Nor is it simply the president's personal moral failings, his disregard for truth, his triple violation of the mantra "one man and one woman for one lifetime" with which evangelicals once fought same sex marriage. His policies — indifference to the claimant environmental crisis, separating parents from children at the border, enriching the already wealthy by eliminating regulations that protect workers and communities, seeking to take away health insurance from millions of Americans — show a complete deviation from some of the most elemental ethical teachings of the Christian faith.
Is anyone surprised an ever increasing number of people are declining to identify with religion? Does anyone think it is mere coincidence that the rise of the "nones" began after the Moral Majority, led by Jerry Falwell Sr. Does not the alliance of the Catholic bishops in this country with this most reactionary version of Christianity, with its supercilious stance and its puerile theology, indicate the degree to which both iterations of Christianity have been conflated into politics?
The answer is not to create a left version of Christianity that adopts all the most trendy tropes dribbling out of the academy, still less to embrace the centrality of sexual liberationism at the heart of today's Democratic Party ideology.
No, it is time for that rarest of combinations, uncompromising faith and a searching, sophisticated engagement of that faith with the modern world. That was not on display at Liberty University last weekend. But, it is what happens day in and day out when the Holy Father goes to the pulpit of the chapel in the Domus Sanctae Marthae where he says his daily Mass.
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Learn more here. Join now. Column Distinctly Catholic. Pence's address was everything that's wrong with evangelicalism today May 15, Vice President Mike Pence delivers the keynote address at a solidarity dinner Oct.
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Column Pence's address was everything that's wrong with evangelicalism today. Most Recent Mother Cabrini Nov 11, A new managerial "middle class" of clerks and bureaucrats was prospering in the cities, but thousands of peasants were displaced from their land and labor by new farming techniques. The country had a growing world reputation for democratic ideals and work opportunity. For these peoples, as well as for French Canadian Catholics to the north of the United States and Mexican Catholics to the south, the chance for a new life free of poverty and oppression was too good to pass up.
Millions of sons, fathers, and later whole families left behind their former lives and possessions and boarded crowded ships sailing for New York. America, for its part, docked ship after ship at Ellis Island for both idealistic and practical reasons. It was the American ideal to welcome the foreigner; all the country's founding groups and many of its leading citizens had been, after all, immigrants.
The motto on the Statue of Liberty, "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor," exemplified the strong tie between immigration and freedom in the national imagination.
But more practically speaking, America's new industries and booming frontier towns demanded large quantities of cheap labor. Guiding Student Discussion But theory doesn't always translate into the feelings and experiences of real people in real situations. Immigration was supposed to be beneficial to the immigrant and to the country, but it also unleashed many fears, insecurities, and troubles on both sides.
It might be a good idea to brainstorm with your students about the positive and negative FEELINGS that both natives and immigrants could have experienced at the time. Let the students imagine and talk about what it might have felt like for the immigrants, who didn't know "the ropes" or in many cases the language. Let them also imagine what it might have felt like for those already living in America, who saw their cities change so quickly: suddenly there was a Catholic church in every neighborhood.
Immigration is, of course, still very much a part of the American reality and public debate. Some of your students may be Catholic themselves and may be surprised to hear of the former low status of the "assimilated" religion they know.
Some of your students may know of immigration from firsthand experience, being immigrants or children of immigrants themselves. Others may know about immigration from news reports or experiences with neighbors. Don't hesitate to make the connections between the realities and perceptions of Catholicism and immigration then and now.
Their experience of the present realities can help them understand the past, and vice versa. Then, refocus the discussion to make the point that in the nineteenth century, the immigrants' RELIGION, Catholicism, became a focal point for these feelings about immigration on both sides.
The immigrants held onto Catholicism for spiritual comfort and group identity. The older Americans blamed Catholicism for the immigrants' "foreign ways. How did the immigrants express their feelings through their faith? How did Protestant Americans use Catholicism as a "substitute" for immigration issues? After several years in America, many Catholic immigrants became sorely disillusioned.
For it was the Catholic Church, more than any other organization, that made a concerted effort to welcome the new Catholic immigrants. Catholic citizens helped them find jobs and homes; sisters nuns taught their children English in Catholic schools; priests tried to protect their political interests and shield them from a sometimes hostile Protestant environment; the local church held religious festivals and social events.
One day in mid-September, I logged on to Church Militant. I had to blink twice to be sure, but there he was: Trey Trainor, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Election Commission, being interviewed by Voris.
In fact, the two men basically agreed that there is no such thing as separation of Church and state under the U. Constitution, and that believing otherwise is anti-Catholic.
And, notwithstanding the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and whatnot, there is not much more to the principle than that.
To take an arguably more germane page from history, John F. Kennedy had to go on television in to reassure voters that he was not too Catholic to serve as president. But maybe someone should. It also mischaracterized the circumstances under which the name was changed.
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