ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

REGARDING OBAMA'S
2 NEW HOUSE CATHOLICS


Inevitably and promptly, John Allen brings his usual 'omniscience' to bear on the nomination of Miguel Diaz as President Obama's ambassador to the Vatican, and since I vehemently disagree - philosophically, temperamentally and even factually in some respects - with his major premises in this case, I won't bother to reproduce his lengthy article here.
ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/diaz-nomination-obama-passes-major-catho...

Father Z, generally an Allen cheerleader, critiques it in a May 28 entry on his blog.
wdtprs.com/blog/

The US Catholic blogosphere is all atwitter (or ablogger!) between Diaz and Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court. But I do not intend to vent the ideological debate on this Forum for practical reasons.

In the case of Diaz, it's a useless exercise. He is being named an ambassador, not to any Church position, and even if he is a theologian, his personal ideological preferences cannot really impact the universal Church nor the Church in the United States (except as he is used by his fellow liberal Catholics as a propaganda tool, which Fr. James Martin at America magazine has done a very good job of starting out to do).

And in the case of Sotomayor, it's most unlikely she is not with Obama on abortion even if she is Catholic, nominally. She is but the newest - though the most prestigious - of the dissenting Catholics Obama has decided to put up for show. And no amount of debate wil change the fact that she is pro-abortion if indeed she is. [Now, that would be real news if it turned out she is not!]

There's a lot of time between now and her eventual confirmation by the Senate to look at who she 'really' is - and until then, it's too early to draw a balance sheet on her.

Early controversy is focused on her judicial philosophy favoring activist judges who make the law instead of interpreting the law; her comment that a Hispanic woman with life experiences can be a better judge than a comparable white male; and perhaps, most troubling, upholding a lower court decision saying a Connecticut fire department was right to deny a position to a qualified white male in favor of a black man who failed to pass the requisite exam [an example of what Obama calls 'empathy' - code for ruling in favor of minorities reflexively rather than on merit and on points of law.