeling that if she ekes out a win or two, she will insist on pursuing the full Monty: a scorched earth effort to seat Michigan and Florida delegates; suing Texas if the delegates don’t go her way; a full court press on any super-delegates who balk; and a gut-wrenching struggle for power up to the convention.

If she cannot be stopped, she can still be slowed. If you’re in Ohio, Rhose Island, Vermont and Texas, you know what to do. This is what you call the fierce urgency of now.