Catholics are paying the price for their alliance with Evangelicals
In 1994, 39 church leaders and scholars — some Catholics, some evangelical Protestants — published a statement of reconciliation. “We together, Evangelicals and Catholics, confess our sins against the unity that Christ intends for all his disciples,” they said, and over the course of their letter laid the foundations for political and spiritual cooperation. They would work together, they declared, to strengthen the family, defend democracy and end abortion on demand. Over the next decade, signatories of the 1994 document, Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), would confer again and pen further statements , all in hopes of establishing a durable accord between their traditions. These were the leaders and the elites: the pastors and priests, professors and bishops, notables and worthies from each side of the great schism. Together, and for what they saw as the greater good, they would overcome the old hostilities dividing rank-and-file pew-sitters.
They had a reason for dramatic measures. For decades, evangelicals and Catholics had struggled to work together even on political issues both groups took seriously, such as abortion and prayer in schools. Old animosities divided them, and mistrust poisoned attempts at cooperation. In the 1950s, Catholics resented the proto-evangelicals pushing for prayer and Bible readings in schools — from Protestant texts and translations. In the 1970s, Foy Valentine , a crusader for traditional Christian morality and the longtime head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, griped that public campaigns against abortion were a strictly Roman Catholic preoccupation; other evangelicals were also wary of participating in anti-abortion politics for fear of associating too closely with a cause presumed to be thoroughly Catholic, and at times they developed their own parallel anti-abortion groups just to avoid cooperating with the Romish.
But a new generation of rightward activists, intellectuals and politicians mobilized during the culture wars, attracting Catholics and evangelicals to their ranks. Eventually, thanks to the work of groups like ECT and the pressure of ongoing polarization, relations between Catholics and evangelicals grew so warm that it now seems hard to recall these struggles. But the political pact between evangelicals and Catholics also came with significant hazards. It has, especially recently, become a source of anxiety for the Catholic leaders who helped convene the alliance in the first place. For all their success building a new coalition on the right, evangelical and Catholic doctrines are still distinct. Working together meant that one party would have to make concessions to the other. And so far, Catholic teaching has given the most ground.
Catholics have had trouble fitting into U.S. politics since the beginning. America’s founders were suspicious of the faith. John Adams mocked the “nonsense and delusion” of “absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted successions, and the rest of those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law.” Immigration from predominantly Catholic countries throughout the 19th century sparked anti-Catholic parties such as the Know-Nothings ; roughly 100 years later, echoes of those sentiments sounded in response to John F. Kennedy’s historic presidential run.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/evangelicals-and-catholics-made-their-peace-catholics-are-paying-the-price/2017/10/27/60d7440e-ba4f-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.fde8d6dc7bad
It's high time moderate and liberal Catholics put their foot down and call out conservative Catholics as the sellouts they are.
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