Catholics for Obama

Monsignor Mike Murphy — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:15:25 EST

They say,

Let's keep religion out of the presidential campaign, if possible.

I say, to each his own. Let's rejoice that the Founding Fathers established a secular nation and that no one has to publicly defend his or her beliefs. I also think this current administration is very Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad! And anything to bring about change, non-violent change, must be done. Religious people like Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Mahatma Gandi, Thick Nahn Hahn, Dorathy Day Pope John Paul II, have proven in dire times sometimes we must look to our Religous leaders for help and guidance. I think we are in one of those dark times. Now I obviously don't mean the religious fundamentalists, who have simply hijacked the worlds great religions for their own evil agenda's and created this mess and in the mean time giving God a bad name. It's really brilliant in a sinister, demonic sort of way.

"We have guided missiles and misguided men." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

A page out of John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign appearance before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston.

At the time, Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, had to dispel rumors that he would be taking orders from the Vatican if he won the presidency.

Kennedy assured the protestant clergy that the pope would have no place in his presidency. He won the day when he told the ministers that when his brother Joe Kennedy's plane disappeared over the English Channel during World War II, no one asked what his religion was.

Catholics Back Obama

Marshall Ganz, a Harvard sociologist, was a major force behind organizing Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), a Catholic organization devoted to "structural" change in the Church. Ganz is a nationally known expert in political organizing. In 2004 he was an adviser to Howard Dean -- Ganz now advises Democratic presidential candidate, Barak Obama. . . .

Ganz's intent in helping to found VOTF is made clear from a letter published on the VOTF web site by his former graduate assistant, Aimee Caravich. Caravich was hired by VOTF to develop a training program for regional coordinators and affiliate leaders.

Caravich, in a letter to VOTF members, wrote:

I sincerely believe . . . VOTF can rise to its feet and claim a piece of the power that the Catholic hierarchy currently holds. I am here to get that ball rolling. . . . After all, as the VOTF opening prayer states, 'We are the Church.'

Ganz recruited her into VOTF after they spent two years together teaching "People, Power, and Change" at the Kennedy School of Government.

Now the same man who helped create an organization to change the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church is a chief adviser to Barak Obama. Last summer, for example, Ganz helped to design and implement "Camp Obama" in five cities across the country. Camp Obama was a three-day training session for volunteers who were tasked with creating a precinct level political organization from the grassroots up.

The Camp Obama web site features a video where Ganz explains, "How we can develop our own stories of self so we can relate with voters on a deeper emotional level than just to transfer information."

Ganz certainly has the credentials for this line of work. He was a civil rights and labor organizer with figures like Cesar Chavez. Additionally, he also worked for 16 years with the United Farm Workers, eventually becoming their National Organizing Director. Ganz tells the story of his work with UFW in his book, Why David Sometimes Wins.

Perhaps Ganz sees Obama as the David who can topple the goliath who is Hillary Clinton. Obviously he views successful grassroots organization as a key to an Obama victory over the well-financed Clinton political machine.

But the presence of Ganz in the Obama campaign suggests the candidate himself applauds the kind of change in the Catholic Church Ganz and his associates were trying to effect through VOTF.

So what is Obama's attitude toward Catholics?

In his speech last summer to the Call to Renewal Conference he explained, "The majority of Catholics practice birth control because they, like all Americans, 'intuitively' recognize religious teachings that are 'more culturally specific' and may be modified to accommodate modern life."

Marshall Ganz may or may not have had a hand in writing that speech, but it sounds like it came right out of the VOTF handbook for Catholic’s. Obama applauds Catholics as intuitive and distinctively American.

Obama has Catholic support, including a priest from Chicago, Fr. Michael Pfleger who said,"I think Barak Obama is in a class of his own."

Now that Clinton is sliding downward in the polls, and the Obama campaign is gaining ground, we may be hearing more of Obama's opinions on Catholic Social teaching.

Catholic Priest Has Only Glowing Praise for Candidate Barack Obama

Catholic priest Father Michael Pfleger of the Archdiocese of Chicago wants people to know that Senator Barack Obama “is the best thing to come across the political scene since Bobby Kennedy.”

Father Pfleger says he has known Obama for 20 years. “I think Barack Obama is in a class of his own,” he said.

In 2006, Obama cast his vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment. “Personally, I do believe that marriage is between a man and a woman,” he said the day he voted against defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

But Father Pfleger is just concerned for Obama’s “vulnerability.”

“When anybody comes with that much hope, whether it’s a Bobby Kennedy or whether it’s a Martin Luther King Jr., they do become vulnerable. They become vulnerable because they tell the country and the world that we can be better and we don’t have to accept what is. And unfortunately, we live in a world where not everybody wants it to be different.”

Although Father Pfleger says he is pro-life, he has a long open-minded history of inviting outspoken pro-choice advocates into his pulpit. In January 2003 singer Harry Belafonte was invited by Pfleger to speak at a Sunday Mass, where he criticized Bush for being pro-life and threatening a “woman’s right to abortion.”

Father Michael Pfleger is not alone, Hundreds of Catholic Priest’s have openly supported Obama. The well respected Jesuit Magazine “America” has even gone Obama it seems.

WHAT ARE THE CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHINGS?

Some people look at Catholic doctrine as a set of rules that Catholics are obliged to follow. As Pope Benedict has explained, Christianity is actually an experience of Christ's love, not a set of dos and don'ts.

The social teachings of the Church are a body of beautiful and profound writings of recent popes and bishops that deal with the nature of God and the nature of man made in His image as social beings. Through these teachings, which are geared to our time and culture, we learn through reason what God's plan is for us as men and women and brothers and sisters to each other. This, in a most compelling way, leads one to the Holy Trinity and to the path leading to true love and true freedom.

The Social Teachings are part of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, which is the teaching authority that Christ conferred to the apostles and which has been passed down to their successors, the bishops. They are scholarly works that spring from Sacred Scripture.

The social teachings include a set of principles that help people inform their consciences and understand their roles and obligations in modern society particularly in seeking solutions to social, political and economic situations related to human dignity.

Often called the best-kept secret of the Catholic Church, many Catholics are unaware of social teachings. They have not been very accessible to Catholic laity and are seldom discussed from the pulpit. People who have been introduced to the social teachings by CCG find they open up a deeper understanding of the Catholic faith.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/AmericanCatholicsforBarackObama

http://catholicsfordemocracy.org/blog/37

Is Barack Obama the next JFK?

by Ted Sorensen

(Ted Sorensen worked with John F. Kennedy for eleven years, first as his senatorial assistant and then in the White House as his special counsel and adviser. He is presently working on his memoirs, to be published in 2008.)

At first glance, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy--the millionaire Caucasian war hero for whom I worked for eleven golden years--seems notably different from the most interesting candidate for next year's nomination, Senator Barack Obama. But when does a difference make a difference? Different times, issues, and electors make any meaningful comparison unlikely. But the parallels in their candidacies are striking.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy and I embarked on a period in which we traveled to all 50 states in his long, uphill quest for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. He was, like Obama, a first-term U.S. senator. But he was not yet 40 years old, making Obama, already 45, a geezer by comparison.

At the time, Washington pundits assumed Kennedy had at least two insurmountable obstacles. The first was his lack of experience, especially compared with the senior statesmen also seeking that nomination-- Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Stuart Symington. Kennedy acknowledged that his age and inexperience would turn away some voters. Obama, though older than Kennedy, is similarly dismissed by some today. But Kennedy noted in one speech that "experience is like tail-lights on a boat which illuminate where we have been when we should be focusing on where we should be going."

Kennedy's second major obstacle was his heritage. Some said he had lost his chance to be president of the United States the day he was born--or, at least, the day he was baptized as a Roman Catholic. No Catholic had ever been elected president of the United States, and the overwhelming defeat suffered by the only Catholic nominated for that position, Governor Al Smith of New York in 1928, had persuaded subsequent Democratic leaders that it would be hopeless ever to risk that route again. The conviction that no Catholic could win was greater, in that less enlightened era 50 years ago, than the widespread assumption today that a black presidential candidate cannot win. The subtly bigoted phrase most often repeated in that election year--by former President Harry Truman, among others--was that 1960 was "too early" for a Catholic president, that the country was "not ready," and that Kennedy should be a "good sport" by settling for the vice presidency. No doubt Obama will hear--or has already heard--similar sentiments about the color of his skin.

Even some Catholic religious leaders--who thought Kennedy was not Catholic enough, having attended secular schools and expressed disagreement with the Catholic hierarchy on church-state separation--opposed his candidacy. So did some Catholic political leaders who thought his candidacy might raise unwanted controversies or produce an unwanted rival to their own positions (much as Al Sharpton and Vernon Jordan may not initially welcome an Obama candidacy). But, in time, Kennedy's speeches and interviews strongly favoring traditional church-state separation reassured all but the most bigoted anti-Catholics. In the end, despite his ethnic handicap, Kennedy proved to be less divisive than his major opponent, fellow senator Hubert Humphrey. Obama may prove the same.

In addition to their similar handicaps, Kennedy and Obama share an extraordinary number of parallels. Both men were Harvard-educated. Both rose to national attention almost overnight as the result of starring roles at the nationally televised Democratic convention preceding their respective candidacies: Kennedy in 1956, when he delivered the speech nominating Stevenson and subsequently came close to winning an open-floor struggle for the vice presidential nomination with Estes Kefauver; Obama in 2004, by virtue of his brilliant speech to the convention that year in Boston.

Both also gained national acclaim through their best-selling inspirational books--Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, published in 1956, and Obama's The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006. Both men immediately stood out as young, handsome, and eloquent new faces who attracted and excited ever larger and younger crowds at the grassroots level, a phenomenon that initially went almost unnoticed by Washington leaders and experts too busy interviewing themselves.

Kennedy's speeches in early 1960 and even earlier, like Obama's in early 2007, were not notable for their five-point legislative plans. Rather, they focused on several common themes: hope, a determination to succeed despite the odds, dissatisfaction with the status quo, and confidence in the judgment of the American people. In sprinkling their remarks with allusions to history and poetry, neither talked down to the American people. JFK was so frank about his disagreements with the leadership of his Catholic "base" that one Catholic journal editorialized against him; Obama was equally frank and courageous with the Democrats' organized labor base in assessing the competitive prospects of the American auto industry in Detroit. Both were unsparing in their references to the "revolving door" culture in Washington.

Above all, after eight years out of power and two bitter defeats, Democrats in 1960, like today, wanted a winner--and Kennedy, despite his supposed handicaps, was a winner. On civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the race to the moon, and other issues, President Kennedy succeeded by demonstrating the same courage, imagination, compassion, judgment, and ability to lead and unite a troubled country that he had shown during his presidential campaign. I believe Obama will do the same.

Mike Murphy's Confessions

Catholics for Obama