Guns are important too and so are taxes on the American of ordinary income. We don't send our kids to public schools but we despise what public schools do to other people's kids and through them to our society.
Catholics who attend Church at least weekly are much more likely to vote Republican as revealed by poll after poll. Our pastors are more and more likely to urge us to vote against the Demonrats. Sure, there is a residual rump caucus of aging activist "Peace and Justice" Kumbayas but the good news on them is each day's obituary page.
I believe that you have the instinct that Catholics are not going to move suddenly rightward at the voting booth and you are probably right about that but we are moving and we tend to be a verrrrrrrry stubborn lot. Once we move, we stay moved for a verrrrrry long time unless and until new reasons make for a slow change in momentum. Also, there is more and more momentum towards the GOP.
We are very good allies to have because of that stubbornness. It would help if Rome would appoint bishops more inclined to our pre-Vatican II separatism not because it is not good to have alliances with non-Catholics but because we Catholics must charge our Catholic batteries to maximize the strength and consensus that we can and must bring to the alliance with others. Be patient with us. We're worth waiting for. When we move against the anti-Catholic Catholics like Kerry, Durbin, Leahy, Mikulski, et al., there will be no turning back. Keep an eye on Archbishop Chaput of Denver. He would make a superb cardinal. He is a warrior Capuchin.
As to cafeteria Catholics, they are no more Catholic than those who despise and reject Scripture can claim to be Protestant. Ancestry is not determinative.
Union members are not robots for labor leaders. It is not right to exclude them simply because they look out for their own economic interests any more than we should reject the industrialist for improving his profit. The capital of the labor union member is his or her labor and he or she has the same right to maximize profit as anyone else. Until the Depression, a lot of labor union members, including many leaders, were openly and proudly Republican. It is also true that, as Reagan used to say, we did not abandon the Democrats. They abandoned us. So be it! p> God bless you and yours.
I have been here about 3 1/2 years after migrating from my native Connecticut. There are union members back thee too. Not too many members of Knights of Columbus Councils are very Democrat inclined as they once were. There has not been a Democrat running the Supreme Council since about 1976 when Virgil Dechant (a Kansas GOP State Central Committee member) was elected. A few years ago he was replaced by a young hardliner named Carl Anderson. The K of C is not specifically political but also knows how to deliver the message in no uncertain terms to the members and the K of C is the premier Catholic organization in this country. Ronaldus Maximus was invited repeatedly to address Supreme Council Conventions (August of each year) and did so at least in election years. Expect Dubya to be invited as well.
There is quiet bloodletting in the Roman Catholic Church as we push AmChurch over the cliff. Rome is appointing good bishops to important and leser positions here, particularly in recent months. They have gotten the message about the scandals and have turned their momentum in the right direction. Catholicism is like a big battleship. If it is plodding along at 3/4 speed in a particular direction (say, obsessed with social gospel stuff) and someone notices some lavender torpedoes have been punching holes near the stern, the battleship can avoid some future torpedoes and eventually almost all of them but it cannot turn on a dime.
When I was 17, I was the first member of my family to consider myself Republican and be active at it. Almost all are Republican now. My relatives were labor union guys to the nth degree and worshipped the water that FDR rolled his wheelchair over. They were never pro-abortion, or even pro-birth control or pro-homosexual or pro-criminal or pro-communist, the combination which now defines the Demonratic Party which has repleced the party of our ancestors.
Failing to notice, FDR's patrician background, they thought of the GOP as the party of the hated executives who wanted to suppress their pay and benefits and dreams (a major problem and maybe even worse today because the GOP never learns much on this score) and it was the party of the mainline Protestants whom they viewed as snooty social snobs and anti-Catholics. My family guys were willing to return the favor by being anti-Protestant mainline (very easy for the Irish with our history), reverse snobs and having a good time laughing at the foibles of the upper class.
We regarded evangelicals and particularly Pentecostals as a curiosity and had little idea of their specific beliefs. We knew they tended to be more like us economically and very much unlike us in worship and religious practices. Even though there was a sharper anti-Catholic Church edge among fundamentalists on Scriptural grounds, it was not a social or economic enmity at all just differing beliefs. You could still play softball or go bowling with fundamentalists and have a good time not expected to be available with Episcopalians or Congregationalists or Unitarians.
As it becomes ever more obvious that the Protestant mainline is both evaporating numerically and also that its remains are moving toward the Democrats and that GOP Protestants are more likely to be Southern Baptists, Westminster Presbyterians (as opposed to the other sorts), Missouri or Wisconsin Synod Lutherans rather than ELCA, truly Christian remnants in the mainline Churches who also want to ally with us politically, Evangelicals and Penectostals, Catholics will be more and more comfortable with being Republican. We will shed poorly catechized Catholics in liberal parishes and dioceses to evangelical and even pentecostal churches where they too will become more likely Republican and the remaining Catholic core will be increasingly hard-core as our internal purging continues.
The hard-core of the Catholic Church are the ones most likely to disdain birth control as well as abortion and to have large families for all the right reasons plus the sheer joy of seeing the shock on the faces of more modern types confronted by mom and dad and the eight or twelve kids. The converts TO the Catholic Church of whom there are many are not coming in to be Kumbayas. Just as some who leave for the conservative Protestant churches do so because they were starved for red meat by their pablum spewing liberal priests and bishops, so others are fleeing INTO Catholicism to distance themselves from the Bishop Spongs and Bishop Robinsons of Episcopalianism or their counterparts in Presbyterianism, Methodism, ELCAism, etc. These folks are coming in BECAUSE they are conservative and they will help reinforce the trends among birth Catholics.
The danger among Catholics can be affluence. Materialism is a prime enemy of orthodoxy in the Catholic Church. Whether Catholics are right in a preferential option for the poor, a sentimental attachment to the underdog, a sympathy for legitimate victims like the unborn, and works which are often theologically derided though practiced elsewhere, or not, those very qualities will, through social issues, bring many Catholics around to the GOP. They will not be Republican marionettes and the GOP should prepare to adapt. We are verrrrry angry at the scandals within and social issue liberalism is the very visible enemy and it is found among the Kumbayas.
As you can see along the border, our numbers will grow. Our families will be larger. We have a superb generation of priests in preparation in seminary now and reinforcements available from the Third World to assist the transformation back from AmChurch to the Roman Catholic Church. This will not be to the benefit of Mrs. Antichrist or those like her.
The advertising that says that the Senate Judiciary Demonrats, including the likes of the phony Catholics Leahy, Kennedy, Durbin, et al. will only accept anti-Catholic "Catholics" on the Federal Bench will sting the Demonrats badly among Catholics. As solidarity is maintained in both party caucuses, it is the Demonrats, including CINOs, who vote unanimously anti-Catholic if a nominee actually believes the tenets of the Catholic faith and acts accordingly. We even have Senator Kerry, who claims to be a Catholic, warning of the evil influence of JP II over American Catholic politicians, the kind of rhetoric that made Catholics Democrats in the first place 100 years ago and more.
Suppose that you are a Baptist and I am a Catholic and we each REALLY are committed to our respective faiths. Our grandfathers or great grandfathers probably did not expect to be chums: possible but not probable. You and I may difer as do our faiths but we live in different times where it is easier to see that we agree on more of the permanent things of Christianity than those items, however important, upon which we disagree. You and I have tangled a time or two but I don't think you are a bad guy and I hope you don't think me one either.
Meanwhile, we can both recognize that, if we are friends, we often have mutual enemies. We call them modernists and you call them secular humanists but they are the same enemies and most are Democrats. The rest are RINOs. Be patient. We will be there with you in both fights. Any wait will be worth it.