By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Just a year ago this week, we reviewed Jim Hitchcock’s book, Abortion and the Catholic Right. The book was both a surprise and a disappointment: The esteemed historian had left professional standards behind and produced a rant attacking pro-lifers who disagreed with him politically. Some of those pro-lifers often appear in these pages, but the most prominent of them was Donald Trump.
“The Trump movement was in many ways an ecumenical manifestation of the Wanderer Catholic underground of conspiracy theories, old religious and ethnic grudges, economic ignorance, resentment, and alienation from the entire modern world, an amalgam that for a time saw Ron Paul as its messiah and that above all yearned for the emotional release that a demagogue could provide,” Hitchcock wrote.
Well, we can pray that, if nothing else, the book at least provided some emotional release, however short-lived, for Jim Hitchcock.
The book was a surprise? Yes — because, frankly, it’s surprising that any publisher accepted it. Shoddy, without an index, unedited, and at a price of $100, one still wonders, what was going on? How could this fine man and longtime prolife advocate be so wrong about everything?
Our colleague Dexter Duggan and I have invited him repeatedly to account for the book’s many errors — some of them grievous and bordering on libel — and answer serious questions. We have promised to print every word of his response. Eleven months ago, he was kind enough to respond (in full): “Thank you, Chris. I intend to get around to responding, but I have been very busy for several months.”
Curious. He was admittedly busy when he put the book together, because he bypassed the crucial task of editing. Had he addressed that admittedly time-consuming task (or hired someone else to do it, as Michael Novak often advised good writers to do), it would have been a better book and we could take him more seriously. But his errors abide, and they need correction — especially his outright falsehoods regarding Mr. Duggan.
A talented and intelligent man, Hitchcock was undoubtedly honest about how busy he was: But a year has gone by, and he has to put a few of those important matters aside. I have renewed the invitation personally, and pray that he will respond.
Left, Right, And Upside Down
Our review last year asked Hitchcock several questions. He’s an avid Wanderer reader, as his book demonstrates, and if he answers them we’ll run his responses in full, either here or at the website we’ve created for that discussion, https://hitchcockmanion.wordpress.com.
Here’s one of those questions we asked: “Why does Hitchcock adopt the Left’s version of political reality expressed by the reductionist ‘Left-Right’ spectrum, which demands that all opinions be forced to fit somewhere along a unidimensional line between two ‘extremes’?”
Lo and behold, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan recently waded in to the same issue, not with regard to Jim Hitchcock but to his avidly pro-abortion governor, Democrat Andrew Cuomo.
On February 6, Cuomo wrote in The New York Times that “As a Roman Catholic, I am intimately familiar with the strongly held views of the church. Still, I do not believe that religious values should drive political positions.”
While those “strongly held views” and “religious values” are in fact eternal truths, the governor’s statement is chilling in one respect, in fact the most important one: He admits outright that, when he enters the cold light of eternity, he will not be able to plead invincible ignorance.
Cuomo went on to attack the “far-right” for its pro-life advocacy, insisting that “most Americans, including most Catholics, are pro-choice.” He speaks with a voice of authority, he insists, because “I was educated in religious schools, and I am a former altar boy.”
Enter Cardinal Dolan. A day after Cuomo’s op-ed appeared, he wrote a most revealing rejoinder on his personal blog. “This is something new from the governor. He did not consider me part of the ‘religious right’ when seeking my help with the minimum wage increase, prison reform, protection of migrant workers, a welcome of immigrants and refugees, and advocacy for college programs for the state’s inmate population, which we were happy to partner with him on, because they were our causes too. I guess I was part of the ‘religious left’ in those cases.”
This is also something new from Cardinal Dolan. His mocking tone veils an interesting admission: He (and most of his brother bishops) virtually define the Catholic “religious left,” a sad fact that we’ve been pointing out for years. But he adds a fascinating observation: “The civil rights of the helpless, innocent, baby in the womb, as liberal Democrat Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey once remarked, is not about ‘right versus left, but right versus wrong’.”
Well done, Your Eminence. You hit a home run — and you just sent a shock wave through the USCCB. For fifty years, as bishops have come and gone, the USCCB’s Deep State has insisted that its Social Justice Warriors occupy the “middle” — between “left” and “right”: that is, left-wing on social and political issues, but right-wing on abortion — period.
Now Cardinal Dolan has resonated an uncomfortable fact: The USCCB’s permanent government is left-wing, period. Yes, and nominally pro-life, which is not “right-wing” at all, but simply “right.” That inconvenient truth upends the very convenient lie from the conference that we have heard forever.
Defend The Family?Or
The Left’s Fantasy “Families”?
In 1980, I was a delegate at Jimmy Carter’s “White House Conference on Families” (WHCF) — a coalition of feminists and leftists devoted to the destruction of the family by proclaiming all the possible alternative lifestyles that could gather under the “family” umbrella. The man running the operation was grievously upset at how effective the few pro-lifers in attendance were at exposing it as a fraud.
That man was the WHCF’s executive director, John Carr, an able left-wing activist who went on to run the USCCB’s political arm for almost a quarter-century. There he preached the mantra that, while the conference was liberal on most issues, it was “balanced” because it was pro-life.
As Mr. Justice Goldberg used to say, “that is a gross canard cut out of whole cloth,” and Cardinal Dolan finally puts it to rest. The bishops support left-wingers like Cuomo on virtually everything but abortion — and abortion isn’t right-wing, it’s just “right.”
Kudos to the cardinal for setting us straight.
The Right Way To
Look At The Left
So what is this “left-right” routine, anyway?
It’s simply the lazy liberal’s way to slander opponents instead of responding to their arguments. And it’s designed to disguise the fundamental truth about the left: Its goal is power, and it is driven by what Augustine calls the “libido dominandi,” the “lust of rule” — the prime mandate of the City of Man, whose ruler is Satan (City of God I, Preface).
Of course, the left flees that definition like the plague. To avoid rational discussion, they call their enemies “Hitler.” Now Adolf Hitler was, in fact, a National Socialist (“Nazi” derives from the German “Nazionalsozialismus”).
And “fascist”? That is the epithet used by the left since the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) to brand any and all their enemies (they rarely brand them as “Communists,” of course — that hits too close to home for today’s aspiring socialist Democrats).
So who constitutes the “right”? Anyone who opposes the left, be they libertarian, monarchist, Christian Democrat, free-market, southern agrarian, constitutional originalist, Republican — even anarchist, although the left often relies on anarchists to create the chaos and terror that provides the left the opportunity to come to power.
Historian Jim Hitchcock knows this more than most. That he ignores it to vent his existential anguish is understandable but, to be candid — simply deplorable.
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