More Catholic Than The Pope

E. J. Dionne has an op-ed in today's Washington Post examining the opposition to President Obama delivering the commencement address and receiving an honorary degree from Notre Dame University. I think what his column shows that the Bush Administration era "Either you are for us or against us" mentality lives on in the Christian right.

We now know that the reaction of right-wing Catholics to Notre Dame's invitation to President Obama falls into the category of "more Catholic than the pope."

To the dismay of many conservatives, the Vatican's own newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, has offered what one antiabortion Catholic blog called "a surprisingly positive assessment of the new president's approach to life issues" -- so positive, in fact, that a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee was moved to criticize Pope Benedict XVI's daily.

The Vatican newspaper offered its analysis as Catholic liberals and conservatives are battling fiercely over Notre Dame's decision to invite the president as this year's commencement speaker and to grant him an honorary degree. The article will strengthen the liberal claim that the Catholic right's over-the-top response is rooted at least as much in Republican and conservative politics as in concern over the abortion question.

The April 29 essay by Giuseppe Fiorentino, L'Osservatore's frequent foreign affairs contributor, painted Obama as a moderate on many fronts. "Some have accused him of practicing excessive statism," Fiorentino wrote, "if not even of making the country drift toward socialism." But "a calmer analysis," he said, suggests that Obama "has moved with caution." (I rely here on a translation of the article posted yesterday on the Vatican's official Web site.)

On abortion and the other life issues, the article concluded that Obama "does not seem to have established the radical changes that he had aired."

In loosening the rules on federal funding of stem-cell research, the paper noted, Obama did not go as far as many in the antiabortion movement feared he would. "The new guidelines regarding embryonic stem cell research do not in fact follow the [prospective] change of route laid out months ago," Fiorentino wrote. "They do not allow for the creation of new embryos for research or therapy purposes, for cloning or reproductive ends; and federal funds can only be used for experimentation with surplus embryos."

Then came a carefully worded sentence declaring that "these measures do not eliminate the reasons for criticism in the face of unacceptable forms of bioengineering that work against the embryo's human identity, but the new regulations are less permissive than expected."

This restrained view contrasts with charges that Obama is the "most radical pro-abortion president in history," words used earlier this year on the Christian Coalition's Web site. During the campaign, Robert P. George, a Princeton professor who is a leading Catholic conservative intellectual, called Obama "the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of president of the United States."

The consternation on the right over the Vatican article was immediate. Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee in the United States, told LifeSiteNews.com that L'Osservatore's assessment was "not helpful" and that "there's nothing middle of the road about the substantive policies that this administration is pursuing on life issues."

It has gotten so bad for Christian conservatives that they are now trying to tell the Pope how to feel about "life issues". That is classic tail wagging the dog mentality that the Bush Administration's "War on Terror" has wrought. And the sad thing is that these people really believe that someone disagreeing with them is all the evidence they need that the other person is wrong. The air must be pretty thin way up there on top of that big ass moral pedestal that these people have created for themselves.


(h/t dkos)