Catholicism versus the Conventional Wisdom Republican Messiah
A peculiarity of discussion of Catholicism on a political site is that Catholicism (and a lot of other Christianity) occupy a space that doesn't exist in American politics. It does not line up cleanly with domestic politics.
The current Republican Party is socially conservative and economically reactionary.
The inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom (CW) is that the Republican Party hurts itself on social issues, and needs to become socially more liberal while focusing on an economic message.
The inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom is often the dumbest political advice availble, as it is here. There is no Republican economic message except warfare on the bulk of the population, regardless of its economic effects. Also, Republican economics is flat-earth level wrong as economics, and morally base. It is no more admirable than social conservatism, and is not even very popular. Social conservatism (which in the Republican party includes racism/nativism) is the core of the Republican electorate.
On the other side we have socially liberal/economically liberal. This corner of the two-axis chart doesn't need to be explained to anyone on DU.
Then we have libertarian thinking. It is not useful to cite Rand or Ron Paul as libertarians. They are not. They are a weird Republican Party cult. No actual libertarian is anti-choice. If the individual doesn't even control the insides of her own body then the individual doesn't count for shit. An actual Libertarian is socially liberal and economically conservative, by American political standards.
And then we have religion. Catholicism, and much other Christianity not featured on Fox news, is socially conservative and tends toward economically liberal. (The opposite of the authentic Libertarian, and also opposite to the inside-the-beltway dream Repblican that doesn't really exist.) You don't own your body OR your money. God's wishes trump your human notions of ownership. Thus we get Mother Teressa... a tireless worker for the poor created by overpopulation, and an anti-contraception zealot.
There is, to my knowledge, no American political "anti-choice, pro-welfare" sentiment. We find that in churches... my fundy relatives are not well off, not racist, and are incredibly generous within their local communities, yet vote Republican and believe Republican economic propaganda as a political matter, while acting differently in their spiritual lives.
It is a peculiarity. Every now and then we see an anti-choice liberal, like Dennis Kucinich (Catholic) was briefly early in his career, but it is rare.
Michael Harrington, author of The Other America and the man whose later books on Democratic Socialism first got me thinking about politics in an organized way, came out of the Catholic Workers as part of an American variant of "revolution theology." His exposure of poverty in America circa 1960 was of great interest to JFK and Pat Moynihan and other followers of the Grand Church in a way that was not interesting to Calvinists... the Catholic Church is an anomalous authoritarian pro-poor, pro-sick kind of institution. (I would not be surprised if American Catholics and non-political Evangelicals could be discerned, in a mild way, from mainstream Protestants in polling questions about poverty.)
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