President Obama has consistently sought a peaceful path among religions in the United States making sure that none feel excluded, writes Michael W. Higgins
The fractious and war-like state of Catholic discourse in the United States continues unabated. When not fighting over ecclesial priorities, episcopal mal-governance, falling attendance records, collapsing parishes, diminishing clergy and issues around women in ministry, a fight over President Barack Obama’s address at the annual ‘Prayer Breakfast’ wasn’t in the cards. Or at least that is what most of us thought.
Obama is not a favourite of Republican Catholics for political and economic reasons if not for moral and religious ones so any opportunity to criticise him that presents itself in the remaining years of his presidency you can be sure will be taken.
No surprise, then, that the vituperative apologist for Catholic tribalism who serves as the president of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, would berate Obama for making “insulting and pernicious” comparisons and for “deflecting guilt from Muslim madmen” unto ordinary and praise worthy Christians.
What got Donohue whipped up – along with the regular platoon of anti-Obama partisans – was his comment at the Washington breakfast that “lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place [the recent barbarous activities of the Islamic State or ISIS], we should remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ”.
Denunciations were Vesuvian in their heat and rage. How dare the President suggest moral and historical equivalency? How could he possibly argue that Christian misdeeds – past or future – are comparable to the atrocities committed by Islamic warriors?
And how could the President of a Christian nation choose nuance over fulmination when speaking to a crowd of the devout?
To Obama’s credit, he has sought regularly and consistently to find an irenic path among religions in the United States making sure that none feel excluded.
Less pacific
He is, in fact, far from soft on terrorists, less pacific than most of his Democratic predecessors when it comes to dealing with hostile ideologies that threaten world order and capable of making difficult decisions that have an immediate impact on human life and welfare. He just chooses to do these things slowly, with professorial deliberation and reasoned justification.
He is, if anything, a Hamlet on the Potomac.
The squabble over the President’s breakfast speech is illustrative of that widening chasm that exists in the country around his leadership, the nation’s growing disquiet over its status in the world (in spite of the fact that under Obama’s leadership the economic health of the country has improved significantly) and the growing tolerance for rabid, ill-considered and coarsened language that proliferates unchecked in the social media and in official news outlets.
Adversarial rhetoric replaces dignified discourse; Russ Limbaugh displaces G. K. Chesterton as an exponent of Christian apologetics; diversity of opinion is sundered by zealous totalists.
When Pope Francis addresses both Houses of Congress in the autumn, perhaps he will model that kind of leadership that prizes equanimity and courtesy, intellectual openness and generosity of spirit that America can on occasion demonstrate and do it before all memory of such dignity has receded irretrievably into the past.
Visit Michael W. Higgins’ blog, Pontifex Minimus: http://sacredheartuniversity.typepad.com/pontifexminimus/