Centennial moment: 1928 presidential election

With the Republican National Convention under way in Tampa and the Democratic National Convention set for next week in Charlotte, N.C., the 2012 presidential election is kicking into high gear. Catholicism is one of the big headlines in this year's contest, not least because both vice presidential candidates — Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Vice President Joe Biden — are Catholic, the first time that's occurred in U.S. history.

That got us thinking about another milestone in U.S. presidential election history — the 1928 nomination of Al Smith as the Democratic candidate for U.S. president. Smith's nod marked the first time a Catholic had been nominated for the highest office in the land, and it unleashed a wave of anti-Catholic vitriol across the nation.

Leave it to Our Sunday Visitor founder Bishop John F. Noll to take up his pen to defend the Church against the hateful accusations leveled against it at the time. In a chapter dedicated to the prelate in his book "Patriotic Leaders of the Church," author John Fink details Bishop Noll's actions:

"Bishop Noll assembled a huge scrapbook of the anti-Catholic literature that suddenly flooded the country. He duplicated them by Photostat and distributed them to other members of the hierarchy, important priests, and various civil leaders.  …

"Each week in Our Sunday Visitor, Bishop Noll took up the latest batch of accusations and patiently answered them point by point from the writings of historians and theologians. At the same time he was careful not to urge his readers to vote for Smith or to impugn the Republican Party in any way. As a matter of fact, the entire Catholic Church in the United States was careful in this respect. No cardinal, archbishop, or bishop endorsed Smith. The annual bishops’ meeting, usually held in October, was purposely postponed until mid-November so nobody would suspect that the bishops met to discuss politics. The convention of the National Council of Catholic Men was also postponed for the same reason, and when the Knights of Columbus met in August, the chairman opened the proceedings by declaring that “if any delegate should so much as mention the name of either candidate for the presidency, he will be declared out of order.” …

 "Al Smith, 'The Happy Warrior' as Franklin D. Roosevelt had called him, went down in what has been called 'the most glorious defeat ever experienced by a presidential candidate.' However, Bishop Noll felt that this defeat did no lasting harm to the Catholic Church. In fact, it might have done some good because it brought bigotry out into the open and gave many fair-minded people an opportunity, for many of them the first such opportunity, to learn the truth about the teachings of the Catholic Church."

To read more about Archbishop Noll's many patriotic contributions to the country, check out Fink's chapter on him. 

Promoting Catholic speakers

Catholic writer and speaker Brandon Vogt, author of "The Church and New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists and Bishops Who Tweet," has announced the top 100 speakers of his Support A Catholic Speaker Month 2012 project, and Our Sunday Visitor readers will find many familiar names on the list, including regular OSV Newsweekly columnists Teresa Tomeo, whose Eye on Culture column appears biweekly, and Msgr. Charles Pope, writer of the weekly Pastoral Answers column.

As Vogt explains, the Support A Catholic Speaker project is designed to do three things:

• Promote great Catholic speakers, who are so important to the life of the Church.
• Introduce new and unfamiliar speakers, who deserve a bigger platform.
• Help bloggers connect with their favorite speakers, blog about them, and build traffic to their own websites

Bloggers are encouraged to choose a particular speaker to profile. See the list and find out how you can reach a speaker in your area. 

Shaw: Catholic results in Pew survey are a crying matter

By Russell Shaw

Worried conservatives reacted negatively to the news that Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York had invited Barack Obama to the Al Smith Dinner in October. But the cardinal plainly believes the invitation serves the best interests of the Church — declaring war on the president of the United States by excluding him from this politically tinged festive event would hardly be helpful.

That’s a reasonable position. But we need also to ask whether war has already been declared — not by the Church but on the Church and what it stands for. With Catholic institutions battling for survival in light of the Obama administration’s “free birth control” rule, this alarming possibility must be taken with the utmost seriousness.

Just how alarming the possibility is was underlined by a recent Pew Research Center survey covering voters’ views. I found myself wondering whether to laugh or cry when scanning the Catholic results. Then reality set in, and the answer was clear: Cry of course. If these figures are correct — and there’s every reason to think they are — the Church is in deep trouble.

Some news accounts found encouragement in particular findings of the survey. But they failed to mention the finding that really catches the eye. Asked who better reflects their views on social issues like abortion and gay rights, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, 51 percent of Catholics said Obama, against 34 percent who said Romney. (For all voters, the figures were 50 percent and 36 percent respectively.)

This has two explanations, neither consoling.

The first, certainly true in some cases, is ignorance. Obama supports legalized abortion and same-sex marriage. As for Romney, whatever his position may have been when he was governor of Massachusetts, he’s now opposed to both, though neither he nor his campaign people have been very forthcoming about saying so. Catholics unaware of these things should know them — which is not to say they will.

The second explanation, also undoubtedly true in many cases, is that Catholics who say they and Obama stand together on the social issues know where Obama stands and are speaking the simple truth.

This survey was conducted for the Pew people in late June and early July. The researchers did phone interviews with 2,973 adults, including 619 Catholics. For the Catholic sample, the margin of error was 4.6 percent—in other words, the numbers for all Catholics could be slightly higher or slightly lower. As noted, some readers saw the results as encouraging. But except for matters already known (e.g., Catholics generally take a positive view of their local bishops), I did not.

Throughout, the survey results reflected a familiar split within the ranks of Catholics, between those who attend Mass weekly and those who don’t. (Among the latter, there was no breakdown to show how often or seldom they do attend or whether they attend at all.)

On the Obama-Romney question, 53 percent of weekly Mass-attenders said Romney better reflects where their position on social issues, against 37 percent who said Obama. But the results were reversed among those who don’t attend weekly, with 54 percent giving the nod to Obama and 31 percent to Romney. Since non-attenders now outnumber weekly attenders by more than two to one in the general body of American Catholics, that presumably accounts for the tilt toward Obama (51 percent) among Catholics overall.

With more than two months remaining before the election, it’s too soon to say how all of this will play out in November. But one thing already is clear. This will be an election of singular importance for Catholicism in America.

Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor.

Centennial moment: Toward a second century

In a little more than a month, Our Sunday Visitor will celebrate its centennial with its Sept. 28 "Continuing the Legacy" Symposium featuring Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, Scott Hahn and Helen Alvare and a celebratory Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Fort Wayne, Ind. (Click HERE for details).

In the build-up to the big celebration, OSV President and Publisher Greg Erlandson has written the cover story for the September issue of The Priest magazine about Our Sunday Visitor's plans for its next 100 years. Here's an excerpt:

"Our Sunday Visitor’s mission as a publisher will be shaped and impacted by the phenomenal changes taking place in technology. Because the pace of change is accelerating, guessing what the future holds reminds me of the answer that would occasionally surface when we as kids asked questions of the Magic 8-Ball: “Reply hazy, try again.” 

"I doubt that in the world of communications media there has been a time of such profound change and turmoil since the birth of the printing press. In the last decade, we have seen the proliferation of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the founding of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, eHarmony and hundreds of thousands of other Internet enterprises; the invention of the data phone and the iPad and all of the phenomenal technology that supports those devices. The list goes on and on and on: eReaders, Amazon, Netflix, streaming video, apps, iPods. Our world has been wholly re-imagined and reinvented in our lifetime. If the Chinese curse is, “May you live in interesting times,” then someone has inflicted on us the mother of all curses.

"Yet at the same time as all this disruptive change has been taking place, those of us in the vocation and profession of communications have been given new ways of reaching our audiences. If Archbishop Noll were alive today, I do not think he would be blind to the dangers, but he would be excited by the opportunities of these new tools and new media.

"In looking to where Our Sunday Visitor is heading at the dawn of our second century, it is important to address the intersection of technology and mission and how our company will continue to serve the Church by forming and informing Catholics and defending the faith. On the one hand, technology alone is not a silver bullet, and each new invention should not be seen as some sort of communications Second Coming. On the other hand, the Church has always adopted new inventions and discoveries in order to accomplish its mission of saving souls."

Read the rest of Erlandson's piece HERE.

Centennial moment: Conversion stories

From the earliest day of Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly, readers have enjoyed the stories of people who entered into full communion with the Church from other faith (or no faith) backgrounds. That tradition has continued in recent years, with OSV Newsweekly publishing converts' stories in its Easter edition (click here to read this year's stories).  

One of the most popular conversion stories in the early part of Our Sunday Visitor's history was that of William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, the legendary "Wild West" showman. In a 1918 edition, Father C.V. Walsh, the priest who baptized the folk hero on his Denver deathbed, provided readers with details of the experience. Here are excerpts from it: 

"When it appeared that Buffalo Bill was dying, Mrs. Harrington [a family friend] suggested to Mrs. Cody, the wife of Buffalo Bill, that she should get some minister to baptize him, as he had never received the sacrament of baptism. Mrs. Harrington, who is a Catholic herself, had no idea that anybody but a Protestant minister would be summoned. But Mrs. Cody, who has Catholic connections and knew, no doubt, that her husband's family were Catholics, replied that if he was to be baptized it must be at the hands of a Catholic priest. Buffalo Bill himself was consulted, and declared that he wanted the baptism. ...

"How natural such a proceeding was on the part of a man who was acquainted with the Church and had long considered its claims and its principles every Catholic will readily see. And even non-Catholics should be able to understand that when a man is on the brink of the grave and about to appear before the presence of his Creator and Judge, he thinks swiftly and accurately concerning the affairs of eternity. ...

"May the sacred ending of this wild and adventurous career lead many to aspire to follow Buffalo Bill in the last great act which crowned his life, and to accept his guidance through the last of shadows, when he chose the one secure and God-appointed way to travel safely to heaven over the great divide."

Shaw: The sunny side of religious persecution

By Russell Shaw

Will the present whiff of  secularist persecution be a help toward healing what ails American Catholics as a Church? Leaving aside predictions, I’ll only say: it may.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan has a flair for getting people’s attention. The archbishop of New York did that recently by declaring the Big Apple “mission territory.” Many other bishops could say the same of their sees. As far back as 1943 in fact, the famous Cardinal Suhard of Paris became forever linked to the title of a book—La France, Pays de Mission?—that he’d commissioned two youth chaplains to write.

In France as in New York and many another place, the fundamental problem was and is the same. Cardinal Dolan calls it “the societal crisis of faith.”

           

In just two months, a general assembly of the world Synod of Bishops will be under way in Rome wrestling with the problem implied in calling New York or Paris or anywhere else outside the third world mission territory. Its theme, chosen by Pope Benedict XVI, will be the new evangelization. And new evangelization, as nearly everyone must know by now, has repeatedly been proposed by Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II before him as a matter of the highest urgency.

But for all the discussion the topic has received, there’s a large question: How do you do it? Without imagining that it’s the whole answer, I suggest that unyielding resistance to militant secularism — as in the U.S. bishops’ campaign in defense of religious liberty against secularist inroads — may be the best tool for a new evangelization presently available to the Church in the United States and other Western countries.

There’s anecdotal but real evidence for that. A book I coauthored several years ago with Father C.J. McCloskey ("Good News, Bad News") cites the witness of recent converts who report that, disgusted by the increasing decadence of the secular culture, they were drawn to Catholicism as the most effective bulwark against it. The continuing onslaught against the Church in sectors of the secular media is a form of negative testimony to the same reality.

Something I heard not long ago helps illustrate the point.

Several Catholic men had come together for an evening of conversation and fellowship. One of them was a fairly new convert to Catholicism, and someone asked him what moved him to take that step.

Here’s what he said:

“I’d reached a point in my life where I was puzzling over the big questions that people sooner or later do face — what’s the meaning of it all and what am I doing here and where am I going? That kind of thing.

“I thought hard about all that, and after a while I came to a conclusion. In the end, there are two, and only two, real options—atheism and Catholicism. The other possibilities just can’t compete. So I thought it over some more, and I decided that Catholicism was the best bet.

“And that is why I’m a Catholic now.”

Not everyone will see the options that clearly. And not all who do will reach the same conclusion. But others are likely to travel the same intellectual and spiritual path as the options become ever more clear in the face of secularism’s cultural imperialism.

As that happens, many will find themselves turning to the Catholic Church — or perhaps turning back to the Church they abandoned years ago. Provided that — and this is crucial — the Church keeps up the good fight for decency and faith in our confused and polarized society.