Remember when the bishops’ fight for “religious freedom” was going to rally Catholic voters ’round Romney? Not so much:
On June 17, Obama held a slight edge over Mitt Romney among Catholics (49-47 percent), according to the Pew Research Center. Since then, Obama has surged ahead, and now leads 54-39 percent, according to a Pew poll conducted on Sept. 16.
I know this is among all Catholics, not just the all-important white, non-Hispanic Catholics. The Reagan Democrats! Maureen Dowd’s rage-aholic brother! Chris Matthews’ cranky, chronically unemployed uncle, who hates gays and hippies so much he votes to cut his own benefits, even though he loved Kennedy and FDR!
The thing is this: not many people — beyond extreme right-wingers — care, or even know, what the bishops are saying. Plenty of church-going Catholics see the bishops for misogynist, child-rape-enabling assholes that they are.
srv
Now they’ve even corrupted the religious polls. What next?
This is not what all the pundits who said the Reagan Democrats would surge said.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I also think that many church going Catholics also believe in the American idea that government and church should not mix, so the church has no right to tell them how they should run their government.
Villago Delenda Est
Red beanie brigade = made up entirely of Jerry Sanduskys.
They’re fucking doomed and they don’t even know it.
reflectionephemeral
Indeed. As a wise man once said:
NonyNony
That’s not entirely true. For example, I know quite a few activist liberal Catholics (Catholic Worker types) who know that the bishops condemned Paul Ryan’s budget as “unjustified and wrong” because of all the cuts made for assistance to needy children, seniors, the unemployed and the poor.
They care in the sense that it’s another spike to drive into the right-wing Catholic condemnation of them as “cafeteria Catholics”, though in general Catholic Worker types give a rats’ ass what the bishops thing about anything when it comes to politics in my experience.
japa21
Plus, most Catholics couldn’t care less about what the bishops said about the birth control uproar, but they did hear what both the bishops and particularly the Nuns on the Bus had to say about Ryan’s budget.
I don’t think most people realize, particularly for Catholics who went to Catholic schools and were taught by the nuns, how much impact the Nuns on the Bus had.
HumboldtBlue
Bullshit. Sources, please. Plenty of church-going Catholics are directly aiding the child-rape enablers and couldn’t give a flying fuck about it.
Sure, they’ll shake their heads sadly and pretend to keen about the awful damage it’s done while sitting at Sunday dinner, but ask any one of these motherfucking church-going Catholics why they still go to worship in an institution that breeds, protects and the covers up for child rapists and you’ll get a litany of excuses, reliance upon superstition and tradition and straight-up anger and finally frustration.
You have a choice whether or not to participate in life as part of that organization and for those that do, including members of my family, you get no sympathy, to the contrary, you get confrontation.
So fuck the motherfucking Pope.
japa21
@HumboldtBlue:
Bullshit. Sources please.
HumboldtBlue
Look at the fucking pews on Sunday, you simpering cocknozzle.@japa21:
flukebucket
I have to admit that it did amuse me to find out yesterday that the Tennessee student who piped wine via enema up his ass had attended a Catholic high school.
Values people. They are absolutely essential.
Another Halocene Human
@japa21: Who needs sources? Attendance has taken a dump since the scandal broke and rolled across the country, and most of the people who left will not hesitate to tell you why.
The ones that are left are a right-winger rump.
I have a good friend who was a gay music director at a parish church for thirty years. (And self-loathing for many of those years, sadly.) He finally GTFO. (He tried to make the switch over to public schools but they passed him over for a public school teacher with much less experience, and it was NOT lack of talent… apparently the Protestant distrust of Catholics lives on.)
Well, guess what, after all the hatred and crap he started attending an Episcopalian church although he was still doing weddings at the Catholic church because he was (shocker) highly requested.
Some horrid RWNJ busybody ninnies complained to monsignor, who, being a weak man as ever (as EVER), sent my friend a you’re fired letter of extraordinarily pusillanimous quality.
Note: the church has employed non-Catholics to do music for years. This was just a ‘scandal’ b/c he was so popular with the younger people for teaching them to love music in children’s choir.
Do you think those young people will be back any time soon? Maybe they won’t have a Catholic wedding.
My Irish Catholic grandmother who put her foot down about Catholic weddings (three of her children did get married but defied her on the Catholic bit, but never fear, the eldest grandchild knuckled under) passed away last year. The boomer generation have shruggies about the church now.
The RCC in the USA screwed the pooch and they are never, never, never getting back what they had.
J. Michael Neal
@japa21: Jake and Elwood Blues probably couldn’t care less what the bishops think, but when the Penguin expresses her opinion . . .
Raven
@J. Michael Neal: Sister Mary Elephant
maurinsky
I sing in a Catholic church, and the priest there just got rebuked by the Archdiocese because he gave a reading at his gay cousin’s wedding. He got nothing but support from the parish.
I have a lot of qualms about working for the church. I was raised Catholic but have no allegiance to it and don’t consider myself Catholic at all (and even when I was Catholic, it was under duress – I didn’t have a choice, my parents took us every week.) But damn, the money is good, and I’m poor, so I need it.
mcd410x
I’m with John G.: We need to start thinking about what happens in November and December if the GOP pulls a coup/secedes/etc. because of illegitimate voters.
Time to re-read Lincoln’s Cooper Union address and realize that, for these guys, it’s always 1860.
Is this lot really going to go quietly?
shortstop
Will this shut Tweety and O’Donnell up?
Ha, I crack myself up.
? Martin
I don’t know. Siding with the bishops seems the surest path to lose the Catholic vote.
ding dong
At the risk of sounding overconfident can we start introducing the word Blowout. 64 style landslide. FDR era overwhelming win. Any term will do.
plynch22
Noonan! Nnnn-oonan! Noonan!
dollared
@HumboldtBlue: You are really out of line, in a addition to being ignorant.
Why are people still in their pews? Because it is THEIR church, not the bishops’. This is not like boycotting Dixie Cups because the Kochs own it. The Church has been there 2000 years. Catholics take the long view. And in fact, many younger Catholics are just biding time until there are no longer any priests or nuns left.
So they aren’t going to leave the field, and leave their church to those corrupt old men, any more than you are going to move to Canada and leave the nuclear codes in the hands of Newt Gingrich or Todd Akin.
One more thing: for most Catholics, their parish is their social life. They aren’t going to leave all their friends and pull their kids out of their schools just because you don’t like the bishops. That’s an important part of the “wait ’em out” strategy.
Now, I speak for about ~60% of Cathlics here. The remaining ~40% really have dug in on the abortion thing.
pogu
Agreed.
Also true.
I went to a baptism class as a godparent a few weeks ago. It was mostly harmless: scripture references were made, miscellaneous advice was given, the normal thing.
Then, at the end, there was an appeal from the instructor, who apparently hosts some kind of program on EWTN radio, about how Saskatchewan “recently” banned the Bible and how people need to become engaged with the church. He made various appeals to listen to the Conference of Catholic Bishops. I came home, looked up what he was talking about, and saw that this “attack” was nothing like how he had depicted it. It was by no means “recent,” and it had nowhere near the effect that he (as the bishops likely had lamented) thought it did. An educated guy – selectively educated – of course.
Anyway, to the point: he said that people need to go home and listen to Catholic radio. I’m fairly certain that only one of the fifteen or so there did. That guy seemed fairly engaged in a RWNJ kind of way. The youth (figuratively speaking) of the church, the stewards of those to be baptized, didn’t seem to care at all.
And, of all things, the radio to counteract the influence of larger society. Laughable.
shortstop
@ding dong: I wouldn’t. Obama is going to win and win big in electoral votes, but I’m not sure how you think he’s going to get to 60-plus percent of the popular vote.
Zifnab
Why are you people always pissing all over my beautiful narrative with your god damned facts? Assholes!
Dennis SGMM
@ding dong:
I think that you are being overconfident. Obama may pull off an Electoral College blowout, but I doubt that he wins the popular vote by anything like a landslide. There’s still Dixie and Arizona and any number of states where the mere fact that Obama is blah will keep people from voting for him.
JPL
Doug’s post gives new meaning to the saying Holy Shit.
NorthLeft12
The Catholic Church heirarchy are completely paralyzed by the ongoing events. I believe they are aware of the problems they are facing regarding attendance/activity, number of priests, fiscal issues, and the overall relevance of the church, but they just cannot summon the courage to make the changes necessary to ensure the
revitalizationsurvival of the church.I was the last member of my family to continue to attend mass. Same for my wife. We stopped going two years ago. I still consider myself a Catholic, but I don’t recognize what it has become. Or perhaps more accurately, I have finally seen it for what it is.
DFH no.6
Raised Catholic and went to Catholic grade school (taught almost entirely by nuns – this was the 60s).
Been away from Catholicism a very long time now (though I did take an unfortunate journey through a corner of Christian fundamentalism in the meantime –I’m all better, now, thanks for asking, but at least I know exactly what the Dominionists and others of that ilk are about, and can throw their Bible verses back in their smug faces when necessary).
None of my many siblings (Mom and Dad were apparently “good” Catholics, at least when it came to birth control) are Catholic anymore.
Nor is my wife, who was also raised in similar fashion as myself in a neighboring parish. Nor are any of her many siblings but one sister. Nor are any of our siblings’ children (except my wife’s sister’s kids who have been raised Catholic – but give them time, they’re still young).
Nor is my son’s Peruvian (naturalized American) wife – only the older people in her family are still Catholic. Wherever I look in any direction of my extended family I see the same thing – almost entirely Catholic in the older and bygone generations, almost no Catholics from Boomers on down.
In many ways the Catholic church in America is following a similar path as the Republican Party – still a strong institution to be reckoned with, but on a demographic downward trend.
The fact that Obama is currently polling much better than Romney with Catholics shows me that Vatican II is still stronger and more popular with most American Catholics than the rightward shift engendered by the Polish pope and the rightwing bishops he installed. Much like the New Deal programs (and their follow-ons like Medicare and Medicaid) still being stronger and more popular with the general citizenry despite the Republican attacks against them since, well, forever.
HumboldtBlue
@dollared:
Why are people still in the pews? because they refuse to rebuke child rapists and instead, in a weekly and sometimes daily act of fear and superstition they walk into buildings to worship a non-existent being all the while the man leading their service spent the night before running down the street in his underwear chasing the 12-year old boy who just escaped his clutches.
There is no “being out of line” when it comes to this evil institution. It’s been a pestilence across the globe for centuries and until thinking people toss away their fear of dying and their really, really fervent wishes for heaven this shit will go on and Catholics, wrapping themselves in their false piety and their tradition and their hymns will claim “it’s the people’s church, not the church of those men who actually run the fucking church because they’re the fucking leaders of the church.”
You’ve got a fucking former Nazi as head bishop and you dare to write about being out of line.
People do good things because they want to be good people, not because of an arbitrary label they apply to their particular brand of mythical belief.
? Martin
@shortstop: No, the ceiling for any candidate is probably 55% short of another secret video showing Romney blowing Rafalca. I don’t think Romney dropping an n-bomb in the debates would even push Obama over 55%.
You’ll never get enough people to switch parties for those kinds of vote margins from the past – but you might suppress turnout enough on one side to get that. The last 2 elections were both quite high turnout.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Dennis SGMM: I’m not given to excessive optimism, but I think Obama is in within five in AZ, and six weeks of the 47% video might well drive down already unenthusiastic Republicans, or drive them to Goode, Johnson or write in votes for Crazy Uncle Liberty or the lunatic Trappist manqué from Pennsylvania. Though in then end I do think the popular spread will be smaller than it was last time. Romney will probably not self-destruct in the debates, and he will get some dummies I mean independent voters back. As long as we don’t have a reverse 2000, which was my nightmare a few weeks ago.
dollared
@HumboldtBlue: Sorry, you want to condemn people for intending to do well. Why don’t you focus your energy on people intending to do evil, such as the Koch Bros.? Do you condemn everyone who buys Union 76 gasoline with equal fervor?
I thought not.
Sophist
@HumboldtBlue: You’re a bit of a dick, aren’t you?
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Another Halocene Human:
Take some salty water. Boil off some of the water. You now have much saltier water.
That’s what’s happened to the RCC over the past few decades. Folks raised in the church but who happened to have a leftward temperament either went completely secular, or stayed Christian but moved to one of the many mainline Protestant churches.
The ones who are still RCC at this point are the “salty ones”, the wingers. Add to that the fact that it’s become trendy for authoritarian wingnuts like Gingrich to convert to Catholicism, and you end up with a much more rightwing RCC than you had previously.
Wombat
I believe your headline should have read: “If the Pope shits in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it still stink?”
jrg
@Sophist: Maybe, but as long as he’s an unprotected dick, god still loves him.
JustAnotherBob
@Dennis SGMM:
Don’t discount Republicans going to the booth in order to vote down-ticket races and failing to vote for Romney.
If they see him as a sure loser (vote-wise) they many withhold their vote or vote Johnson in order to send a message to the party to drive further off the road and further into the right hand ditch.
PeakVT
There’s not much point in getting overconfident about Obama alone. Even if Obama did win in a blowout, it wouldn’t matter that much if Democrats didn’t take the House. I looked at the polls a bit this morning, and the most likely result seems to be about 227 for the Republicans and 208 for the Democrats (+/- 3). And those 227 are like to even more radical as a group than the current batch of wackos. Yes, if Obama won the PV 60/40, Democrats would take the House. But he’s not. The margin of victory will probably be less than last time.
Hopefully I’ll be wrong, and we’ll see Nancy SMASH wielding her gavel in January.
Gin & Tonic
@HumboldtBlue:
Even granting the many ills of the Donohue wing, the USCCB, etc., this is simply false in the majority of cases. Some priests are child molesters. Some are unfaithful to their vows in other ways. Most aren’t.
I know some parish priests very, very well. They are humble people doing good work. They may be distressed by their management, but do good work nevertheless.
Dennis SGMM
@JustAnotherBob:
My schadenfreude runneth over should that happen because the Republican slate in 2016 would be obliged to top this year’s losers in pure, batshit crazy.
James E. Powell
@DFH no.6:
Same here. Seven kids in my ‘we are the baby boom’ family. All raised Catholic, all but two went to Catholic grade school. Not one practicing Catholic. Only one goes to church, Methodist.
James E. Powell
The thing is, I think the Catholic church could make huge gains in membership with just a few changes. They could stay anti-abortion, but they’d have to become pro-birth control and drop the anti-gay/lesbian. Adopt a full-on Matthew 25:31-46 political attitude. They won’t do it, but it would be a winner.
Matt McIrvin
@mcd410x: I think we have to be on the lookout for an out-of-control waaaaaahmbulance.
NorthLeft12
@James E. Powell: That would be a start for me.
Allowing or better yet, encouraging women to become priests would be a big deal too. And yes, I do believe in miracles.
NorthLeft12
@James E. Powell: That would be a start for me.
Allowing or better yet, encouraging women to become priests would be a big deal too. And yes, I do believe in miracles.
shortstop
@? Martin: I very much doubt he’s going to even get 55%. 52, yes, 53 or 54…maybe. But the EVs will be 303 or 332, so eff you, GOP.
ET
The Catholic hierarchy was only supporting Romney because of abortion and gays. There is little in the Republican party message beyond that that melds (or at least melds easily) with Catholic doctrine. Add to that the distrust of the hierarchy over the molesting scandal, and individual Catholics were totally up for grabs. Some would go GOP some Democrat. It was going to be that way if the hierarchy jumped on the GOP bandwagon or didn’t.
HumboldtBlue
@Sophist:
Yeah, I’m the dick, but at least I’m not forcing myself into a 9-year old’s mouth.
And Gin? I knew some damn fine parish priests as well. They weren’t damn fine men and teachers because they were Catholic, but because they wanted to be good men. There is no special secret Catholic recipe for doing good deeds, being a responsible citizen and a decent human being.
The Catholic church has always been and always will be a feudal system of princes and peasants, a system based on fear, obedience and more fucking fear. It’s rotten to its core and no lamenting about how it could have been, or how it was or even how it will be in the future is going to change that.
That asshole Ratzinger lives in opulence as do Cardinals and Bishops and hell, even some parish priests, and yet, by pointing out the foul stench, the mouldering corpse and the trail of harm, I’m the dick, not the perpetrators.
Matt McIrvin
@Dennis SGMM: Based on obsessive watching of polls and poll-aggregation sites, I think Obama is not going to do as well as he did even in 2008. He has a very hard ceiling around 347 electoral votes, basically every place he carried in 2008 except for Indiana and Omaha.
North Carolina is iffy, and there’s always a possibility that vote suppression will flip Florida. My gut feeling is that he gets FL but not NC, and gets 332 EVs. It’s a win, and I’ll take it. A really spectacular debate performance might change the picture, but this is probably about as far as we’ll get on Romney-fail alone.
Sam Wang is now saying that retained Democratic control of the Senate is very likely (as much as I want Elizabeth Warren to win, it’ll probably happen even without her), but the House is on a knife edge and could go either way. It’s definitely the place to concentrate at the moment if you’re interested in the big picture.
Drive-by Nomad
Picture little Catholic school girl me, a 2nd-grader circa 1973 when Roe v. Wade happened. The nuns put up hideous pictures of bloody, dismembered babies in all the hallways of my school, and I went home crying, unable to understand, yet afraid to tell my mother why.
Though it’s taken me many years to realize it, that was the day I became a ferociously pro-choice atheist.
I second HumboldtBlue: “Fuck the motherfucking pope.”
ellie
@Another Halocene Human: I agree about the younger generation but here is an interesting story: My 82-year-old mom was a devout Catholic until recently. She told me on the phone that she can’t bring herself to go to church anymore because of the right wing crazies. This was a woman who made all eight of her children go to Catholic school over her husband’s objections, and who told me 10 years ago I could not get married in the Catholic church because I wasn’t devout enough.
The Catholics lost her and she is not coming back. If they can’t hold on to the likes of her what chance do they have to hold on to the younger generation? None.
pogu
Piling on:
I can scarcely stomach the sermons much of the time, but it usually depends on which priest is speaking. The younger one is definitely more of a rightwing ass. He made a point, at the end of mass, to matter-of-factly state that the church, unlike the federal government, has a budget surplus this year. The crowd clapped. The older one, the more priestly one, does not include such gems to appeal to the whoop-and-holler nutjobs in the pews. His are far better.
The younger pushes the USCCB BS, as do the deacons.
Last week, there was a missionary (Haiti, Dominican Republic) nun who came. Hers should be the face of the church rather than the reactionary priests.
rb
@Drive-by Nomad:
Ah, fuck. I am sincerely sorry you went through that.
If I never step back inside a Catholic church again, it’ll be too soon.
patrick
@dollared:
I’m one of your 60%, although I’ve been mulling at checking out “catholic lite” (episcopalian) because I’m getting pretty fed up with the RCC and the USCCB over the fortnight crap and now their heavy support in the anti-same sex marriage constitutional amendment in the land of my forefathers, MN.
rb
He made a point, at the end of mass, to matter-of-factly state that the church, unlike the federal government, has a budget surplus this year.
Interesting. But will they quit soaking their members, depriving the struggling working class of much needed funds through guilt and fear?
Oh, HELL no.
There are days that for a moment I wish I believed, so I could indulge the fantasy of these fucks having to explain themselves to their torturer god.
JustAnotherBob
@PeakVT: If we hang on to the Senate and White House but don’t take the House we get a second chance in 2014.
Two years of an Obama presidency and Democratic Congress would be enough to fix a whole bunch of stuff that needs fixing. We could finish the equal rights issues, get a solid climate change bill in place, deal with campaign finances and do something about cutting down the power of corporations, etc.
If all we have is two years there will be no filibustering.
Best to take it all this year, but if we don’t we get a replay.
DFH no.6
@James E. Powell:
Your proscription for how the American Catholic church could become a larger (and more importantly, better) organization is spot on, as is NorthLeft12’s reply to you regarding women clergy.
There was a lot of discussion some years ago that the Catholic church in American was going in more progressive directions, which would eventually occasion a probable split with Rome and Third World Catholicism.
Though no longer Catholic (I’m actually an atheist) I fondly remember how welcome the Vatican II reforms were, and I wish the Catholic church had continued on that path (in my opinion, that would have at least militated against the disgusting child-molestations and bishopric coverups, especially if priests were once again allowed to marry as they can in the Orthodox church, and as many did – no matter what various church councils proclaimed – for the first thousand years).
That may still happen (who knows?) but for the foreseeable I think all of those (birth-control and gayness ok, women priests) are bridges too far. It really would mean a split from Rome to become a completely separate church, and I just don’t see that happening any time soon.
pogu
@rb:
My question was, if there is a surplus, where’s *my* refund?
James E. Powell
@DFH no.6:
My bad for leaving out the ordination of women as priests. Shows to go you how deep conditioning is.
pseudonymous in nc
There is a proud tradition of kicking bishops up the arse.
patrick II
@flukebucket:
That explains it. It’s not a sin if you don’t drink it.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
Quite a few do, but I think many, many more just don’t think of them at all, at least not in relation to their practical, every day lives. If they did care what the Bishops think, then why do so many Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives? No, they don’t care about what a Bishop thinks about Pres. Obama because what the bishop thinks can’t affect their day to day life. This is what separation of church and state have wrought. Are you as grateful as I am? Can I get a witness?! ;)
redshirt
Ahem! The answer to the post title:
Yes, and no. If the Pope is shitting in the woods, then there clearly is someone around, and thus he hears it.
However, let’s deconstruct the mixed metaphor and return to the original formulation of the question: If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around, does it make a sound?
The answer is no. “Sound” is word to describe the perception of pressure waves in an atmosphere. Without a perceiver, or an atmosphere, there is no sound. Just waves.
However, on Earth, it is unlikely there are no perceivers present, be they man, dog, or bug.
Thatgaljill
I was listening to All Things Considered this afternoon and heard a story about how the Archbishops in various places (San Francisco among them (facepalm)) are saying that if parishioners support policies that are in conflict from Church teachings they should not take communion. My “favorite” quote was “either you’re with us on the important things or your not.” (eyeroll)
http://n.pr/TJZHJn