The Democrats' fatal attraction

[fpb]

There is one obsession at the top levels of the Democratic Party which has done them immense damage and which they should ditch - if people could be rational about obsessions - as fast as they can: namely, the obsession with Catholicism. Thinly disguised as a concern for "the Catholic vote", it amounts in fact to a sterile and futile desire,

Comments

[stigandnasty919]

I hesitate to speak for Irish Catholics, originating from the other side of the community in Northern Ireland. However, I think you are right that Catholic (and Protestant) are community labels in Ireland rather than being solely to do with religion. There is an old joke in Ulster, a barbed joke because it contains a huge amount of truth - "I know he is an atheist, but is he a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?"

Among my friends are a small number of Catholics who hold views on the teachings of the church that would place them, to my mind, amongst Protestants. Catholics who, for example, question or reject the Catholic view on Communion or contraception, the authority of the Pope or the notion of confession. Some may even question the existence of God. But they regard themselves as Catholics and attend Mass regularly because that is, in Irish terms, who they are.

Decades of division among the communities in the North, and centuries of oppression across the island are probably what drives this strong feeling of community, even where faith may have faded.

As an aside, the term Irish seems to hold a strange meaning in certain parts of the US Irish community. I have been told, on a number of occasions, that as I come from a protestant background in Northern Ireland I am somehow not Irish. My answer - that as my ancestors have lived in Ireland for, on one side of my family, more than 500 years and, on the other, more than 300 years, it follows that those making the assertion cannot possibly be American - never seems to go down all that well.