{"id":105,"date":"2008-05-01T09:11:18","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T09:11:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/counting-catholics-a-reply-to.html"},"modified":"2008-05-01T09:11:18","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T09:11:18","slug":"counting-catholics-a-reply-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/counting-catholics-a-reply-to.html","title":{"rendered":"Counting Catholics: A reply to Deal Hudson"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am somewhat reluctant to respond to Deal Hudson’s rejoinder<\/a> if only because he has such a great walkaway: “Catholics in the GOP may be step children, but not orphans.” I wish I’d thought of it. But I can find plenty of other drawbacks in his argument that will help me overcome any hesitation…
\nFirst off, I would never attempt to stop a debate between Deal and Steve. Just as I would not jump in front of a subway train.
\nSecond, that Catholics like presidents with a strong religious grounding is no surprise. Everyone does. As Ike famously said, every U.S. president has to have a religion, “and I don’t care what it is.”
\nWhere Deal’s analysis goes wobbly, in my view, is in his effort to separate out “self-identified” and “active” Catholics. It sounds like a way to try to figure out who is a “good” Catholic and who is a “bad” Catholic based on frequency of mass attendance. While frequent attenders are more likely to say their faith informs their political thinking, that 50 percent figure is again well below that of other categories, especially evangelicals (81 percent). Moreover, there is, unfortunately, no evidence or guarantee that attending mass regularly ensures that one hews to Catholic teachings, especially as they relate to the public square. Plenty of regular churchgoers throughout history have voted for very bad people. And while regular churchgoers espouse opposition to abortion more readily than other Catholics, they don’t necessarily back policies to reduce abortions, they way less frequent attenders do. The GOP’s rhetoric on abortion may provide “a partisan advantage,” but its record and, more important, the church’s teaching, does not. Moreover, the positions of frequent attenders on a range of issues central to Catholic teachings–especially re social justice–are out of step with the bishops, and less frequent mass attenders.
\nAbove all, however, when it comes to politics–as well as faith–it is not for Deal or me to decide who is a “Catholic who cares.” Candidates want to appeal to Catholics across the board, and to do that they need to appeal to a broader Catholic culture. Which gets back to our original question: Why are Catholics–including those frequent attenders supposedly more “faithful” to church teaching–voting for Clinton more than Obama? They may be stepchildren in the GOP, but they are stepping up in the Democratic Party. Not much of an outro line, but it’ll have to do…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am somewhat reluctant to respond to Deal Hudson’s rejoinder if only because he has such a great walkaway: “Catholics in the GOP may be step children, but not orphans.” I wish I’d thought of it. But I can find plenty of other drawbacks in his argument that will help me overcome any hesitation… First…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nCounting Catholics: A reply to Deal Hudson - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/counting-catholics-a-reply-to.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Counting Catholics: A reply to Deal Hudson - Benedictions: The Pope in America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I am somewhat reluctant to respond to Deal Hudson’s rejoinder if only because he has such a great walkaway: “Catholics in the GOP may be step children, but not orphans.” I wish I’d thought of it. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}