Behind Shrub's letter
Miss Dare: I wonder how many
Catholics other than me caught the hidden insult
to the Church inherent in the modernists'
sudden rush to defend her: If the
Jonesians are "bigots" in calling
Catholicism a cult, then Catholics are
presumed to be equally bigoted should they call
Protestantism "heresy". Yet that
is the official stance of the Church, to
which all Catholics must adhere. Any
ecclesiology less inclusive than Baha'i is now
bigotry. Also,
if the Internal Revenue Service can deprive BJU
of tax exemption for its bar on interracial
coupling, which treats all races equally,
aren't they morally required to do the same for
Rome, whose recruiting policy for
upper-level positions most definitely does not
treat both sexes alike? The only apparent
reason for treating the "sexism" of
Rome less severely than the
"racism" of Greenville is the number
of votes involved, and their relative
swingability. (Hmmm... can a writ of
mandamus be used to force the government
to an embarrassing but logical conclusion?) In such a mudfight as this,
both the religious right (i.e., Catholics)
and far left (the Bob Jones gang) ought to
borrow an insight from the Mohammedans:
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Cheers,
St. Paul
(P.S. I do hope
your new venture meets with more success than
the first, Miss Dare.)
From another Catholic reader:
I have some curious ideas about Bob
Jones.
While there is some dissent to the notion
that Bush shouldn't have gone to Bob Jones in
the first place, almost everyone seems to agree
that the university's opposition to the Papacy
is "bigotry". The unstated (and
dangerous) assumption on which this agreement
rests is that all religion is
"bigotry" unless it conforms to the
moral relativists' position that no religion is
more true than any other (which itself usually
springs from a belief that all religion is
false). I'm Catholic but think
fundamentalists are entitled to their opinion
that the Pope is in league with the devil as
long as they don't try to suppress my way of
thinking the way the liberals try to suppress
theirs.
The people in the Republican Party and the
elite at large that despise the "religious
right" do not appreciate what the Civil
War, a century of poverty, and the
commercialization of culture has done to working
class white people in the South. They've
never lived in the South or with the poor whites
who are still the majority there. The end
of state-sanctioned racism (rightly) stripped
away what little dignity they possessed and
exposed them for the "rednecks" and
"white trash" that Jay Leno and the
rest of the media repeatedly remind them that
they are. Like Russian workers in the
post-Soviet era, they turn out of despair to
alcoholism and beating their wives, children,
and dogs.
Ridiculous though the media evangelists and
the fundamentalist churches may seem to the rest
of us, they showed to poor whites that they
cared by reaching out to them, not just in
election years but every day of the week.
(N.B. Most blacks are Methodists or Baptists
because during the slave era only those
denominations condescended to proselytize
them.) Go to any southern church and you
will hear countless stories of hopelessly
dysfunctional families that have returned to a
normal, alcohol-free, crime-free way of life
after being "born again". And
notwithstanding Bob Jones's dating policies, I
have witnessed more genuine fellowship among
born-again blacks and whites than between the
polarized racial grouplets on our irreligious
and politically correct Ivy League
campuses. Were it not for Pat Robertson et
al, poor white America might be in approximately
the same stage of cultural and moral
disintegration as poor black America.
Given that the federal government seems
determined in the name of diversity and cheap
labor to create a Spanish-speaking replica of
the black ghetto and all its problems, we should
at least be grateful that someone is tending to
the rest of the country.
