{"id":225,"date":"2009-01-22T09:52:52","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T09:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/bishops-strategy-on-obama-good.html"},"modified":"2009-01-22T09:52:52","modified_gmt":"2009-01-22T09:52:52","slug":"bishops-strategy-on-obama-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/bishops-strategy-on-obama-good.html","title":{"rendered":"Bishops’ strategy on Obama: Good Cops, Bad Cops?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cardinal<\/span>So the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S., through its president, Chicago Cardinal Francis George, welcomes the incoming President-elect just before his inauguration with a respectful, constructive<\/a> letter, dated Jan. 13, setting out hopes for collaboration and working together on a range of issues, including the pro-life agenda. Notably, Cardinal George did not refer to the Roe decision, and proffered a commitment to working together on policies to “reduce the number of abortions.”
\nIt sure seemed like folks with some political savvy–which the hierarchy did not demonstrate during the election campaign–got to the leadership with some words of wisdom about political realities, and what to fear and who not to fear, and how best to advance the cause. The Jan. 13 letter was a marked shift from the tone and substance of George’s immediate, flat-footed, ham-handed post-election statement <\/a>regarding Obama.
\n\"Obama<\/span>But wait! The day before Inauguration Day came word of a follow-up letter <\/a>from George to Obama on Jan. 16, in which he warned the incoming president not to reverse Bush policies on abotion funding or stem cells, saying they “could introduce significant negative and divisive factors into our national life, at a time when we need to come together to address the serious challenges facing our people.”
\nCompare that all to the markedly different tone from Rome. A nice telegram from the Pope<\/a>; an inauguration commentary in L’Osservatore Romano<\/em><\/a> comparing Washington to Berlin in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall; and a Vatican Radio interview with Rick Garnett of Notre Dame<\/a> who, according to Catholic World News,<\/a> “commented on the new president’s openness to religion and predicted that under his leadership, the United States would continue to be less secularist than many European nations.”
\nWhat does it all mean? First, that the bishops–whose deo internal divisions were exposed during the campaign–are still struggling to find a strategy and a voice to deal with the new political reality. Second, it’s easy for the Vatican to make nice. The local bishops are the point men who have to deal with the Administration on policy questions. Third, George’s tone, while still seeming to come from between clenched teeth, was a good deal more constructive even in the follow-up letter than the November statement and the comments from other bishops and much of the pro-life community.
\nReality is being to take hold. The final question is whether this is too little, too late. There is still so little recognition of the historic moment of Obama’s election, little sense of joy or any emotion, or appreciation of the prospect of the end of a terrible policies on torture and such. The bishops seem like such bystanders to this moment.
\nAnd there’s a danger that if they don’t get their act together, they may remain so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S., through its president, Chicago Cardinal Francis George, welcomes the incoming President-elect just before his inauguration with a respectful, constructive letter, dated Jan. 13, setting out hopes for collaboration and working together on a range of issues, including the pro-life agenda. Notably, Cardinal George did not refer to the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,3,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-politics","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nBishops' strategy on Obama: Good Cops, Bad Cops? - 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\/2009\/01\/bishops-strategy-on-obama-good.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bishops' strategy on Obama: Good Cops, Bad Cops? - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S., through its president, Chicago Cardinal Francis George, welcomes the incoming President-elect just before his inauguration with a respectful, constructive letter, dated Jan. 13, setting out hopes for collaboration and working together on a range of issues, including the pro-life agenda. 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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\/225","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=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}