{"id":24,"date":"2008-07-31T11:29:40","date_gmt":"2008-07-31T11:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2008\/07\/chaput-mccain-and-notsodistant.html"},"modified":"2008-07-31T11:29:40","modified_gmt":"2008-07-31T11:29:40","slug":"chaput-mccain-and-notsodistant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/07\/chaput-mccain-and-notsodistant.html","title":{"rendered":"Chaput, McCain and not-so-distant thunder from the Catholic “wafer wars”…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"\"<\/span>As reports continue to cite Catholics<\/a> like Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine or Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as veep short-listers for Obama, the McCain camp appears to have countered with a little-noticed event that could have large implications should Obama try to shore up his Catholic flank with the No. 2 pick. Yesterday in Denver, John McCain and his wife Cindy met with Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, who is perhaps the most visible and outspoken churchman for denying communion to pro-choice Catholic pols. <\/p>\n

Chaput has also recently challenged Catholics<\/a> who are thinking of voting for Obama that they could only do so if they will be able to explain their reasons, “with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life–which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.” (Chaput is even clearer on why Catholics cannot vote for pro-choice pols in his new book, “Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life.”<\/a>) <\/p>\n

With St. Louis Archbishop Raymond L. Burke having decamped to Rome <\/a>to head the Vatican equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court–“The appointment is going to make every pro-choice Catholic politician very worried,” as church pundit Father Thomas Reese put it–Chaput is even more prominent, but also maybe more isolated within the U.S. hierarchy, a large majority of which does not agree with Chaput’s approach–just as he has made it clear he disagrees with his brother bishops. <\/p>\n


\n\"John<\/span>So why is McCain reaching out to Chaput? The Denver prelate has no connection to McCain’s home state of Arizona, nor did McCain meet with Washington’s Archbishop Donald Wuerl. Chaput said afterwards that the meeting was private<\/a> and no comment would be forthcoming. But McCain’s courting of the Colorado churchman could shore up his bona fides with religious conservatives across denominational lines, who are more likely to join together in an “ecumenism of the barricades” against liberals in their own churches than find common ground with their co-religionists. <\/span><\/p>\n

A renewal of what Chaput called the “wafer wars” of the 2004 campaign–with pols and prelates battling over who is worthy to receive and who is not–would be ugly, but it might serve the McCain camp if it peeled off conservatives, especially some Catholics who have been flirting with Obama’s “catholic” (small “c” is intentional) vision of the common good. Will that give Obama pause when he looks at a potential Catholic running mate?<\/span><\/p>\n

It took five centuries and a culture war, but maybe the Reformation is finally over. Now it’s schism all over.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As reports continue to cite Catholics like Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine or Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as veep short-listers for Obama, the McCain camp appears to have countered with a little-noticed event that could have large implications should Obama try to shore up his Catholic flank with the No. 2 pick. Yesterday in Denver, John…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,12,1,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion","category-catholics","category-election-08","category-religion-in-the-public-square"],"yoast_head":"\nChaput, McCain and not-so-distant thunder from the Catholic "wafer wars"... - Progressive Revival<\/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\/progressiverevival\/2008\/07\/chaput-mccain-and-notsodistant.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chaput, McCain and not-so-distant thunder from the Catholic "wafer wars"... - Progressive Revival\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As reports continue to cite Catholics like Virginia Gov. 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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\/progressiverevival\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}