Catholic Scholars Blast GOP

Forty-four scholars signed onto an open letter critical of former U. S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) and former U. S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) but a look at the signatories raises more questions about them than about the presidential candidates.

The letter states:

“We challenge our fellow Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail. Mr. Gingrich has frequently attacked President Obama as a ‘food stamp president’ and claimed that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Santorum remarked: ‘I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.’”

“These college professors made a connection that Gingrich didn’t, between African Americans and food stamps,” the Cardinal Newman Society notes. “And the accusation that Santorum said, ‘I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money’ is also unproven. Check the video here.  It’s unclear what he says.”

Actually, more than one-quarter of those who signed the letter (14) represent groups with a Catholic imprimatur that focus on issues not normally associated with doctrinal Catholicism—welfare, immigration and taxes. These groups include Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Of this, and similar groups, Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid recently noted that “These groups, including Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, are designed to give the impression that Catholics are less concerned about issues like stopping abortion and protecting the sanctity of traditional marriage than passing government health care.”

The 30 academics who joined them do indeed come from the theology departments of well-known Catholic colleges and universities. Nevertheless, while their paper trail on matters political is voluminous, their output on matters of faith and morals is a bit less so.

Specifically, a search of the more than two-dozen theologians turns up only two who have condemned abortion implicitly. For example, in a 2010 interview, Steven Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America, told the Catholic News Agency “that it was ‘gratifying’ to see individual Tea Party representatives oppose abortion ‘even though libertarianism theoretically is suspicious of government promoting moral or religious values.’”

In 2002, Rev. John F. Kavanaugh S.J., Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University wrote “One thing the Democrats really stand for, however, is abortion—abortion on demand, abortion without restraint, abortion paid for by all of us, abortion for the poor of the earth. I am not a one-issue voter, but they have become a one-issue party.”

Schneck and Father Kavanaugh’s co-signers have not issued anywhere near such clarion denunciations of the practice of abortion. For instance, Rev. David Hollenbach, S.J., who led a quintet of signatures from Boston College, has credited the Clinton Administration, somewhat inaccurately, with reducing the number of abortions: He failed to take note of state restrictions on the operation put in place during the Clinton years.

Also, as we have noted, Hollenbach questioned the pro-life credentials of Condoleeza Rice, a speaker at BC, while passing on those of U. S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., another guest lecturer with a solidly pro-choice voting record in Congress.

Like Hollenbach, the other signers are distinctly left-leaning. Rev. Thomas J. Reese, S.J.,
a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University, to name one, thinks that the U. S. Catholic Bishops, who have issued pastoral letters calling for increased welfare spending and nuclear disarmament, are too right wing. Not too surprisingly, Father Reese is “go-to Catholic” for much of the so-called mainstream media: He writes regularly for the Washington Post.

Then there is the last lady on the list—Nancy Dallavalle, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Fairfield University. On Rate My Professors.com, one of her students describes her as a Christian feminist. Another gives an idea of what this means.

“I lost points on my paper for referring to god as ‘He,’” the reviewer remembered. “The reason: ‘I won’t have any sexism in my class.’”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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