RR Reno commentary in the NCRegister on Spadaro attack, best response to date

When I read the Fr. Spadaro attack piece, I immediate thought the target was First Things and not Church Militant which is mentioned by name.  Fr. John Neuhaus accomplished quite unexpectedly the ecumenicism that Vatican II called for except not in the way the liberals have perverted the concept to mean.  Indeed, out of the many replies to Spadaro, the best titled was Antonio Spadaro has discovered a brand of Protestantism he doesn’t like.  First Things is the bane of liberal Catholicism.  I'm finishing up Douthat's Bad Religion, which to put briefly is a must read which I hope to expand upon at some point.  Douthat's touches on Neuhaus and gives context to what the whole First Things movement meant.   If you want to understand why people like Wuerl, O'Malley, and now Cupich etc pursue a hermeneutics of rupture, this book gives some the most meaningful insights into the liberal Christian mind that I've ever read.  To sum it up it's basically the anti-First Things.

There may now be a recognition for the NCRegisters and First Things of the world that there is no way to avoid the foray.  As much as I'd like to dream that it's just the media's Pope Francis problem, I can't find a way to reconcile that with what is actually going on; like the destruction of the Pontifical Academy for Life.  This doesn't mean I'm bent on despair or apostasy, I just pray and fast (not as much as I ought), and try live my little peasant life as best I can with the time I've been given. 

... That''s the long winded way of saying that RR Reno's reply is the best to date.

COMMENTARY: The essay’s rhetoric of ‘inclusion’ and accusations of ‘fundamentalism’ immediately taint it with an aggressive cultural progressivism.

I was surprised by a recent piece of extended commentary in La Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit newspaper that functions as a quasi-official mouthpiece for the Vatican.

Written by the editor-in-chief, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, and Argentinean edition editor Rev. Marcelo Figueroa, “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA: A surprising ecumenism” is a collection of uninformed assertions spiced with malice. It argues that Protestant and Catholic support for American conservatism amounts to an “ecumenism of hate.”

It’s hard to take this seriously. Father Spadaro and Figueroa seem to know very little about the history of religion and politics in the United States. For instance, they say “religion has had a more incisive role in the electoral process and government decisions over recent decades, especially in some U.S. governments.” This is wrong. The great reform movements in our history — abolition, prohibition and Civil Rights — have been motivated and articulated in explicitly Christian terms. Princes of the Church, such as Cardinals Mundelein and Spellman, were frequent guests at Franklin Roosevelt’s White House.

continue at National Catholic Register