It was a perfect literal representation of the schizophrenia of my religious mind.
I was attending CPAC, the annual conference of conservative activists, when I was barred by hotel staff from going down an escalator. No admittance here, sir.
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What gives? It was the 2012 Catholic Social Ministry Gathering. No CPACers allowed.
The Catholic Social Ministry. The Catholic left.
I was dumbfounded. It was just too literal. I've been a Catholic and pro-life political conservative for at least ten years, but I've also been a Jesuit-educated Catholic who agrees with church liberals about things like immigration, the environment and the minimum wage. It has always troubled me that there is a schism between the Catholic left and right.
It seems that, aside from the occasional "Meet the Press" joint appearance by Peggy Noonan and E.J. Dionne, the two sides don't even talk to each other. It's like two different tribes. Catholic liberals have America magazine, Catholic conservatives have First Things. They hold hands during the "Our Father," we don't. Catholic liberals defended Obama's health plan. Catholic conservatives saw what eventually did happen -- that the policy became coercive and unjust to religious people who oppose abortion and contraception.
And here at the Marion Wardman Park hotel in Washington, D.C., the two sides were literally separated feet apart by an escalator.
What a wasted opportunity! Imagine what a fantastic chance for dialogue and just plan old weird fun if they had dropped the guards and the velvet rope barriers and let the two sides mingle. Andrew Breitbart talking with John Carr, the Executive Director of the Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Rick Santorum having a sandwich with Deacon Al Turner, the Executive Director of the Office of Black Catholics for the Archdiocese of Washington and author of the lecture "Building a Culture of Life in the Black Catholic Community." Pat Buchanan having a beer with the director of the USCCB's office of Migration Policy and Public Affairs.
But it wasn't to be. This division is a shame, because I have love for both the Catholic left and the Catholic right.
I was educated in high school by Jesuits, and while a couple had let their minds rot with liberalism, others preached social justice with a deep love and respect for the traditions of the Church. One of the most extraordinary priests I have every know, Fr. Greg Hartley, could talk one minute about the best early Moody Blues album and the next lecture you about the the awesome magnificence of the Real Presence of the Lord in Holy Communion. The Jesuit's motto is "seeing God in all things," and their magnanimity was often a rich way of developing your soul and fully engaging the world.
Yet the Catholic right is a first line of defense against the creeping totalitarianism of what Pope Benedict XVI calls "the dictatorship of relativism." They are in the trenches fighting the Obama administration's attempt to force religious organizations to pay for contraception. Much more than the Catholic left, they see that liberalism in America is not static; it has moved considerably left in the left 40 years, and continues to do so. That movement is now drifting towards totalitarianism, as evidence in the attempt to make Catholic violate their consciences.
After I had some phone calls to connections I have the the D.C. archdiocese, I was allowed to cross the Berlin Wall that separated CPAC from the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering. I went from asking Sarah Palin who her favorite band is to talking with a young Catholic guy at the Jubilee USA Network about Bono's commitment to reducing the debt of third work countries. I talked to some people off the record, and while I can't quote them I can give a general impression. I was struck by how different the Catholic left is from the general political left. Yes, there are a few communist lunatics in the Catholic left. But the vast majority of the people I talked to are simply spiritual people who are called to work on helping the suffering -- people who work for groups like Catholic Charities and the Committee on Migration. Most work with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
It was a marked contrast to the liberalism of Occupy Whatever, which has grabbed all the media headlines in recent months. I visited the Occupy site in D.C. three times in the last three months, and while those folks were mostly nice, their minds have been marinated in communist and anarchist rhetoric -- although it's more funny there days than threatening.
They want utopia and they want it now. There is a dire shortage of horse sense there, and for some Catholic conservatives to lump all the leftists together is inaccurate and wrong. I've probably been guilty of it myself.
How different the Occupy movement might have been had they had had a grounding spiritual focus, aside from the usual leftist Dorothy Day fed the poor and fought war and poverty, mostly from a leftist perspective, and was one of the most orthodox Catholics of the 20th century. She had a soul devoted to the Church, and this kept her feet on the ground. Without that grounding, the Occupy movement was doomed to utopianism and incoherence.
I brought up the current contraception controversy with some people at the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering, and while the conservations are off the record, I can report generally that every response I got was dramatically more thoughtful than responses I got to questions at Occupy D.C. The people at the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering are not ideologues; the ones I spoke to were most interested in discovering the facts about the Obama insurance mandate -- who is paying for what, and how it affects us as Catholics. Many of the conversations were more thoughtful than some of what I heard at CPAC.
Next year, let's knock the wall down and have the two groups break bread together. Let's have a conference that brings the Church together in one room. We'll call it the John Paul II Conference on Catholic Unity. After all, John Paul the Great was both a tough conservative political warrior and a mystic and poet who wanted capitalism to be moral and who loved the poor and outcast.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearReligion and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
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