Catholic Political Divide Over Obama at Notre Dame

Also involving religious insanity is the debate over President Obama's invitation to give the commencement address at Notre Dame University, a Catholic university that seems to attract Catholic extremists who see the world solely through the lens of abortion issues. For the record, I am not one who favors abortion and I have a low view of women who use abortion as a method of birth control rather than properly using other birth control methods. However, I do not believe I have the right to dictate to others that they can never have the right to an abortion regardless of the circumstances. Not so the Catholic Church or the Notre Dame fanatics many of whom I have known believe that popping out baby after baby every 15-18 months is proper family planning. Fortunately, not all Catholics fall into this extreme category as highlighted in this Washington Post story:

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A campaign by outraged Roman Catholics to keep President Barack Obama from delivering the commencement address at Notre Dame shows that the gulf between the church and backers of abortion rights remains deep. Yet the effort to get the school to rescind its invitation to Obama also highlights a political disconnect between the conservative Catholic hierarchy and millions of U.S. Catholic voters.

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One Catholic leader, Archbishop Raymond Burke, accused Obama of pushing an anti-life, anti-family agenda. Burke, the first American to lead the Vatican supreme court, said Friday it was "a scandal" that Notre Dame had invited Obama to speak.

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Yet polling and other evidence shows that Catholic voters have a largely positive view of the president, closely tracking other national polling. Obama's standing is more evidence that U.S. Catholics don't always follow the Church hierarchy, whether on issues such as abortion and contraception or political preferences. Also, the president's community service background and his opposition to the Iraq war appeal to some Catholics. . . . Obama is also widely popular among Hispanics, a fast-growing growing Catholic population in the U.S.

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Patrick Whelan, a physician at Harvard Medical School and president of Catholic Democrats, said that by taking such a hard line against Obama, bishops and other conservative leaders risked driving Catholics away from the church rather than cool their support for the president. "There are unintended consequences to this kind of angry, vituperative language about their opponents," Whelan said. "By making themselves pawns of the conservative right, the bishops are playing into a cycle of decline for our church."

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Increasingly, the Roman Catholicism is becoming a third world religion with observance in modern, educated counties declining. Only uneducated and extremist followers tend to still blindly follow a corrupt and out of touch hierarchy that continues to act as if we were living in the 13th century.