Good Catholic, Bad Catholic

I've written about this sort of thing before, about how Barack Obama's actions regarding various Catholic matters has been designed, all along, to show that there are the Right Sort of Catholics (pro-abortion ones, mainly, especially pro-abortion Democrats) and the Wrong Sort (pro-life ones, especially the ones who say you can't be Catholic and pro-abortion).

Now Time has gotten into the debate:

The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church traditionally couch even the harshest disagreements in decorous, ecclesiastical language. But it didn't take a decoder ring to figure out what Rome-based Archbishop Raymond Burke meant in a late-September address when he charged Boston Cardinal Seán O'Malley with being under the influence of Satan, "the father of lies."

Burke's broadside at O'Malley was inspired by the Cardinal's decision to permit and preside over a funeral Mass for the late Senator Ted Kennedy. And it has set the Catholic world abuzz. Even more than protests over the University of Notre Dame's decision to invite President Barack Obama to speak, disputes over the Kennedy funeral have brought into the open an argument that has been roiling within American Catholicism. The debate nominally centers on the question of how to deal with politicians who support abortion rights. Burke and others who believe a Catholic's position on abortion trumps all other teachings have faced off against those who take a more holistic view of the faith. But at the core, the divide is over who decides what it means to be Catholic.[...]

The American hierarchy has been divided before, most recently in the 1990s by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's argument that abortion is not the only issue in the "seamless garment of life" that Catholics are called to promote. But the current debate, which is expected to surface again when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) holds its general meeting later this month, is the bitterest yet. A minority faction of bishops had hoped Pope Benedict XVI would lead the way in punishing those who dissent from church teaching. His preference for avoiding the political fray has both frustrated them and emboldened them to act on their own.

You see, if you read the rest, the way that Time is setting this up: in one corner, the mild-mannered Cardinal O'Malley, who is "holistic" enough to be quiet about abortion (which isn't, to give the cardinal his due, actually true) and to let the pro-abortion Kennedy family essentially take over a Catholic Funeral Mass and use it to lobby for socialized health care which, back then, was supposed to include free abortions for everybody; in the other, the pugilistic Archbishop Burke who fits the media template of the "anti-abortion" bully, and who is embarrassing his colleagues in America and in Rome by insisting over and over that Catholics who drool over the prospect of more and more dead unborn babies aren't "holistic" anything--they're putting themselves outside the Church by their heretical pro-abortion beliefs.

And Time then, in this final paragraph, coyly suggests that Barack Obama's idea of a Good Catholic is the one that will prevail:

There are other signs that the word has gone forth, at least for now. In years past, the annual Red Mass held the Sunday before the U.S. Supreme Court's term opens has been so heavily steeped in pro-life rhetoric that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg now declines to attend. This year's service, however, featured a homily by the new chair of the bishop's pro-life committee that included only the subtlest of references to abortion. More striking was the image of Biden taking Communion without incident.

Most striking? I'd call it most shameful, myself--but then I'm over in Archbishop Burke's corner.

Well, mostly. I do, respectfully, disagree with the good archbishop about whether Senator Kennedy should have had a funeral Mass. But the fact that this Mass was used as an occasion for grandstanding by shameless pro-abortion Catholic family members and friends is an unfortunate reality, one which, moreover, should have been prudently forestalled.

But otherwise, I can see that the wisdom of Archbishop Burke has foreseen the inevitable outcome of this particular culture war: that the media would begin to beat the "good Catholic/bad Catholic" drum, and insist that "good Catholics" are the ones who vote to poison, dismember, or behead unborn human children--but in a "holistic" way, of course; while "bad Catholics" are the ones like Archbishop Burke, who embarrass everybody by insisting that Hell is real, and that Catholics who approve of the wholesale murders of unborn human beings are risking spending eternity in its unquenchable fire.