Why the Lack of Support & Exodus from the Church

[Erikaspirit16]

For example: the Democratic Party has several issues in their official party platform that are 100% against Catholic dogma / social teaching:

pro abortion
pro same-sex marriage
pro government funding of Planned Parenthood

Nonsense. Silly me, I’ve actually READ both platforms. They are essentially different types of documents: The Republican platform is about ideals. The Democratic platform is about actual policies. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. To give an analogy, the Republicans would be likely to say something like “Every person should have the right to improve their economic situation.” Sounds good. Their policies, in fact, attack ordinary people and give all the power to large corporations and the rich, resulting in widening the existing inequalities of wealth and income. The Democrats would be likely to say “We need to raise the minimum wage. We need to subsidize schools, from pre-K through university. We need to ensure that there is no discrimination in hiring or promotion.” These sorts of policies help the vast majority of people in very concrete and practical ways.

In contrast to the Republican platform–which the majority of posters on this site seem to enthusiastically support–the Democratic platform does not presume to dictate morality. The Democratic platform simply acknowledges that people should be free from government interference (something the Republicans pretend to champion, but in fact oppose at every turn). So yes, people should be free to get abortions if they want or enter into homosexual relationships. This is not Massachusetts in the 1680s where a Puritan government dictated morality for every person. The last time I looked there was still freedom of religion.

The Republican Party has NOTHING in their official party platform that goes against Catholic Dogma / Social Teaching. While there are policies Republicans support that challenge Catholic Social Teaching, the teachings are in areas where the Church allows for prudential judgement. Meaning, no Republican disagrees with these issues, simply disagrees on who should pay for it and how it should be implemented.

No kidding there are policies that challenge Catholic social teaching. If Republicans had there way, there would be no government “interference” in the free market system. If a drug company wants to raise the price of a life-saving drug from $100 to $10,000, they should be free to do so. If a millionaire can pay for a certain operation, but an unemployed person cannot, let the unemployed die. If a company can save 1% of its obscene profits by moving 1,000 jobs to Mexico or China, let those 1,000 newly unemployed fend for themselves. Is this “prudential judgment”? To me, they are simply abhorrent. They completely ignore Christ’s command: Love your neighbor as yourself.

 

[phil19034]

No kidding there are policies that challenge Catholic social teaching. If Republicans had there way, there would be no government “interference” in the free market system. If a drug company wants to raise the price of a life-saving drug from $100 to $10,000, they should be free to do so. If a millionaire can pay for a certain operation, but an unemployed person cannot, let the unemployed die. If a company can save 1% of its obscene profits by moving 1,000 jobs to Mexico or China, let those 1,000 newly unemployed fend for themselves. Is this “prudential judgment”?

I personally do not know a single true conservative who would agree with this statement. Now, I know several libertarians who (who are registered as or vote Republican) would agree with this, but I don’t know a single conservative who would agree with this statement.

Republicans are not 1 large monolithic group. There are many different view points within the party.

However, the MAIN thing that groups all Republicans together is that we believe in subsidiarity. We believe that services should be FIRST offered by the private sector. If that doesn’t work, the service should be handled by the lowest possible level of the public sector.

Same thing with laws. Laws should be handled on the local most level possible.

 

[Le_Cracquere]

f a candidate had a pro-choice position, but also was against the death penalty, wanted to fund worldwide charities to help children in danger of famine and disease, had a plan to end wars, etc. etc. they would still be against them because of the pro-choice position.

Actually, I’d also be against them because of their unacceptable positions on the death penalty and war. Opposing either unqualifiedly is at least as wicked as supporting them where unjustified.

 

[Erikaspirit16]

I personally do not know a single true conservative who would agree with this statement. Now, I know several libertarians who (who are registered as or vote Republican) would agree with this, but I don’t know a single conservative who would agree with this statement.

Fascinating. Those TRUE conservatives must be truly wonderful people. It’s a shame I’ve never met one.

If the Republicans were somehow the champions of Catholic teaching and Democrats were the agents of demonic forces, why does the USCCB document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” spend a few paragraphs talking about abortion and spends 30 PAGES talking about other issues? If abortion were the overriding issue, it would be a simple document to write. One sentence: “You may only vote for candidates who oppose abortion and want to make it illegal.” Done. Yet it goes on for 30 pages.

 

[HarryStotle]

If the Republicans were somehow the champions of Catholic teaching and Democrats were the agents of demonic forces, why does the USCCB document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” spend a few paragraphs talking about abortion and spends 30 PAGES talking about other issues? If abortion were the overriding issue, it would be a simple document to write. One sentence: “You may only vote for candidates who oppose abortion and want to make it illegal.” Done. Yet it goes on for 30 pages.

So how many “pages” does the document spend talking about, say, murder or rape or child abuse? Perhaps these are not “overriding” issues either and can, therefore, be safely jettisoned from all consideration, and left up to individual moral consciences, provided those “other” unspecified issues are appropriately dealt with?

Or perhaps not.

Merely because these decidedly moral issues are not “overriding” does not mean they are amenable to being traded off and replaced with some other “good” outcome.

As to your “one sentence”…
"You may only vote for candidates who oppose abortion and want to make it illegal."

Let’s turn this one sentence around such that the USCCB state clearly:

“You may vote for candidates who support abortion and want to make it legal, provided…”

And then also state clearly:

"You may vote for candidates who support murder and want to make it legal, provided…"

"You may vote for candidates who support rape and want to make it legal, provided…"

"You may vote for candidates who support child abuse and want to make it legal, provided…"

Would you be offended by these? I would.

Those are decidedly moral issues with NO “wiggle room,” correct? No exceptions, correct?

Then why is this one okay?

"You may vote for candidates who support abortion and want to make it legal, provided…"

Why can it be left up to individual moral consciences while the others cannot?

Perhaps because you don’t really see it as a moral issue at all?

 

[phil19034]

phil19034:

I personally do not know a single true conservative who would agree with this statement. Now, I know several libertarians who (who are registered as or vote Republican) would agree with this, but I don’t know a single conservative who would agree with this statement.

Fascinating. Those TRUE conservatives must be truly wonderful people. It’s a shame I’ve never met one.

If the Republicans were somehow the champions of Catholic teaching and Democrats were the agents of demonic forces, why does the USCCB document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” spend a few paragraphs talking about abortion and spends 30 PAGES talking about other issues? If abortion were the overriding issue, it would be a simple document to write. One sentence: “You may only vote for candidates who oppose abortion and want to make it illegal.” Done. Yet it goes on for 30 pages.

Well, that’s most likely because you never bothered to talk with any of us.

I’m sure your parish has a good number of these Republicans (as most Catholic parishes do). Every single priest & nun who votes Republican would also fit into this category.

 

[Erikaspirit16]

Then why is this one okay?

I’ve explained that ad nauseum in previous posts. Let’s try one last (?) time: murder, rape, child abuse. There is an overwhelming consensus among US voters that these things are evil and should be criminal acts. Abortion: no consensus among US voters. Depending on how the question is asked, only 18-21% in the last 40+ years have said abortion should be illegal. And not because of personal whims, because what “abortion” is is defined differently by different religions.

 

[Erikaspirit16]

Well, that’s most likely because you never bothered to talk with any of us.

Or–could it be???–they never bothered to talk to me.

 

[HarryStotle]

So all of them are not moral issues that apply to every moral agent regardless of what some or most people think? Instead, what it means for something to be moral is merely that it is the consensus view? All morality is comprised of merely de facto propositions.

So extermination of Jews would be fine provided that a consensus of people in any society agree to it? A raw democracy of three wolves and a sheep is fine by you? And the way it SHOULD be?

If murder, rape and child abuse are ONLY moral considerations BECAUSE of consensus opinion, then if and when that consensus changes they, too, are amenable to no longer being moral issues. Is that your position? It seems to be.

When you write “And everyone has a right to their own beliefs. And I have no right to inflict my beliefs on others, nor do they have a right to inflict their beliefs on me,” what you really mean is they have no such right to inflict beliefs until they can convince a sufficient number of others to become the “consensus” view and then they can “inflict” all they want. At that point, those who disagree with the consensus lose their right “to their own beliefs” because the consensus view will be inflicted without mercy.

 

[HarryStotle]

Or–could it be???–they never bothered to talk to me.

The barrier doesn’t appear to be in their talking, if you get my drift.

To wit: “I’ve explained that ad nauseum in previous posts.”

Perhaps they aren’t being heard above all the “explaining?”

 

[GrandPaRay]

NoelFitz, Thank you for being open and honest with me, You can tell the nun’s did a good job on us. The official church is different from the one we were educated in. Those in charge of the teaching were told what to pass on to us. Now information is so available that a person can easily check what we were told to be factual. The official church has no new information from the time it started. The catholic church even started the advancements through the very large number of Priests who discovered new facts in science. The catholic laity kept advancing in knowledge, and especially in the last 50 years. I know it will take some doing , but it can be done. We must embrace Science and use the scientific method to stay relevant. Reality is what gets us there.

 

[Erikaspirit16]

what it means for something to be moral is merely that it is the consensus view?

You still don’t get it. Amazing. Morality is morality; there is an absolute good. We agree. But if there is no consensus agreement about a specific moral issue (abortion, for example), the state should NOT make a law concerning it. It should be left to the individual. As it is. It has nothing to do with whether or not abortion is an “intrinsic evil” or an absolute evil. And no, just because something is legal doesn’t make it morally right.

If murder, rape and child abuse are ONLY moral considerations BECAUSE of consensus opinion, then if and when that consensus changes they, too, are amenable to no longer being moral issues. Is that your position? It seems to be.

As always, you are confusing morality with legality. These are two separate things; sometimes they coincide, but not always. Some things that are illegal are not immoral. Some things that are immoral are not illegal.

Murder, rape and child abuse are illegal (underlline: illegal) because the overwhelming consensus of voters agrees that those things should be illegal. Whether they are moral or not is an entirely different issue. In this case, they are also immoral. And yes, if someone was in a small minority (they believed sex with children was OK or they thought polygamy was just fine), then yes, they would have the morality of the great majority imposed on them because the overwhelming majority would make it illegal (as they have).

But the legality of things (not morality–we agree that’s an absolute, right? At least in our own opinions) can shift with opinion–homosexual acts used to be illegal. Now they’re not. Selling alcohol used to be illegal. Now it’s not. Abortion used to be illegal. Now it’s not. Slavery used to be legal. Now it’s not. Selling various concoctions as medicine without any regulation used to be legal. Now it’s not. Etc. Morality may be absolute, but legality is not.

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

removing abortion from the sphere of morality (by making it MERELY a matter of choice)

I don’t know where that is coming from! In NO WAY am I removing abortion from the sphere of morality. In fact, I’m doing the opposite–I’m saying that each person (woman, if you like) has to decide for themselves. Their conscience is supreme (as the Catholic Church teaches–and if YOU say their conscience is not well formed, that’s YOUR opinion, not theirs).

I guess you just ignore what I write. I’ll try all caps: RAPE, MURDER, TORTURE, CHILD ABUSE, PEDOPHILIA are all crimes where THERE IS A CONSENSUS OF OPINION (!!!) that they are morally wrong and should be made illegal. Anyone advocating that these things be legalized would be in a tiny minority. Abortion, on the other hand, has 18-21% over the last 40+ years saying it should always / mostly be illegal. No consensus, not illegal.

There is another grave problem with your thinking. Abortion didn’t become the law because it was the consensus view at the time. Abortion was imposed as law because of a judicial fiat.

It may well be that it has become the “consensus” view BECAUSE it was given legal standing by the Supreme Court. In other words, perhaps most people support abortion in deference to the fact that it is the law based upon Roe v Wade and the Casey Decision, which is mirrored by you in your first two lines above. What if the consensus view of abortion by the public is merely a function of what the court said about the absolute right of individuals to make up their own morality? In other words, people mostly agree that the so-called “consensus” view is true because SCOTUS told them it is true.

Even more simply: we arrived at the consensus view because of a legal imposition by judges, not because it was the consensus view. The consensus merely results from the legal imposition. That would mean we need to work hard to get rid of Roe v Wade so a pro-life view will again become the consensus view as a result.

Same with laws surrounding SSM, by the way.

 

[guanophore]

And make sure no one is legally able to use birth control, since that also effects society, and is against church teaching.

Primarily because it kills human beings. we have laws of all kinds that impose the morality that killing, beating, raping human beings is wrong and punishable. Catholics just don’t distinguish the wrongness by whether the baby is outside the womb, or inside.

 

[HarryStotle]

You still don’t get it. Amazing. Morality is morality; there is an absolute good. We agree…

As always, you are confusing morality with legality. These are two separate things; sometimes they coincide, but not always. Some things that are illegal are not immoral. Some things that are immoral are not illegal.

But the legality of things (not morality–we agree that’s an absolute, right? At least in our own opinions) can shift with opinion–homosexual acts used to be illegal. Now they’re not. Selling alcohol used to be illegal. Now it’s not. Abortion used to be illegal. Now it’s not. Slavery used to be legal. Now it’s not. Selling various concoctions as medicine without any regulation used to be legal. Now it’s not. Etc. Morality may be absolute, but legality is not.

You mouth the words, morality is absolute, but you don’t seem to comprehend their meaning.

If morality is, indeed, absolute, then it ought to supersede the law of the land because every moral conscience in the land ought to be obligated to the absolute and categorical character of moral precepts.

Your view, fundamentally, is that any morality cannot be absolute since it must give way to the law of the land formed by the consensus of moral consciences. However, if it is the determination by individual moral consciences that form morality (and the law, according to you) in the first instance, then it isn’t morality, per se, that is absolute, but the right of individuals to determine their own morality that is absolute.

No one can be obligated to a moral principle if they hold the absolute right to ignore all such principles. They are merely obliged to do whatever they choose in any given situation. Essentially, that just enshrines as a moral right their right to do whatever they choose. There can be no such thing as obligation because the obligatory nature of morality can be vetoed at any moment by the capricious moral will of each person because you claim that is the absolute right of each moral conscience, no matter how ill-formed.

Since you give no moral principles which are absolute, you have no way of determining whether any individual conscience is ill-formed or well-formed. You cannot distinguish between the two because each conscience is the absolute determiner of its own rightness. This is just moral relativity disguised as moral theory hidden behind the absolute right of the individual to do whatever they want.

You are also just mouthing the words “well-formed conscience,” since it merely means, for you, that the person simply has to convince themselves (and their current ill-formed conscience) that they want what they want badly enough to force everyone around them to accede to their “right” to have it.

 

[guanophore]

But again (last time?) this is the point–different religions have different points at which they recognize the fetus as “an innocent human being.” This is not a question of science, it’s a question of belief. And everyone has a right to their own beliefs.

I think you have it backwards. It is absolutely about science. Science has determined that human life begins at conception. It so happens that the CC has always held this view, but it has only been recently that this could be scientifically proven with new technologies that can see inside of the cell. If not destroyed, a zygote will develop into a human fetus every time.

Now the infusion of a soul is another matter which, for the present, lies outside of scientific ability.

And I have no right to inflict my beliefs on others, nor do they have a right to inflict their beliefs on me.

This is a specious argument, since we have done this with virtually every law that exists. Murder is punishable by law becuase the majority of society believe that it is wrong.

Homosexual unions recently became legal because the majority of society (apparently) believe it is right. This is a belief that has been imposed upon those of us who do not believe that way.

 

[guanophore]

Actually, I would suppose the Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom or God would be the very definition of a theocracy, so, yeah, pretty much every good Catholic should want to live in a theocracy, but not just any theocracy, only one, the one with Christ as King.

This is what happened during the middle ages, when there was a conflation of Church and State. It was considered illegal and immoral to be outside of the theocracy. People were fined, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, and put to death if they were thought to be non-compliant with the theocracy. The problem with a material vs a spiritual theocracy is that human beings have so many flaws. Ambition, power, wealth and many other temptations create a State that is oppressive.

The United States was colonized by pilgrims fleeing from such a Theocracy. The separation of Church and State was created to prevent that.

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

Actually, I would suppose the Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom or God would be the very definition of a theocracy, so, yeah, pretty much every good Catholic should want to live in a theocracy, but not just any theocracy, only one, the one with Christ as King.

This is what happened during the middle ages, when there was a conflation of Church and State. It was considered illegal and immoral to be outside of the theocracy. People were fined, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, and put to death if they were thought to be non-compliant with the theocracy. The problem with a material vs a spiritual theocracy is that human beings have so many flaws. Ambition, power, wealth and many other temptations create a State that is oppressive.

The United States was colonized by pilgrims fleeing from such a Theocracy. The separation of Church and State was created to prevent that.

It isn’t clear to me that having Christ as king both spiritually and temporally is a bad thing. The problem is when you have usurpers who take the role of leadership as if they are God. That is a different story entirely from having God reign as King. The Kingdom of Heaven will be both spiritual and physical. That would be the whole point of the Incarnation, no? That God fully takes on human nature in order to redeem both it and the order that governs it?

What do you suppose the line of the Our Father…thy Kingdom come… means? What of the prophecies of Daniel, the proclamations of John the Baptist and Jesus concerning, “the Kingdom is upon you?”

It isn’t as if democracy (the unfettered will of the people) is playing itself out absent all those human flaws you spoke of (think back the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror for perspective.) I strongly suspect this slow move towards absolutizing global governing bodies in tighter and tighter circles of power will eventually reveal just how despotic and flawed human forms of government can get. At the moment, about half of the population of western nations positively want some global governing body to look after their supposed needs. As those “needs” become more and more absolutized, so will the authority need to be to provide for those “needs.” Most have no clue regarding what is to come.The Middle Ages will look like a summer camp in comparison – and then the Lamb will return and his Kingdom come in glory.

 

[HarryStotle]

This is what happened during the middle ages, when there was a conflation of Church and State. It was considered illegal and immoral to be outside of the theocracy.

Actually it wasn’t so much a conflation of Church and State as an infection of the Church by so many human flaws and a corresponding move by those in power to coordinate the power of the state with the authority of the Church.

The kingdom of God will require the free assent of the people to the absolute authority of God. It still doesn’t make any sense to me why the omniscient and omnibenevolent authority of God wouldn’t be what everyone desires. Instead most will opt for any second rate banana republic form of governance that caters to their immediate wants rather than providing for their eternal well-being.

 

[guanophore]

The kingdom of God will require the free assent of the people to the absolute authority of God it still doesn’t make any sense to me why the omniscient and omnibenevolent authority of God wouldn’t be what everyone desires. Instead most will opt for any second rate banana republic form of governance that caters to their immediate wants rather than providing for their eternal well-being.

I think there are many of us that do waant the omniscient and omnibenevolent authority of God to govern us. The problem is in how human beings perceive this. There are about as many ideas of what it means as there are belly buttons. Ultimately, that Kingdom rule must begin in each and every heart. Human leadership, without Christ as King in each heart, will inevitably become corrupted.