KerryWatch

Amy Welborn posted this suggestion:

The Kerry discussion just a bit. I was just about the post something, when cs and Patrick Sweeney started an echo chamber of my thoughts down below.

It really is time for John Kerry’s bishop – O’Malley, and perhaps even McCarrick, while we’re at it, to join forces and respond to this guy every time he makes one of his misstatements about Catholic teaching or trumpets his faith the day after he’s skipped Mass to go to an AME church.

If anyone at all had nerve and a sense of humor, it could actually be entertaining. The idea, in my mind, is not to threaten and be Big Brother. It’s to point out idiocy when it appears – and if it appears under a particularly pompous, self-righteous guise, all the more reason to avoid self-righteousness ourselves.

So, I’ll volunteer. Bishops are invited to fund “KerryWatch.” I’ll edit and add my moderating tone. Curt Jester and Mark Shea can be content editors.

If there’s not enough money in the diocesan coffers to fund us all, perhaps the company that makes Botox can kick in some dough.

Well it is always nice to be named as a possible content editor with the likes of Mark and Amy. Of course KerryWatch could become a full time job in tracking Kerry’s misstatements about the Catholic faith. In reference to this suggestion Mark Shea left the following funny comment.

In the words of Pope St. Pius XXIII, “I’m there.”

Of course everybody is commenting on Kerry’s latest blunder.

Mr. Kerry became combative when told that some conservatives were criticizing him for being a Roman Catholic who supported policies, like abortion rights and same-sex unions, that are at odds with Catholic teaching.

“Who are they?” he demanded of his questioner. “Name them. Are they the same legislators who vote for the death penalty, which is in contravention of Catholic teaching?”

He added: “I’m not a church spokesman. I’m a legislator running for president. My oath is to uphold the Constitution of the United States in my public life. My oath privately between me and God was defined in the Catholic church by Pius XXIII and Pope Paul VI in the Vatican II, which allows for freedom of conscience for Catholics with respect to these choices, and that is exactly where I am. And it is separate. Our constitution separates church and state, and they should be reminded of that.”

I will give Mr. Kerry a pass on misspeaking Pius XXIII instead of John XXIII, this can be an honest mistake. The egregious error is the fictional oath from Vatican II. No such oath exists in the documents of Vatican II just as the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution. Those who have lost limbs in accidents sometimes feel a phantom limb. Democrats seem to have “phantom documents syndrome.” In this syndrome you have the tendency to quote from documents, phrases that don’t exist. This syndrome is also closely related to “foreign law syndrome” where you appeal to laws from other countries when you don’t feel like pretending it is in the constitution. These manifestations also seem to find a common root in “Spirit of Vatican II syndrome.” Maybe one day science will find the genetic defect that causes you to see things that are not there in written documents.

Mr. Kerry often sites following his conscience or in having to follow the will of his constituents. I remember hearing this excellent phrase “Conscience is always student and never professor.” Our society has inverted that relationship. Cardinal Newman is often mistakenly appealed to as one source for the conscience is king concept. The following is from Cardinal Newman in a letter addressed to the Duke of Norfolk addresses both conscience and duty.

…The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its {249} blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.

Words such as these are idle empty verbiage to the great world of philosophy now. All through my day there has been a resolute warfare, I had almost said conspiracy against the rights of conscience, as I have described it. Literature and science have been embodied in great institutions in order to put it down. Noble buildings have been reared as fortresses against that spiritual, invisible influence which is too subtle for science and too profound for literature. Chairs in Universities have been made the seats of an antagonist tradition. Public writers, day after day, have indoctrinated the minds of innumerable readers with theories subversive of its claims. As in Roman times, and in the middle age, its supremacy was assailed by the arm of physical force, so now the intellect is put in operation to sap the foundations of a power which the sword could not destroy. We are told that conscience is but a twist in primitive and untutored man; that its dictate is an imagination; that the very notion of guiltiness, which that dictate enforces, is simply irrational, for how can there possibly be freedom of will, how can there be consequent responsibility, in that infinite eternal network of cause and effect, in which we helplessly lie? and what retribution have we to fear, when we have had no real choice to do good or evil?

So much for philosophers; now let us see what is the notion of conscience in this day in the popular mind. {250} There, no more than in the intellectual world, does “conscience” retain the old, true, Catholic meaning of the word. There too the idea, the presence of a Moral Governor is far away from the use of it, frequent and emphatic as that use of it is. When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to Him, in thought and deed, of the creature; but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all. They do not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but they demand, what they think is an Englishman’s prerogative, for each to be his own master in all things, and to profess what he pleases, asking no one’s leave, and accounting priest or preacher, speaker or writer, unutterably impertinent, who dares to say a word against his going to perdition, if he like it, in his own way. Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations. It becomes a licence to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that and let it go again, to go to church, to go to chapel, to boast of being above all religions and to be an impartial critic of each of them. Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had. It is the right of self-will.