Lions 1, Christians 0

Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport,

spokesperson for the Bishops'

Conference regarding the

contraception mandate in the Healh

Care Law

There they sat: Roman Catholic Bishop of Bridgeport William Lori, President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod Dr. Matthew Harrison, Union University Professor of Moral Philosophy Dr. C Ben Mitchell, Yeshiva University Director of Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Ethics Professor Dr. Craig Mitchell—five men testifying before Congress on the pressing question of the implications on Religious Freedom for the Health Care Mandate for Contraceptive Coverage.  What is the problem?  Well the problem is this: appearances.  The battle is won not by facts but by emotions and whoever thought to put an all-male panel of witnesses up on a question that is not only about protecting religious freedom but also about women’s health must be a secret agent for the other side. 

     The debate about requiring religious institutions to provide contraceptive coverage in their mandated health care programs for their female employees is not unlike the debate about the legalization of abortion that had involved many of the same parties and which has divided our society for decades.  It is not a one-issue question.  I wish some of my fellow pro-Life Catholics would listen—LISTEN—to some of my friends who are pro-choice.  We on the pro-Life side of the argument are concerned about unborn babies.  And yes, we will use that language—babies—because that is what they are and we will not mask the critical implications of this debate with euphemisms that take away the personhood from these victims of intra-uterine slaughter.  Having said that, we need to sit down and listen to the pro-choice camp speak of their concern for women and for the complexities with which unplanned and unwanted pregnancies often confront women.  And we need to let them choose the language for their argument. Fair is Fair and we need to admit that pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing present women with limitations to their educational opportunities, to their careers, to the economic security of their families, to the stability of their relationships.  At times pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing even present serious threat to their health, if not even to their lives.  I have found that when I sit down and talk about abortion with my pro-choice friends that we are not even talking about the same agenda.  And if I want to protect the lives of unborn children then I have to be involved in protecting women from being put in the difficult positions that make abortion the only practical solution to their dilemmas. 

    This debate about the Health Care Mandate for Contraception is very much the same.  I am concerned about religious groups not being forced to provide services which they regard as morally unacceptable.  But that is only one side of the question.  I must also be concerned that women have access to services which my religion may say is morally wrong but which is legal.  Being legal doesn’t make something right.  I am not saying that.  But neither do my religious beliefs  make it wrong.  We have reached a social consensus on the legitimacy of birth control—as indeed we have on abortion.  I have the right to work to change that social consensus; indeed if I believe something is wrong I have an obligation to work to help my fellow members of society see why it is wrong, just as its advocates have a right to work to try to convince me.  But neither do any of us have a right to force society to live under the minority opinion and neither should any of us be forced to act against our consciences because the majority believes differently than do we. 

     This debate gets messy because there are those who in their religious zeal would wish to prohibit women from having access to contraception under any and all circumstances.  And here, we should say "prevent people from having access" as there are male contraceptives as well as female.  To proscribe contraception entirely is clearly an extremist position but there are some in the Church—bishops, clergy, and laity—who would have contraception be illegal and generally unavailable.  Such a position does not help any rational discussion. 

      Then there ere are those who realize that contraceptives are a part of modern medical protocols but who believe that they should be in the realm of private choice and paid for by the consumer out of her or his own pocket.  They may believe this because of religious reasons or, more likely, because they do not favor publicly funded health care of any sort for anyone.  They need to be honest and admit that their oppositoin to "ObamaCare" is not moral, it is purely political.

      Neither of these is a good position for us Catholics to be in.

      Then there are those who recognize that universal health care is—in general—in accord with the fundamental values of our Christian faith/  Among these are many who may or may not  be opposed to contraceptives but who recognize that contraceptives are a part of modern medical protocols and and as such should ordinarily be covered by health care as are other protocols; but who also believe that those religiously owned institutions (though not individual employers) whose religious traditions consider contraception to be immoral, should not be required to offer that coverage.  At the same time they should not begrudge their employees to have access to contraceptives provided through and by other means for which the religious institutions do not have to pay or be involved. 

     That might sound like I agree with “The Obama Compromise”

      Well, I don’t.  For one thing, it isn’t a compromise.  Eleanor Holmes Norton, the “Delegate” to Congress form the District of Columbia claimed that the Administration had worked out a compromise between the religious institutions and the insurance companies.  That is not quite the truth.  The Administration did not sit down with representatives of the religious organizations involved and with the insurance companies and hammer out a solution to which all could, admittedly with some reservations (that is how compromises usually work), agree.  But it is too late now.  The president slipped the trap into which incompetent advisors had led him.  The Church will not have to provide—directly—contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients to employees of its schools, universities, administrative offices, hospitals, and other institutions.  I have doubts that the insurance companies will provide these out of their own generosity; it seems more a shell game, but what can we say?  I am not back in the Obama camp but I am sure that most of my friends who had concerns are. The President is to be congratulated on creating an appearance of reasonableness.  Bishop Lori, on the other hand, by sitting with an all-male panel has been left with egg on his face—and the Church’s—for not understanding that perception has more to do with winning than reality and thus the Church has lost.  More on this to come.  In the meantime, would their purpled mitered majesties please get some professional advice  on how to handle public relations?   

Night of the Long Knives

What Was He Thinking?

My friend Kathy commented at dinner the other evening that “we are supposed to bring our faith to our politics but it seems that most people bring their politics to their faith.”  I thought this was a comment worth reflecting on.  I remember the election of 2008 when so many Catholics were voting against Barack Obama supposedly for religious reasons when it fact, embarrassed by their Republican politics (and in the cases of two friends of mine, their racist prejudices), they were hiding behind the skirts of Mother Church as justification for their choice.  But the current flap over the issue of religious exemptions to President Obama’s Health Care Laws demonstrates that politics trumping faith is not simply the sin of the “religious” right.  The estrogen-deprived stridency of a range of voices from Nancy Pelosi to the internet chatter mavens show us that bandwagon-riders, liberal or conservative, crash the gates of faith with wacko political views.  We need people who will use well-informed reason to bring faith to politics. 
     I cannot conceive of why President Obama has put himself in this untenable position “between a rock and a hard place” over the issue of exempting Catholic institutions from the particular clauses of the health-care mandate that would require Catholic schools, universities, health-care facilities, diocesan offices, and other Church employers to provide employee coverage for contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients that are contrary to Catholic moral values.  All sorts of other establishments —Alliance One Tobacco, Ruby Tuesdays’s, Local 802 Musicians Health Fund,  CIGNA, Baptist Retirement, Denny’s, Aetna, UFT Welfare Fund, Cracker Barrel,  and about one hundred other employer groups were granted exemptions from the Health Care mandate in part or in full.  So why not Catholic institutions?  But the President has put himself in the middle of it now.  If he backs down, an alliance of groups as diverse as Planned Parenthood and the American Nurses Association will turn on him.  If he pushes on—well, there is no monolithic Catholic vote but he will lose valuable allies in the Catholic community.  Granted, he won’t lose all Catholics, but he will lose those who have most influence over others.  By that I don’t mean the bishops—they lost their influence over the Catholic faithful during the sex-abuse scandals.  He will lose Catholic teachers, professionals, writers, editors, journalists, social workers, and what clergy he has—mostly among the monastic and religious orders who are generally better educated than the diocesan clergy and have more influence over the laity they serve.      
      I was at a cocktail party the other evening—I hate parties of any kind and this was a particularly dull group of moneyed suburban liberal types —and there was plenty of chatter about this, most of missing the point as bandwagon riders have a tendency to do.  I have no doubt from the circles in which I am often trapped that the bandwagon liberals will support the President in ’12 just as the bandwagon conservatives opposed him in ’08 (and will again in ’12).  But as I posted on February 7^th, the progressive Catholic intelligentsia—Sean Winters from National Catholic Reporter, Douglas Kmiec, America Magazine, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, Los Angeles Cardinal Mahoney, Notre Dame President John Jenkins, Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine, as well as top officials of such agencies as Catholic Relief Services, Catholic Charities USA, and others feel betrayed and angry.  How does the President get out of this mess?  It’s beyond me.  What isn’t beyond me is that someone (ok not an individual but various advisors) got him to drive the getaway car for a hit on the big ol’ ugly Catholic Church 
     And don’t doubt for a moment that this is a slam on the Church.  Markos Moulitsas, in his political blog “The Daily Kos” is perhaps the most explicit in posting this vitriolic piece by one Kaili Joy Gray.  It tells us a lot about what the issue is for many in the “no-exemption camp.”
“… Catholic leaders who are outraged—outraged!—that women in this country will be receiving full, comprehensive health care through their insurers. Church leaders started whining last year that being forced to provide health care to women oppressed their First Amendment right to deny health care to women. And so, for the next several months, the Obama administration hemmed and hawed about whether to implement the new policy, as promised, thanks in no small part to the lie repeated by the bishops, Republicans, and even supposedly liberal commentators like E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post that such a decision would alienate the president's Catholic supporters. 
     Thank you Ms. Gray for your insightful and articulate comments.  Are you a raving maniac or just the ordinary everyday garden variety jerk?  Have you read the arguments supporting exemption?  Do you have any idea what they are about?  Well, I suppose facts would probably only clutter your pretty little mind anyway so why bother, but Kos why do you print  the brainless raves  of a religious bigot who doesn’t even understand that that the issue isn’t access to contraception but freedom of conscience?   As I asked yesterday: would you deny a Muslim woman the right to wear the  hijab? Wouldn’t you consider a person who wanted to make her act contrary to her religion a bigot?   Do you know anyone who thinks a yeshiva should be forced to serve pork barbeque to their gentile employees?  Wouldn’t you regard that as insulting and contemptuous towards Jews?  But it’s ok to tell not individual Catholic employers but the Catholic Church itself as an employer: we demand that you violate your tenets?  Why would you do that except to insult and degrade a particular religion?  Well, Ms. Gray isn’t the only one using inflammatory language.  The National Organization for Women (NOW) posted on their website:
TAKE ACTION: Tell President Obama: Free The Pill From the Bishops!  Will Obama through (sic) birth control under the bus.  (Obviously NOW needs to find a high-school graduate to check their spelling.  Maybe Kaili Joy  Gray needs a job and NOW will provide her with the coverage she covets). 
They also posted this slant:
Catholic Bishops Fail to Take Birth Control from More Women. In an important decision that ensures access to affordable birth control for millions of women, the Obama administration announced today that it would not expand an unconstitutional refusal clause that will already deny contraceptive coverage to some women under the Affordable Care Act.
     I am not sure what makes the refusal clause unconstitutional but until the Courts declare it to be so it is no more than NOW rhetoric designed to slant the issue.  And are the bishops taking birth control from more women or simply saying that if an individual wants birth control, sterilization, or abortifacients  please arrange for someone else who does not think these things to be immoral  to pay for them.  I don’t see Cardinal Dolan sweeping down to grab these pills from some sweet lady’s clenched fist.  
      Planned Parenthood, no friends with the Catholic Church (to be fair, the enmity is mutual)  has launched a nationwide television ad campaign encouraging Americans to back the President’s refusal to exempt Catholic institutions from requirements that violate Catholic moral doctrine, insisting that women have a "right" to have the Church provide them with birth control, sterilization, and abortifacients.  What right?  Who gives such a right?  Is it a right given by God? Is it a right inherent in nature?  Right?  Rights may be things recognized by law but they are not things conferred by law.  The Law may require the Church (or anyone else)  to do something but there is no intrinsic “right” to birth control or abortifacients.   Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, I grant you—but “the pill.”  No, not a right.  A law perhaps but laws are what we make them.  Rights transcend the law.  But I guess you have had to have  philosophy course or two to know the difference. 
One blogger, a Cecilia Bruck, wrote:
Exactly! First the Catholics try to force the rest of the world to live by their religious views, against our will, and take away our freedoms, then they are outraged when others do it to them. Can you hear the denials? This in no way forces catholics (sic)  to use contraceptives if they choose not to. The catholics (sic) are trying to force the rest of us to live according to a religion we don't want to be a part of.  …  we are entitled to the same respect as you are in our own religous (sic) freedoms and beliefs. If not, then you are discriminating against the rest of us because of our religion and because of our sex, and that is not only illegal, it is also against the constitution you claim to love so much.   (Well, I guess Ms. Bruck is not a winning candidate for that editing post so needed at NOW.) 
The Feminist Majority Foundation posted this on their website:  
Beginning today, women's rights groups - including the Feminist Majority Foundation, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Council of Jewish Women, and others - have launched a campaign and blog carnival to support the Obama Administration's decision to maintain full contraceptive coverage under the Preventive Care package of the Affordable Care Act. The administration has been under enormous pressure from the Catholic bishops to broaden the religious exemption. The campaign, which will include a blog carnival this week and other actions, aims to correct misinformation generated by negative newspaper editorials and other media outlets. The request to broaden the religious exemption, primarily pressed by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, would have denied millions of American women contraceptive coverage, including students, teachers, nurses, social workers, and other staff (and their families) at religiously-connected or affiliated schools, universities, and hospitals, as well as social service institutions like Catholic Charities.
And so the vultures gather. 
I could go on and perhaps will post more on this in the near future.  But the question remains: what provoked the President to step into this pile of ****.  He is anything but dumb.  Why has he consented to drive the getaway car for those fiends who are fueled by a hatred for the Catholic Church?  This sort of divisive politics is against everything he has stood for to date.  How will he get himself out of this mess?   

Who Got Obama to Wear the Black Hat?

White House spokesperson, David Axelrod

On Tuesday White House spokesperson David Axelrod said that the Obama Administration was looking for some sort of a compromise that would ease the tension between the Administration and the Catholic community over Church institutions being required to provide employee insurance coverage for contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients.  Mr. Axelrod said on MSNBC program, “Morning Joe”

I heard earlier Joe [Scarborough] say, ‘Well, there may be compromises that can be reached.’ We have great respect for the work that these religious institutions do. …We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedoms, so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventive care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions.”  

      I don’t think the administration gets it.  Compromise isn’t what is needed.  Backing off from forcing people to do something that their religion believes is immoral is what is needed.  Don’t require by law for religious groups to violate their tenets.  I don’t think that Muslim women should be forbidden to wear the hijab or a yeshiva required to serve pork barbeque to its gentile employees.  I don’t think a Baptist seminary needs to have a bar or a juke box and I don’t think non-believers should be required to start the day with prayer just because their employer is “born-again.” Why should Catholic institutions have to pay for services that they believe are contrary to their religious faith?   I am not talking about individual Catholic employers—we are considering institutions run by the Catholic Church.  Ya’ might as well force the Salt Lake City Council of the Twelve Apostles to drink espresso.  

     The Catholic Church didn’t start this pissing contest and whoever advised President Obama to get into it must have been a double agent from The Karl Rove Academy for Vile Politics. What a gift to the Republicans this has been!  Now Speaker Boehner is getting into the act and using this as another hammer to beat up on the President.  Boehner and the Republicans will be the heroes and pass laws that will grant the Church protection from the harm that the President should never have exposed us to.  Good for Catholics; great for the Republicans.  What was Obama thinking of?  What motivated one of the brightest and most savvy men to live under that sometimes distinguished White House roof to do something so stupid in an election year?  (I looked in my thesaurus for a synonym for “stupid” but after considering several alternatives I thought that the plain unvarnished truth is best.  Nothing says it better than “stupid.” “Ill-advised”, “imprudent”, “injudicious”, what have you—just puts lipstick on the pig as the President used to say.  So we stick with “stupid.”)  I honestly don’t see how at this point the President can make this situation work for him.  The various foes of the Church—led by our friends at Planned Parenthood—are insisting that the President not back down to those horrible, nasty, Catholic bishops.  “This is,” they claim, “one more example of how the patriarchy of the Catholic Church tries to keep women from exercising full rights as human persons in our modern world.”  Any backing off from the mandate will inflame those whose political dream is to drive the Catholic Church from the public square and stuff it into the dust closet of “whatever you do in your private-life…”  “Wouldn’t it be nice if the Church just went away?”   On the other hand, to stay on this course of requiring Catholic institutions to violate their tenets on what Catholics perceive to be the sacredness of life is driving hundreds of thousands of liberal Catholics from the Obama (and Democratic) fold.  Maybe the President doesn’t need Catholics for his re-election.  (He did get 54% of the Catholic vote in 2008—a pretty good percentage.) He might think he is safe without us Catholics behind him.  Right now, the election looks better for him than it has in a long time.  The economy is showing signs that his policy of patient reorganization is bearing fruit.  The Republicans are split between a candidate who is too liberal for the base and three candidates who are two crazy for the nation. But November is a long way off and much could change for the President’s fortunes.  The President may find that he has painted himself into a corner and someday may want those Catholic votes.  He had mine in 2008.  It looks like he won’t in 2012.    But that’s ok,  Planned Parenthood has assured him that there are more women voters than Catholic bishops.  I suppose there are, but there is something wrong with that apples and oranges equation. 

How Many Rights Will the Obama Administration Abrogate?

I have a friend who spent 20 years as a Catholic chaplain in the U.S. military. We were undergrads together, though he was, in fact, a couple of years ahead of me.  Jack is a real looker, the classic “Father What-a-Waste,” and it got him far—which is good because he isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier and brains sure weren’t going to do it for him.  He didn’t do well in Philosophy, I remember, because his mind was never very good for abstractions.  Math and Science—no problem and if you needed your car fixed or your VCR programmed—he was your man.  But abstractions—well fortunately we need priests, and as I said in his day he was a looker (and at seventy still looks pretty good for himself), and so he got through seminary with a smile and not much philosophy or theology.

       We went for dinner one evening some years back—I was living in Rome and he was part of the entourage accompanying then-president Bush (“W”) on a foreign trip.  I have no idea how a Catholic chaplain got to come along with a Protestant President, but again good looks and a spotless record go as far in the military as they do in the Church.  Maybe it was to impress some of the Vatican people that the Methodist President brought a priest with him; maybe it was a reward for his hard work.  And maybe it was both.  But we went to dinner, I remember, at a place I like near the Campo dei Fiori and I asked him what advice he would give a soldier who was conflicted because he had been given an immoral order.  Jack didn’t comprehend the question.  It was like I was asking him how much he thought we could get for the green cheese if we ever set up a base on the moon.  “An immoral order?”  he queried.  He paused.  He looked into thin air for about 20 second.  “We don’t do that” he said.  “I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”  Had it been anyone else, I would have thought it was just company loyalty to deny the possibility that evil might exist in the hearts of those wonderful people who had  brought you Abu Ghraib, but I could see he was really puzzled at the concept that someone, somewhere might give an immoral order.  I mean this guy isn’t just ingenuous, he’s actually obtuse.  He’s a true blue believer—Vatican, Pentagon, God, King and Country. If the pope said: next Sunday we’re all going to say mass in the nude, he would marched to the altar bare-assed naked.  And if his commanding officer had told him to drop his drawers when he saluted the President, he would have mooned ol’ “W.”   Fortunately it never came to that.  And fortunately he retired from the military before Secretary of the Army John McHugh put out word through the chief-of chaplain’s office that Catholic Chaplains were not to read at Mass this past Sunday the Pastoral Letter Military Services Archbishop Timothy Broglio had written and ordered to be read at mass condemning the Obama Administration’s forcing Catholic Institutions to provide a type of employee health care that would pay for contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures contrary to Catholic morals.  This is a double whammy—an attack on Free Speech as well as Freedom of Religion.  The government (OK, the Department of the Army, so a government department) prevented a letter from an Archbishop to the faithful under his care from being read?  Like what country is this?   McHugh, by the way, is Catholic—but it wouldn’t matter if he were an Episcopalian or even a Buddhist.  This is a clear interference with religious freedom. 

      Now to be fair, this wasn’t President Obama or even “The Administration,” but this flap over religious institutions being required by law to violate their basic moral principles was initiated by the Administration and can be laid directly at the President’s door.  What is the White House thinking these days?  I am sure that they weren’t happy with Archbishop Broglio’s letter to our letter to our men and women in uniform.  The Archbishop made it clear that there is a time for disobedience and the military doesn’t want to encourage that thinking and the government doesn’t want—for good reason—for our troops to be given the example of not only questioning but defying authority.  But our men and women in uniform are here to defend—among other things—our freedom of speech and our freedom from government interference in our religious practices.   

Here is what the Archbishop wrote:  

“the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States” in a way that is “denying Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty.”

“And, as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to choose between violating our consciences or dropping health care coverage for our employees (and suffering the penalties for doing so),” he wrote. “We cannot—and will not—comply with this unjust law.”

      And this had to be censored?  Well, fortunately the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, a Methodist didn’t think so. Secretary of the Air Force, Michael Donley didn’t think so.  No problem with the Marines.  No problem with the Coast Guard.  But I am glad Jack is out of the Army before he did something so wrong as to surrender his rights—and obligations—of free speech and free practice of religion in a system that does not understand that authority has its limits.  

The Dream That Has Turned to a Nightmare

Archbishop of Boston,Cardinal Sean O'Malley 

greets President Barack Obama at the Funeral

of Senator Ted Kennedy in 2009.

Sean Winters, a writer for the liberal-oriented National Catholic Reporter wrote a scathing attack on the Obama Administration last week over the decision not to exempt Catholic educational and health-care institutions from the mandate to provide employees with insurance coverage for abortions, sterilizations, and contraceptives including abortifacients.  Winters wrote: 

President Barack Obama lost my vote yesterday when he declined to expand the exceedingly narrow conscience exemptions proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.

Winters is one of the many Catholic liberals whose enchantment with the Obama presidency has “hit the wall” as they have realized that the candidate and Administration they went out on a limb to support has betrayed them.  Catholics have probably not voted as a bloc since the 1960 campaign that put John F. Kennedy in the White House as the first Catholic President.  Certainly by the 1972 election the liberal/conservative split in the Church was reflected in the political choices that Catholics made in the polls with liberals going for Humphrey and conservatives going for Nixon.  The situation became even more divisive with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing constitutional protection for a woman’s “choice” in opting for abortion in an unwanted pregnancy.  By 1980 Republicans had realized that the abortion issue could be used to political advantage in weaning Catholics away from their traditional alliance to the Democratic Party.  Ronald Reagan and the Bushes promised us the sky when it came to ending abortion while they delivered very little.  Yet the gradual shift of many Catholics to the GOP was not so much about “the Right to Life” as it reflected the emergence of American Catholics from labor to management level jobs and from working class to professional class.  As Catholics became more and more educated and Middle Class, and as Democrats moved from being the party of Labor to the party of suburban liberals the political face of American Catholicism began to shift as well.  “We have worked hard,” many thought, “and we want to keep what we have—let those behind us work to get here like we have worked.”   Yet there was a faithful cadre of Catholics left in the Democratic Party.   Mostly they were intellectuals, or at least committed Catholics who took their faith seriously and were familiar with the long tradition of social encyclicals and they could not bring themselves to embrace a party whose economic theories are at such variance with the Catholic Tradition.  Now this group has become disillusioned.  Winters writes:

I accuse you, Mr. President, of treating shamefully those Catholics who went out on a limb to support you. Do tell, Mr. President, how many bullets have the people at Planned Parenthood taken for you? Sr. Carol Keehan, Father Larry Snyder, Father John Jenkins, these people have scars to show for their willingness to work with you, to support you on your tough political fights. Is this the way you treat people who went to the mat for you?

There will be few true-blue Catholics left in the Obama camp but the President need not worry.  I doubt those Catholics will go running to Mitt Romney.  They recoil in horror at Newt.  Santorum, they think, is from another planet all together, and they can’t recognize his Latin Mass Catholicism  as anything other than the ecclesial equivalent of the embalmed (and poorly embalmed) remains of Pope Pacelli.  (See blog entry for April 14, 2011.)   Where will they go in November?  They will be like homeless ghosts wandering in the political underworld seeking some provisional shelter where they might alight long enough to cast their spectral -vote for some obscure pale shadow-candidate of some phantom sixth party who champions all that is just, all that is iconic, all that is virtuous—someone who can replace Obama, not in the White House for sure, but on that pedestal they had constructed for him in their own temple of Feel-Good-American Civil Catholicism.  Obama has let us down But that is our fault not his.  He is intelligent and articulate but he never was the Angel of Democratic Idealism we projected him to be.  We made him into something no man could be.  I have that Jansenist streak that runs through us American Catholics, especially those of us who pretend to a pharisaical orthodoxy, and I know in my heart that no man is pure and God alone is holy.  It just took us three years to realize that Barack is made from the common mud from which God rolled out you and me.