Rush to Rahe

I noted over the weekend that when the Obamacare contraception, sterilization and abortifacient mandate came down, I thought of Professor Paul Rahe and his book Soft Despotism. I thought Professor Rahe had an important contribution to make to the subject of the Obamacare “preventive services” mandate; I asked him if he would write about it. Professor Rahe spoke up not only as a scholar of deep authority on the issues, but also as a member of the Church. Responding to my request, Professor Rahe posted “American Catholicism’s pact with the devil.” Professor Rahe’s post bears reading and rereading.

Indeed, Rush Limbaugh read it on the air yesterday. Rush introduced it with this explanation:

Paul Rahe (r-a-h-e), a professor at Hillsdale College, wrote a brilliant piece that was posted February 10th, last Friday. “American Catholicism’s Pact with the Devil.” What made me interested in this is we had a couple of calls last Friday. One was from a woman, you’ll recall, who was very animated and very upset. She criticized the Catholic Church, the bishops, the clergy, for being in bed with the Democrat Party for decades. She said that they basically sold their souls and became leftists. Rahe explains it and expands upon it. One of the key points that he makes is the Catholic Church got sucked in.

By the way, I don’t want you Catholics to get upset here. This is not a rip on the Church per se; it’s not a rip on Catholicism. It’s a rip on the people who have been running it, starting with Cardinal Bernardin. But the point is, they fell for a seductive notion that the redistribution of wealth equaled charity, that robbing Peter to pay Paul equaled charity. And that allowed them, under the tenets of Catholicism, to support liberalism and socialism. And that’s what they became. It’s a really brilliant piece. It prints out to six pages and I haven’t the time to go through it all, but I did excerpt it. I’m going to share it with you as the program unfolds. It is so good, it’s the reason I’m gonna revisit the subject.

It is interesting in another sense, too. People are wondering if what’s happened here with Obama, Catholic Church, abortion, contraception, is it a tipping point? Is the outrage from the Church real? Is it enough to cause the Church, at the top, to reverse its whole association with the Democrat Party? We’ll see. One of the things that Rahe does is point out that the same thing happened with the priests who were abusing kids. They looked the other way, just as they looked the other way with abortion. Wait ’til you hear this. It’s a pretty profound indictment of Cardinal Bernardin who basically said: Abortion, contraception, are no different than any other popular social issue of the day.

He lumped it in with everything else the Church opposes, and they hemmed themselves in where they really couldn’t criticize the Roe v. Wade decision. Rahe points out that when he goes to Mass, he doesn’t hear Catholicism anymore. He doesn’t hear any moral underpinning from the Church. All he hears is a bunch of socialist, left-wing dogma. Anyway, it’s a brilliant piece and I’ll excerpt it as the program unfolds today….

I happened to catch Rush reading Professor Rahe’s column yesterday; the only thing he got wrong was the pronunciation of Rahe’s name (“ray”). Rush performed a signal service in drawing attention to Professor Rahe’s post and to Professor Rahe himself.

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