I know it will come as a big surprise so please sit down. Fr. Andrew Greeley is in the Obama camp. Greeley writes glowingly of Senator Obama in the SunTimes. Although Fr. Greeley cannot look at the Church but to see fault after fault, apparently when he looks at Obama, he sees nothing but halo.
When Chicagoans who know Sen. Obama read the columns about him turned out by the national punditocracy, we tend to gasp and shake our heads in bemusement. He has become an ink blot for sick minds, very clever sick minds. Call up realclearpolitics.com and see what I mean. My favorite recent outbursts of hate come from Thomas Sowell, an African-American conservative economist, and from Naomi Schaefer Riley, the “assistant taste editor” of the Wall Street Journal (which title may be an oxymoron). Both write about
Greeley, is so vociferous in his defense one could be forgiven if the thought that Sowell and and Schaefer had insulted Greeley’s momma. Defending Obama against Sowell’s charges that Obama was a radical when he left Harvard and that is why he joined Trinity Church, Greeley writes:
Professor Sowell asserts that Barack Obama had to abandon his radical stance when he became a national public figure; he had to “project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together. The ease with which he has accomplished his chameleonlike change is a tribute to the man’s talent and a warning about his reliability.”
Anyone who knows anything about Obama’s activity as a community organizer in Chicago, even before he joined Trinity knows his style was always one of bringing people together in consensus.
Bringing people together in consensus? Would that include the babies that were left to die after failed abortions? Are they part of the consensus? Would this consensus also include the vast majority of the citizens of Illinois who supported the Born alive Infant Protection Act and rightfully abhor the infanticide practiced at Illinois’ hospitals? Apparently not since Obama fought against these most basic rights for babies. So much for consensus. Greeley finsihes with this ode to the Obamessiah.
Neither columnist is capable of delivering a precinct, no matter how skillful their fiction. However, their venom indicates that both are offended by this attractive, charismatic and intelligent young man. The last American politician who was the subject of such animus was JFK.
I would suggest that Greeley ought to be ashamed of himself for being an Obama shill, but that would be pointless.
April 3, 2008 at 1:41 pm
…”I would suggest that Greeley ought to be ashamed of himself for being an Obama shill”
It aint gonna happen.
I was listening to a podcast, and something was said that might be relevant here. They were talking about the Church, and that there are sinners in the pews and at the Altar as well.
One of the speakers noted that in the modern period we are perhaps more taken aback about errant Priests than our ancestors were in the Medieval period. To support this, he used for example the art that they left behind.
Specifically the Last Judgement frescoes, where all walks of life were depicted being escorted by demons to the dark realm; rich, poor, secular AND clerical (i.e., Priests and Bishops).
When I read about renegade priests, like this chap, I think of that visual.
April 3, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Why is it you holier than thou catholics act like abortion is the only issue that matters?
Like Greely, Obama brings something I have never seen before, a charisma that I imagine was much like that of Kennedy.
April 3, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Murder with a smile is quite charming isn’t it?
April 3, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Anonymous,
A candidate’s “charisma” ought to be a secondary consideration in the mind of a conscientious voter. First are the ideas a candidate espouses. These ideas are what will shape his policy and ultimately are what will have an effect on you, the citizen, and on the country and the world.
Obama talks about change and accomodation and coming together. But the fact is that his ideas border on socialistic. He is as far left politically as one can get. His stance on abortion is merely the “crowning jewel” of his political/moral philosophy.
If there is no right to life, what matter if I get a yearly colonoscopy?
April 3, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Since when does charisma trump the sanctity of life in all its stages? And since when did so many people become so weak-minded and superficial? (Yes, I am referring to Obama supporters…)
April 3, 2008 at 4:41 pm
What about all the lives lost in W.’s unjust war?
Why do you care about only potential lives and not the real lives of people?
April 3, 2008 at 5:13 pm
I’ve never met a potential person. Have you?
April 3, 2008 at 9:03 pm
All lives lost, to war, abortion, murder, etc., are tragic.
But, I just can’t understand the mindset of people who would protest a war because of lives lost but have no problem voting for someone who advocates the butchering thousands and thousands of unborn babies every year (and in Obama’s case the just born, too). Do the lives of these babies have less value because they are unable to defend themselves?
No one likes war but there are times when it is a necessary evil. Abortion is just plain evil.
April 3, 2008 at 11:43 pm
What does expect from that heterodox Catholic chaplain of the Democratic Party? Greeley and Obama are cut from the same cloth–and go happily the the bank with sucker money. These guys are master con artists. Greeley’s horizons broadly span the areas between the navel and the knees; and Obama’s seem to flow from some subbasement of the old Kremlin.
–John Hetman
April 4, 2008 at 9:37 pm
He has so much else to be ashamed of…
This one is pretty far down the list and is just going to have to wait its turn.
April 6, 2008 at 7:50 am
Why is anything about Greeley ( or even McBrien ) shocking? It’s logical. Flies around sh’t!
April 6, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Hetman,
You let Greeley out of the Kremlin way too easily on this one. To dissent with Sen. Obama is to be insane, per Fr. Greeley (and likely the Sun-Times, who wrote the headline).
That is a classic technique of the Bolshi’s, and repeated here by our own Fr. Greeley.
JBP