Distinctly Catholic

Michael Sean Winter's new blog. (He also blogged for America.) He also wrote this piece: Anti-Gay Auto-Da-FéThe perverse and vicious campaign to ban homosexuals from Catholic seminaries.

From the introductory post to the new blog:

There are two guiding insights that I bring to my writing. On politics, I have never found a better description of, and challenge to, those of us who champion progressive politics than these words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: “American democracy has come to accept the struggle among competing groups for the control of the state as a positive virtue – indeed, as the only foundation for liberty. The business community has been ordinarily the most powerful of these groups, and liberalism in America has been ordinarily the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community.” Even more than when Schlesinger wrote those words in 1944, the principal cancer in American politics and culture today is the way the pursuit of material wealth often leaves the other aspirations of the human heart in the dust. Mammon and its adherents walk through American life like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, leaving many maimed victims on the side of the road, always too busy to notice let alone make amends.

On Catholicism, the challenge posed by Gaudium et Spes 22 is my guiding star: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.” There is no issue, no concern, no problem that affects humankind about which the Church can be indifferent, and no issue, concern or problem that cannot benefit from the unique light shed by the Catholic theological tradition.

We can agree that corporatism and oligarchy are problems for the country. But where is the respect for the Constitutional order of the country, and its political traditions? As I haven't taken America seriously for a long time, I don't know that much about Mr. Winters, other than what other bloggers have written in response to him. Is his blog going to be another "Catholic" blog written by a statist Democrat who uses Catholic social teaching to defend that party's agenda?

The present system is unsustainable -- it's time to think outside of the box.