Freakshow

Straying from the soothing wonders of Wales for a moment, to have a quick, but noisesome slog through the muck of American Catholic politics, (oh, I can't be bothered to find a link. Here, look it up yourselves.)

a friend was asked by Protestant inquirers: "From what Catholic freakshow did Pelosi, Biden, Kerry, & Teddy Kennedy escape?"

he offers, briefly:

Quebec is the best place to look, sez I, for the beginning of an understanding of the problem. It was like a dam burst, all at once, about 1960. Literally, centuries of restraint within a pre-modern Catholic order, which had effectively survived from the Late Middle Ages without significant alteration, turned overnight into total antinomian chaos, with a sudden explosive loss of faith. Some monasteries, & especially nunneries, have cracked like this, too: an overnight bust-up from tight Catholic discipline to screaming heebees.

We acknowledge that the result of such dam-bursts is worse than if the people had never been Catholic at all. It is as if they instantly switched sides, en masse, from Christ to Satan, whereas, something a little more Protestant & moderate might have been preferable.

What we have in USA & English-speaking Canada now is (mostly) more subtle & individualized.

Our Premier McGuinty in Ontario here came from a family like the Democrats you mentioned. The parents were pretty Catholic, but trying very hard to integrate into a Protestant world. The kids all "broke out" into post-modernity. They retained their Catholic "ethnicity" as if it were their "right" -- in the case of politicians, their "right" to the Catholic vote, as it were -- but nothing more.

They truly despise Catholic teaching, & look on their fellow Catholics as "backward" -- the way the Democrat elite looks on all their constituencies. They desperately crave acceptance as "ethnic Catholics" from non-Catholics.

Their Catholic identity becomes a kind of demented narcissism.