Vance quoted at length from a Francis homily in
March 2020 about a passage from the book of Mark about Jesus being in a
boat with his disciples. A storm caught the group off guard by an
unexpected and turbulent storm, which left them disoriented and in need
of comfort.
Jesus slept for the only time
mentioned in the gospels. When he awakensafter the storm has passed,
the disciples ask why he wasn’t concerned if they perished.
“Indeed,
once they call on Him, He saves his disciples from their
discouragement,” Vance quoted Francis as saying. “The storm exposes our
vulnerability and uncovers our faults and superfluous certainties around
which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits
and priorities.”
“We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity,” Vance added.
What absolute tosh.
Do these people ever look up anything?
The storm hadn't passed. It was raging. They were going to die. He was sleeping. They wake him. He commands the storm to stop. It stops. They are amazed. He was upset at their faithlessness.
They were saved from being killed by an actual storm, not from some stupid, introspective-conscience-of-the-west-like existential angst imported into the text from our cowardly, post-Christian, 21st century dull humanitarian consensus which cannot say what a woman is and can't even bring itself to call things what they actually are, such as that a man posing as a woman is a man posing as a woman.
Are we surprised that the same people who deliberately misrepresent their foundational book misrepresent also who is the dictator destroying Ukraine and who started the war?
And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full.
And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they
awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish?
And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?
And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?
“I was really disappointed with what he said on ‘Face the Nation’ the
other day. And I don’t mind telling you, somewhat hurt. This was not
only harmful, this was inaccurate. You heard what he said: ‘Oh, the
bishops, they’re pro-immigrant because of the bottom line, because
they’re making money off this.’ That’s just scurrilous. It’s very nasty,
and it’s not true,” Dolan said, speaking on his weekly SiriusXM show “Conversations with Cardinal Dolan.” ...
“You want to come look at our audits, which are scrupulously done?
You think we make money caring for the immigrants? We’re losing it hand
over fist … we’re not in a money-making business,” he continued.
A Brookings analysis earlier this year by University of Pennsylvania professor John DiLulio noted that Hillary Clinton lost theoverall white Catholic voteby 33 points in 2016, but four years later, Biden cut that deficit in half, losing by only 15 points.
The story never once mentions that J. D. Vance, Trump's running mate, is a 2019 convert to the Catholic faith and might represent as big a challenge for Harris as her abortion advocacy and her grilling of "a Catholic judicial nominee about whether he could remain impartial due to his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a respected Catholic fraternal organization".
I was expecting a juicy exposé of 2019 Catholic convert J. D. Vance's radicalism in Paul Elie's "J. D. Vance's Radical Religion" for TheNewYorker, here, but all you get is disappointment and dark insinuation.
If you are hoping to find out if Vance fasts for Lent, makes pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, or goes to daily Latin Mass, you won't.
It's mostly an essay specializing in ideological assumptions and guilt by association, written from the sneering point of view of the illiberal ethos which can't believe there is still a religion in America which is thoroughly pro-life in its commitment to the unborn and the elderly, and committed to the sanctity of marriage between men and women.
For example, Paul Elie insinuates that Vance is a "conservative Catholic" just like Supreme Court justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, but never tells us exactly how. Therefore we should be afraid of a coming "top-down ordering of society . . . enshrined through regime change" if Vance advances to the executive branch and cooperates with this Supreme Court cabal.
We're not told what kind of Catholics are justices Roberts and Gorsuch, either, not to mention Sotomayor, or how the other four form a conspiracy against the American nation.
For Paul Elie, what it seems to come down to is that Vance is too buddy buddy with people like Patrick Deneen, whom he asserts to be anti-democratic without evidence:
In 2023, Vance took part in a discussion at the
Catholic University of America with the Notre Dame political scientist
Patrick Deneen, an advocate of “post-liberalism,” which, he explains in
his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change,”
is the view that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive
tyranny” and so must be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.”
Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug; during the discussion, Politico reported,
Vance “identified himself as a member of the ‘postliberal right’ and
said that he views his role in Congress as ‘explicitly anti-regime.’ ” ...
For Deneen, post-liberalism involves elevating “leaders who are part of
the elite but see themselves as ‘class traitors’ ready to act as
‘stewards and caretakers of the common good’ ”—and to enact their views
on abortion, marriage and divorce, euthanasia, the free exercise of
religion, and other issues without the constraints of legal precedent or
the democratic process. Evidently, Vance fits the bill. After learning
of Trump’s choice of running mate, Deneen, in a statement, called Vance
“a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a
generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”
I'm not a fan of the Catholic integralists, nor of the broad influence of Catholicism at the expense of the nation's historic conservative Protestant character either, but I'm not particularly afraid of them, just as I am not afraid of the Christian nationalists.
Mostly they are amusingly grandiose.
These groups represent a reaction to illiberalism, which is what this is really all about. The radicals are the so-called liberals who like to read Paul Elie and subscribe to TheNewYorker, who want to suppress speech and suppress religion and its influence and suppress everything about this country's past. This country is about freedom, and freedom is really messy, which is why ideologues of the left and right have so, so much to say against it.
Freedom really ticks them off.
I'm thoroughly confident that these idealists can blather on all they want and that the American people are still not going to submit to their religious tests for citizenship on the one hand, let alone to their pope on the other.
