{"id":182,"date":"2008-12-17T08:56:20","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T08:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/the-future-of-a-catholic-polit.html"},"modified":"2008-12-17T08:56:20","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T08:56:20","slug":"the-future-of-a-catholic-polit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/12\/the-future-of-a-catholic-polit.html","title":{"rendered":"The Future of a Catholic Politician"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve written about Anh (Joseph) Cao<\/a>, the neophyte New Orleans Republican and former Jesuit seminarian who won a surprise victory over the once invincible but now disgraced (allegedly) Rep. Wiiliam Jefferson earlier this month in a storm-delayed Congressional election. Cao is an affecting mix of humility and politics, the latter informed but not dictated by his strong Catholic faith. Whether Cao will have a place or an influence on the future of the GOP, or a role in articulating a more coherent Catholic vision of politics, remains to be seen.
\nBut Cao had some interesting comments this week in an interview with Dan Gilgoff<\/a>, our former God-o-Meter maven who recently began a “God & County” blog at U.S. News & World Report. Cao speaks movingly and humanly about his past “crisis of faith” and his current commitment to “the core of my faith and the core of my political view, that politicians are put into office in order to serve.”
\nObviously many people will want to focus on what this avowedly pro-life Catholic will do about abortion and homosexuality. Here’s what he says:<\/p>\n

Q: How important were traditional family values issues, like abortion and marriage, in your race?<\/strong>
\nA: Very little. I was focusing on the need to rebuild the Second Congressional District so the issues of abortion and marriage were not the focus of my campaign at all.
\nQ: Are those values issue high priorities for your first term in Congress?<\/strong>
\nA: My main priority in the first couple of years is to focus on rebuilding the Second Congressional District in Louisiana. Three and half years after Katrina, there are areas that remain devastated. The healthcare system is in need of reform. The educational system is in need of reform. We need to develop economically, need to look at the levies and at coastal restoration. Those are the issues right now that concern the majority of my constituents, so that’s what I’ll be focusing on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The next question, for us, is whether such statements will help or hurt his political career, in the GOP and with the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve written about Anh (Joseph) Cao, the neophyte New Orleans Republican and former Jesuit seminarian who won a surprise victory over the once invincible but now disgraced (allegedly) Rep. Wiiliam Jefferson earlier this month in a storm-delayed Congressional election. Cao is an affecting mix of humility and politics, the latter informed but not dictated by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Future of a Catholic Politician - 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\/12\/the-future-of-a-catholic-polit.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Future of a Catholic Politician - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ve written about Anh (Joseph) Cao, the neophyte New Orleans Republican and former Jesuit seminarian who won a surprise victory over the once invincible but now disgraced (allegedly) Rep. 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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\/182","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=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}