Saturday, August 18, 2012

Catholic Conservatives In Both Religion and Politics Should Embrace the SLOW Pace of Change Not Revolution

One of my favorite blog posts has this week has been at Practicing Catholic . See Indivisible: Jay Richards on Embracing Incremental Change

I can think of some practical applications to this. John Paul the II and even Pope Benedict even has not been exactly forgiven by some for down laying down a 6 Pack of Theological whoop ass when they came into office. The problem is of they ( and very much John Paul II ) has a Church that was very much in practical schism. They might have won the battle but lost the war. A war that has high internal consequences. However in the end it looks like not Orthodox Catholicism survived its is now emerging in a new growth stage.

You also see it on the issue of abortion. Every 4 years you hear Conservatives and the GOP has not really done much on abortion. LOOK ROE V WADE is still law. Well that ignores that by slow change we have managed to chip away at Roe and it's got people like Planned Parenthood  running scared. Some legislation being passed the state legislatures and upheld by the courts would have been unimaginable in the 80's.

Also we see more people becoming pro life. It should be recalled that as late as the early 1970's the Southern Baptist Convention was still issuing pro choice statements.

Now that does not mean sometimes major changes are needed that are quite a revolution. For instance one could argue that we have run out of time on the Federal Budget for much slow incremental anything.

Still we need to be careful in draw and quartering our Friends ( see current Cardinal Dolan situation) because things we might object too ( rightly or EVEN  wrongly perhaps) are not running on our time table.

Christians today are often called to task about certain Old Testament passages that are problematic in some people's view. God in Salvation history has at times to bring his people along slowly to get to know him again. God's time is not our time. Thus we see regulations on such things as multiple marriage and slavery that while not supporting the practice had the purpose of  mitigating the damage.

Needless to say the errors Catholicism has had to deal with in last few decades may be some of the worse the Church had hit them all at one. The recovery will not happen over night.


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