Interesting quotes
On the Bishop of Rome’s visit:
“Clearly, they like the pope, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to do everything he tells them,” said Father Thomas Reese of Georgetown’s Woodstock Theological Center. “People ultimately are going to do what they think is right.”
As quoted in the Bloomberg article: Benedict to Confront Skeptics, Scandal in U.S. Trip. I guess that in Fr. Reese’s book Roman Catholics in the U.S. are really Protestants with funny rituals?
On Bush being a closet Catholic:
You can’t be Catholic and un-Catholic at the same time.
From a comment on Bush a “Closet Catholic”? at Pro Ecclesia * Pro Familia * Pro Civitate. I would only differ in saying that yes you can – when you sin.
Of course in one sense that’s fine: the Pope can’t predict the weather or micro-manage policy (the sciences and the market are autonomous and free) but yes, Fr Reese’s kind reallly do want to be a working-class (with the occasional odd ritual like First Communion or even the rosary to mark them as Irish, Italian, Polish, etc.) version of liberal mainline Protestants: an ugly A-frame church with a Saturday-night Mass, Haugen and Haas hymnal and First Communions but birth control and women clergy like the Episcomethyterians.
(Note to Fr R: your kind like the churches you sort of imitate are dying off. The kids are either secular or listening to Pope Benedict not you.)
Bush of course is no Catholic nor really an evangelical but a tolerant old liberal Protestant like his dad with mainstream Wilsonian politics. Karl Rove painted him as an evo to get ‘the Christian vote’ (there is no more bloc RC vote). A horrible president but I think like Hillary Clinton his Methodist faith is sincere (it fuels her proven giving to charity and her desire to use the state for social change, however misguided): joining his wife’s church helped him kick drugs and drink and AFAIK he doesn’t commit adultery.
He should have stayed in Texas having fun owning a baseball team.
I do suspect Obama is an opportunistic yuppie agnostic who latched onto Trinity United Church of Christ both to cadge particularly black votes (he bombed at first because they knew culturally he isn’t really black), vital for a Chicago politician, and to fulfil his own wish to be ‘blacker’.