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racism in Pennsylvania? Seventy-two percent of Catholic Democrats in the
heavily Catholic state of Pennsylvania voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton,
according to the MSNBC exit polls, and more than half of them said they
would not vote for Sen. Barack Obama if he won the nomination. The finding
gave me a chill. On the other hand, most Obama voters said they would vote
for Clinton if she should win the contest. Is Catholic racism rearing its
ugly head again? I have spent almost a half century monitoring Catholic attitudes in this country. Through the years, Catholics have been ahead of Protestant denominations though behind Jews in measures of racial tolerance and on liberal issues -- including the Vietnam war. |
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What is happening? Chris Matthews, a
native of the Keystone State (poor dear man!), pointed out that many of them
might be in neighborhoods where they felt threatened. Abortion does not seem
to be an issue in this election, and not many Catholics shape their vote on
this issue. Obama did very well in his home city and state among Catholics.
Sure it's his home state, but threatened people in such a state might view
him as not only a black oppressor but a traitor. That certainly was not the
case. |
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Irish Catholics crossed the line of national college attendance in the first decade of the last century, Polish and Italian Catholics after World War II. Catholics now are above the national average in white-collar and professional class occupations. Some of us are showing up on elite university faculties. Some even on television news programs. There are, of course, many Catholics still in blue-collar jobs, perhaps especially in uncivilized places like Philadelphia and Boston. Yet on average Catholics are disproportionately in the middle, upper middle, and even upper levels of American society. It is not Civil War time, and Catholics are not struggling for jobs with blacks as they did in the New York riots. Research by two first-rate
sociologists, Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, has demonstrated that Catholics
remained disproportionately Democrats in the Reagan years, not shifting more
than anyone else. It is time to stop using "blue-collar" as a routine
descriptor for Catholics. Yet many Democratic leaders are embarrassed to
admit that they need Catholic votes to win an election. They are somehow
unclean.
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 A Stupid, Unjust, And Criminal War: Iraq 2001-2007 Father Greeley calls to task those who justified, planned and executed the war and reminds us that God weeps at the destruction of war, whether lives lost are ‘ours’ or ‘theirs.’  Order
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