When did Catholics shift this far towards the right/conservatism?

[concretecamper1]

why so many people on CAF have decided to wholeheartedly embrace the full platform of right-wing, conservative ideologies, including populist, nativist, isolationist positions which sometimes result in outright racism and anti-Semitism

Can you name one such platform and how it has resulted in racism or antisemitism?

 

[BartholomewB]

What you are calling a “shift to the right” might more properly be called a “shift back to the right.” Liberation Theology arose in Latin America in the fifties and sixties of the last century, although it didn’t become well known around the world until 1968, when Celam, the Latin American Episcopal Council, held a conference in Medellín, Colombia, at which it famously proclaimed the Church’s “preferential option for the poor.” At the time, that was a very big step for the hierarchy, and its repercussions were felt around the world. Whether or not it was a good decision is a question that has not yet been conclusively answered. Nowadays in Latin American countries the bishops point out, with hindsight, that “When the Church made its preferential option for the poor, the poor made their preferential option for the Pentecostals.”

Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America - Wikipedia

 

[jeannetherese]

True, but that does not explain why so many Catholics on CAF are, for example, in favour of the death penalty and also call for a range of other harsh measures against criminals and illegal immigrants.

I see that you joined the forums one day ago. Broad brush criticism of Catholics seems an unusual way of reaching out in charity. Perhaps you might want to spend a bit more time getting to know your fellow posters?
You could join a thread discussing one of the political positions you have raised and ask about Catholic teachings in regard to that position.
I wish you well in your journey back to the Church.
jt

 

[1ke]

Being such a minority in the US, many Protestant ideas have seeped in to Catholic sentiments, particularly of those who don’t know better.

Some segments of American Catholicism have been infected by particularly fundamentalist Protestant beliefs and ideas, and this has been incorporated into the political outlook of this segment of Catholicism.

It stems primarily from sincere and just pro life advocacy, which used to subsist in both political parties in the US about equally. Blame, in large part, Nixon’s Southern Strategy and what it did to the Republican Party (and the Democratic Party too).

For many, “pro life” has unfortunately distilled down to a reductionist view from being pro life to “anti abortion” which isn’t the same thing.

It isn’t just one thing. It, like life, is complex. But, not every Catholic has given up on Catholic ideals, Gospel values. I find myself at home in neither US political party.

 

[RhodesianSon]

Guess it’s a good thing you’re a Methodist then.

 

[1ke]

When I see Catholics seriously suggesting that women should be denied the vote, for example, or discussing the Battle of Lepanto or the Battle of Vienna in connection with the present-day spread of Islam in Europe, I am afraid I see a Catholic Church that has shifted very, very far to the right of where it was 20+ years ago.

Actually, what you see are a few wingnuts with a megaphone known as the internet.

The Church doesn’t espouse any of this nonsense.

 

[FrankFletcher]

When abortion became legal and supported by democrats for one.

It’s the child sacrifice of old under a new name. True Catholics are against anything that goes against God’s laws.

No, that didn’t do it. It really got going under Bush the second, when his team saw an opening to snag Catholic voters by telling them that voting for anyone else would be a mortal sin. I’m not joking — you can look this up. This is also when the non-negotiables came into being, as though there are only 5 such topics for Catholics. The GOP bought and paid for Catholics.

 

[1ke]

I have been reading threads on here for several months, and I have been searching some old threads, and I see a lot of evidence that Catholics today are quite closely aligned with a spectrum of right-wing political positions including some that are quite extreme.

No. What you see are a tiny sliver of people who are Catholic and post here, with a subset of views currently dominating the forum. I’ve been on this forum since 2004. It has changed substantially in the past couple of years, with so many of the long time posters leaving and a few people with wackadoodle far right agendas swarming here.

 

[thrasher59]

Just my two cents: I’m a cradle Catholic and, nationally, I voted for Trump based on the abortion issue and,locally, straight Democratic.

 

[twf]

The political centre of gravity in the Catholic Church has seemingly shifted from left to right, and a significant portion, perhaps a majority, are radical, alt, or far right. I am wondering what happened while I’ve been away.

I don’t think so. Some Catholics in the United States are conservative, and have, in some cases perhaps, conflated traditional Catholic values and American conservative values…in reality, there is some overlap, but certainly not even close to 100% overlap.

Americans constitute a mere 5% of global Catholics. You only have to look at our Holy Father Pope Francis to see that the Catholic Church as a whole is decidedly not 100% aligned with the US Republican / Conservative movement…

 

[Methodist]

You do realize that this is an environment of anonymous internet Catholics and not truly representative of the thoughts and beliefs of Catholicism in general, right?

I was taking it to be a representative sample of Catholicism in the English-speaking world. There are posters on here who are moderate and even left-wing and liberal, but they are heavily outnumbered by posters who are right-wing, often very right-wing. Furthermore, when I have come across more moderate posters, I have often found that the person is actually an atheist, agnostic, non-religious, lapsed Catholic, Protestant, or Jew.

I am not fond of being lumped into a group such as “far right”.
The Church has consistently condemned racial ideology (although, sometimes our bishops misrepresent Church teaching on the topic), and so do I, ALL racial ideology.

Quite right! And yet over the summer, what I kept reading were endless threads about BLM, calling them “Black Liberal Marxists”, claiming to expose their secret agenda to destroy the institution of the family, quoting a BLM member who described herself as a trained Marxist, claims that BLM were the true racists. I kept seeing threads discrediting ideas such as white privilege, unconscious bias, and systemic racism. I kept seeing statistics such as “13 percent of the people commit 50% of the crime” and claims like “the police kill more white people than black people”. I read people saying that protestors should be classified as domestic terrorists. There were ridiculous, exaggerated claims, such as one poster who said that if fellow students at her postgraduate pharmacology degree programme knew that her brother was a police officer they would burn down her house! There was endless rhetoric about the fact that cities with Democratic local government were more likely to have higher crime rates than cities with Republican local government, despite the fact that any intelligent person can see that this is because crime is more common in communities that are poor, and poor people are more likely to vote for more left-wing parties. With regard to the statues, one poster said that the statue he would like to see pulled down was one of Nelson Mandela, because he was a terrorist.

I wish you well in your journey back to the Church.

Thank you for your kindness. I did not wish to offend anybody.

Guess it’s a good thing you’re a Methodist then.

If you are correct about the orthodox interpretation of Catholic teaching, then yes. Perhaps you are also one of those who believes that Franco, Salazar, and Pinochet were examples of good Catholic rulers.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

I was taking it to be a representative sample of Catholicism in the English-speaking world.

And you are wrong to do so.

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

Even though you’re brand new to a dying forum and seem filled with rage, I’ll give a partial answer, for the sake of the three lurkers we have left.

Abortion.

If you aren’t alive, there’s no way you can enjoy any other right or benefit.

I used to belong to Amnesty International and they used to stay away from the abortion issue, and stay with political freedom.
Then they threw in their lot with the abortion supporters.
Then I left.

 

[MNathaniel]

It sounds as if you are deeply political, and uncomfortable in any environment where those with a different political opinion even have a presence.

It sounds like you perceive the mere presence of those who think differently from you, as upsetting to the point of being overwhelming.

I’ve noticed this in complaints from people who lean politically left, the last few years. It seems like they’re so used to surrounding themselves with only people who think exactly the same way they do, that the mere presence of a different opinion horrifies and alarms them, and they consider it some kind of existential threat. As if not being allowed to completely dominate every forum, means leftists themselves are being dominated or overwhelmed.

Only if your political position requires your voice to be the only one allowed, is that the case.

And if that’s your political position, then your political position is the frightening and oppressive one.

 

[TRose225]

Because under socialism legal abortion will never be abolished or even not promoted or restricted in a country this large with open borders. Income redistribution would make the illegalization of abortion infeasible as we do not have enough “rich people” to redistribute wealth from to poor and working class people with an increased population growth and open borders on top of that. The best solution is changing the current culture to that of more personal responsibility. Globalist mentality/open borders will only gain us a utilitarian society where we are wanted as long as we are useful. If you look at all the modern socialist countries in Europe(relatively small populations compared to the U.S. btw) they shame women into killing Downs Syndrome babies, and coerce euthanasia among the elderly and mentally ill.

 

[otjm]

Hence providing examples of things that could reasonably and justifiably be described as radical right, alt-right, or far right.

Having been alive since 1946, I find your examples and perceptions skewed, but to no particular surprise. In the 1970’s I dated a woman while I was in grad school (she was an undergrad) and I broke off the relationship as I saw too much conflict between our faiths. She went on to become a Methodist minister, so it is not as if I have absolutely zero contact with Methodists - not do I presume her to be the typecast Methodist.

However, even then she was more liberal than I, and from my observations and conversations since then (she and I share a group of friends from that time) have only seen she and her husband (both ministers), and information shared as well as seen since then as to positions of Methodists in general, to have become more and more liberal. And that is particularly present in comparisons of moral matters - abortion and gay marriage to be two examples.

I don’t recall if Caesar Chavez was Catholic or something else, but I am also old enough to remember that he was most definitely against illegal immigration as he saw that as a serious challenge to the ability of legal Hispanics to move up the economic and social ladders. I recall JFK, a Catholic, running for office and then subsequently getting us into the entanglement of Vietnam; and I remember the Democrats supporting the Domino Theory (and interestingly, after Vietnam fell to Communism, so did Laos and Cambodia, and Thailand nearly fell to it) - thus proving in real life/real time that it was not “US Imperialism”.

You have a seriously skewed vision of both the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party, and you appear to be willfully blind to what is occurring right under our noses - both yours and mine.

The Catholic Church is both/neither conservative nor/or liberal. We support LBGTQ people as God’s children, but do not support sexual activity outside of marriage - which many, if not most LGBTQ people cannot wrap their minds around, as they take an all-or-nothing attitude. The same stance goes for sex outside of marriage - the Church still says it is is sinful, but sadly too often that conversation stops with “It is a mortal sin” without clarifying the results of accepting it as “normal”.

The Church is also the largest organization (for lack of a better term at the moment) in terms of humanitarian work. That has not changed either.

(continued)

 

[otjm]

(continued)

And as to your apparent and extremely liberal attitude as to Marxism, it is not some 'boogeyman in the closet - or out of the closet". The leadership of both Antifa and BLM openly acknowledges they “have Marxist training” and it shows clearly to those who are not willfully blind.

Your comment of “movement” to “more conservative” Is like a person standing on a raft in a flowing stream yelling “The land is moving!”. It is not the land which is moving; it is the perception of the individual on the raft.

I happen to be a Catholic and a registered Democrat, and have not bothered to change parties; I also have not voted for any Democrat who supports murdering children in the womb. The Democratic Party was the party of labor and small businesses when I first registered. Trump won in particular in part because labor had been so ignored by both the Obama administration and by Hilary. Trump likewise made serious inroads to both the Black and the Hispanic communities, not because of “chin chatter” but because of his economic zones and work to increase employment in both communities - something that Obama gave lip service to and nothing else identifiable. And since the election, there have been a multitude of comment that the Republican Party has become the party of labor and the Democratic Party the party of Big Business - most particularly high tech. One only has to look at who contributed to whose election run to see that. And recently the Koch brothers have publicly stated that their approach has been wrong.

However, being opposed to abortion, even voting for a political party that also opposes abortion, does not explain why so many people on CAF have decided to wholeheartedly embrace the full platform of right-wing, conservative ideologies, including populist, nativist, isolationist positions which sometimes result in outright racism and anti-Semitism.

Aside from the fact that your vision is skewed, the results of the last election nationwide show something that the conservative and moderate Democrats are waking up to (wonder if that means they are “woke”?) - and that is, the Blue Landslide slid down the opposite side of the hill. The news media for the greatest part has embraced a strong move to Socialism and cannot admit that the rioters in multiple Democratic cities are far, far left wing. The projections were that the House would gain as much as 15 seats; the count is not yet final, but they did not gain a single seat - they lost seats. Not a single state was flipped - they flopped. The microphones have been to the “defund the police” crowd, but people who are not Socialists want more police, not fewer; they want to see better policing but realize that when police are confronted by violent criminals, more force is going to be used (and don’t even bother cherry picking that as doing so ignores the vast number of times that the force used was indicated by the actions to the criminal).

(continued)

 

[otjm]

(continued)

The country itself does not want what the Democratic party has to sell on the local and state level, and putting aside issues of the vote itself, it appears they did not like Trump as a person (surprise, surprise) but they definitely liked what he accomplished and/or stood for in terms of policies.

Oh - and the anti-Semitism? Ummm… the embassy moved; three Middle East countries have changed their position to Israel… Yeah, lots of anti-Semitism.

 

[RhodesianSon]

Franco, Salazar, and Pinochet were examples of good Catholic rulers.

I believe they were decent men who did the best they could given the circumstances they were in, and that their rule was better for the Church than the alternative.

 

[ColoradoCatholic]

does not explain why so many people on CAF have decided to wholeheartedly embrace the full platform of right-wing, conservative ideologies, including populist, nativist, isolationist positions which sometimes result in outright racism and anti-Semitism.

You are going to have to back that up. I don’t see a lot of racist people on here, or anti-Semitism. I will say that Catholics believe their religion is the only religion that embraces the fullness of truth…which as a Catholic is true, but the Catholic faith is built on the very foundation of judaism…so you can’t really have one without the other.