Rockford Bishop once likened Democrats to Nazis and said they threaten America’s survival

13 comments April 11th, 2009

 

 Rockford Bishop Thomas Doran’s denunciation of Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama as this year’s commencement speaker (HERE) is mild compared with his condemnation of the Democratic Party in a column he wrote three years ago (HERE).

 Writing in the Aug. 11, 2006, issue of The Observer, the diocesan newspaper, Doran shied from identifying “the political parties of our country” by name but left little doubt as to whom he had in mind in his opinion that “adherents of one political party would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people.”

“The seven ’sacraments’ of their secular culture,” Doran continued, “are abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation. These things they unabashedly espouse, profess and promote. Their continuance in public office is a clear and present danger to our survival as a nation.”

 The good bishop went on to compare Democrats with the Nazis in World War II and said theirs is “the party of death.”

 I find it especially interesting that Doran cites contraception as one of the “sacraments” for which Democrats are to be condemned. The church says artificial birth control is “intrinsically evil,” but polls show that most of the Catholic laity, and even lots of the clergy, disagree with the Vatican on this matter.

 One wonders whether Doran would raise a fuss if Notre Dame slated a commencement speaker whose attitude about contraception was permissive.

 One also wonders why Doran made no conspicuous statements of umbrage regarding Pope Benedict’s extraordinary graciousness toward the pro-choice and twice-divorced French President Nicholas Sarkozy at ceremonies in Rome in December, 2007 (see HERE). I guess it just wouldn’t be politic for a bishop to publicly second-guess a pontiff.

 POSTSCRIPT: Coincidentally, then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, a Catholic Democrat,  delivered a speech at Notre Dame in 1984 in which he addressed at length some of the same issues raised in the current controversy over the school’s invitation to President Obama.

 Cuomo noted that he personally opposed abortion but defended his political opposition to laws prohibiting it.

 Said Cuomo:  “[T]hose who endorse legalized abortions aren’t a ruthless, callous alliance of anti-Christians determined to overthrow our moral standards…We cannot justify our aspiration to goodness simply on the basis of the vigor of our demand for an elusive and questionable civil law declaring what we already know, that abortion is wrong. Approval or rejection of legal restrictions on abortion should not be the exclusive litmus test of Catholic loyalty.”

 The full text of Cuomo’s speech is HERE.

UPDATE: The latest Pew survey shows that nearly two-thirds of Catholics approve of President Obama’s job performance: