{"id":107,"date":"2008-05-05T14:13:49","date_gmt":"2008-05-05T14:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/the-catholic-gap-two-views-exp.html"},"modified":"2008-05-05T14:13:49","modified_gmt":"2008-05-05T14:13:49","slug":"the-catholic-gap-two-views-exp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/05\/the-catholic-gap-two-views-exp.html","title":{"rendered":"The Catholic Gap: Two views explain it all for you"},"content":{"rendered":"

Want to know why Obama hasn’t put away the nomination already? One word: Catholics. (Or, for those of you with more ultramontanist sensibilities, two words: Roman Catholics.) We’ve expended lots of bytes debating it here, and it will surely figure in tomorrow’s contests in North Carolina and most especially Indiana. For a primer on the issue, check out two articles.
\nOne is by Melinda Henneberger, a Slate contributor, Commonweal columnist, practicing Catholic and the author of If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians To Hear<\/a>. In “Hillary for Mother Superior”<\/a> she pieces together the trail of evidence, some of it self-inflicted by Obama, while others clues leading to places some of us don’t want to go:<\/p>\n

A priest I know in central Pennsylvania, the Rev. John Chaplin, sees race as an issue. “At my little church, some of what I heard was racial, and some of it was people believing that stuff about Obama being a Muslim,” said Chaplin. Parishioners seemed to find video clips of Obama’s former preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, particularly shocking in contrast to the formality of the Catholic Mass and our high-church fondness for services so decorous that one really needn’t exchange a word with another soul. (“We don’t carry on like that in our church” is how one woman in Chaplin’s diocese, the 67-year-old wife of a retired cop, described her reaction to Wright to me.) “You know that Catholic thing about propriety,” Chaplin said, “that you penalize people for speaking out and never penalize them for keeping quiet? That’s part of it, and the Catholic notion of patriotism, which is heavily nationalistic, hurts him, too. This isn’t a group predisposed to voting for Hillary…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She also cites Tina Fey’s comparison of Hillary to bitchy old nuns, which always struck me as not only unfair to nuns (I don’t know any like that, but I’m an adult convert, post-V2–my knuckles were spared) but also paradoxical: Catholics (seem to) complain endlessly about parochial school nuns, then want to vote for one for prez? Then again, as Melinda points out, the same people who complain about Obama’s pastor complain that he is a Muslim…
\nThen there is this Boston Globe piece today, “Catholics Reflect Schism in Democratic Base<\/a>,” which does a good job unpacking the split.
\nMore to come tomorrow, no doubt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Want to know why Obama hasn’t put away the nomination already? One word: Catholics. (Or, for those of you with more ultramontanist sensibilities, two words: Roman Catholics.) We’ve expended lots of bytes debating it here, and it will surely figure in tomorrow’s contests in North Carolina and most especially Indiana. For a primer on the…<\/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-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Catholic Gap: Two views explain it all for you - 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\/the-catholic-gap-two-views-exp.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Catholic Gap: Two views explain it all for you - Benedictions: The Pope in America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Want to know why Obama hasn’t put away the nomination already? One word: Catholics. (Or, for those of you with more ultramontanist sensibilities, two words: Roman Catholics.) We’ve expended lots of bytes debating it here, and it will surely figure in tomorrow’s contests in North Carolina and most especially Indiana. 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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\/107","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=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}