{"id":131,"date":"2008-10-23T14:08:46","date_gmt":"2008-10-23T14:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/blue-state-red-bishops.html"},"modified":"2008-10-23T14:08:46","modified_gmt":"2008-10-23T14:08:46","slug":"blue-state-red-bishops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/blue-state-red-bishops.html","title":{"rendered":"Blue State, Red Bishops"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another Pennsylvania Catholic bishop is weighing in against pro-Obama Catholics. This time it is the other side of the Keystone state from Scranton’s Bishop Martino<\/a>. In the Diocese of Greensburg, Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt has issued a statement<\/a> decrying the invitation extended by Seton Hill University<\/a> to Douglas Kmiec, to speak on campus about faith and politics. Kmiec is a prominent pro-life supporter of Barack Obama, and his reasoning for that support appears to be at the heart of the bishop’s complaint:<\/p>\n

“As the teacher of authentic Catholic doctrine in the Diocese of Greensburg, I feel compelled to state in view of this situation that Mr. Kmiec distorts Catholic teaching by making it synonymous with his own personal views. There is no “other” Catholic position except the one which appears in authentic Church documents. His misrepresentations of Catholic doctrine do a grave disservice to the Catholic community and far beyond.
\nI seriously question the good judgment of the University administration in allowing him a platform on campus. [snip]
\nIs it any wonder then that not only the demonstrators at the event, but many others as well, consider his presentation an offensive trivialization of the institution’s declared Catholic identity!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The bishops says he has tried “in vain” to reach the university’s president, so I don’t know the disposition of the case, or what influence\/authority he has here. In any case, these episodes seem to represent a broadening of the definition of who is to be barred from Catholic property. Here is the diocesan website<\/a>. The hyperlink to the statement is on the right-hand side under the “What’s New” banner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another Pennsylvania Catholic bishop is weighing in against pro-Obama Catholics. This time it is the other side of the Keystone state from Scranton’s Bishop Martino. In the Diocese of Greensburg, Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt has issued a statement decrying the invitation extended by Seton Hill University to Douglas Kmiec, to speak on campus about faith…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nBlue State, Red Bishops - Pontifications<\/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\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/blue-state-red-bishops.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Blue State, Red Bishops - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Another Pennsylvania Catholic bishop is weighing in against pro-Obama Catholics. This time it is the other side of the Keystone state from Scranton’s Bishop Martino. In the Diocese of Greensburg, Bishop Lawrence E. 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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\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}