Posted by
KsReaganite on Friday, November 14, 2008 7:15:43 PM
Whether or not you agree with his bold approach, it is hard not to be
impressed with the courage of Father J. Scott Newman of Greenville. Frankly, I am not sure that his
public missive to those who voted for Obama-Biden is the best approach to an embarrassing
problem bedeviling the American Catholic Church for two decades now: how to handle
radical promoters of abortion who claim to be Roman Catholic and shamelessly hide
behind the flimsy “personally I am prolife but…” argument.
I have had the honor of meeting the learned gentleman and hearing him
deliver a fine homily from his pulpit at St. Mary’s Church. Succinct, articulate,
and well versed in the fine art of communicating with 21st century
parishioners, Reverend Jay Scott Newman is the embodiment of the confident young men of faith and purpose who came into the priesthood encouraged by the servant
zeal of the late John Paul II. These relatively young men are slowly replacing priests
and prelates like former Congressman Father Bob Drinan and Boston Cardinal Bernard Law whose permissive
sinecures of cushy comfort gave rise to a generation of fallen away Catholics
and triggered scandals that shook the very foundations of America’s biggest Christian
denomination. An instinct for compromising with the establishment is wired deep
into the fiber of the American Catholic Church, a legacy of being a distrusted ‘alien’
entity for at least the first hundred and fifty years of the Republic’s
existence. It is not surprising to recall that the Chief Justice who famously
declared that black people were nothing more than commodities of trade was
himself a Roman Catholic. In true fashion of subsequent ‘have my cake and
eat it too’ Catholic politicians, however, Chief Justice Roger Taney
protested to the end that while he ‘personally’ agreed with his Church’s
teachings that slavery was evil, he couldn’t impose those beliefs on the
rest of the country. Where have I heard that before?
Priests like Scott Newman and bishops like Bruskewitz (Lincoln,
NE) and Chaput (Denver) have the faculties of logic
functioning in their well trained minds, unlike their predecessors whose
reasoning abilities seem to have been compromised by all that 1960s era funny
weed. The Roman Catholic Church is crystal clear about its non-negotiable
social justice issues: sanctity of innocent life, racism, marriage, and
slavery. A Catholic who promotes, by word or deed, death, slavery, racism, polygamy or gay marriage, is automatically placing himself/herself outside of
the farthest boundaries of the Church. It can be certainly argued, though by
stretching logic somewhat, that politicians like Vice President-elect Joe Biden
and Rudy Giuliani can logically support the ‘right’ to infanticide
by others and remain Catholics in good standing. What is beyond logic, nonetheless, is to
posit that you can remain a Catholic and want to actively remove existing
protections for innocent life while seeking to publicly fund what the Church
considers infanticide. At that point, it moves from being ‘pro choice’
(whatever that meant in the first place) to being squarely ‘pro
infanticide’.
Father Newman has taken a stand for preserving the integrity of the
Catholic social gospel. He may be in error as to his zeal and his methods, but
at least he is doing more than most of his own bishops who seem to have
abandoned the New Testament in favor of an honorable mention in the New York
Times.
Those who don’t like the Catholicism of Father Newman can do the
simple, American thing: find another church or create their own. Nobody is
forcing anyone to be a congregant at St. Mary’s in Greenville, South Carolina.
Or they can petition Congress to nationalize the Catholic Church as tyrannical
legislatures like the Roman Senate, the German Reichstag, and the Chinese People's Congress have all attempted to do at various times in history.
As a priest, Scott Newman seemed to have chosen the Mother Teresa version of Catholicism over the Teddy Kenendy version of the same. Do you blame him?