VIDEO: Catholic and Republican

It’s a good thing for many Church leaders that there isn’t a bishops’ primary going on right now.

As the primary season continues to play out, the sense of outrage continues to increase. The burning cause of all this anger is the sense of betrayal felt by authentic Republicans — and by “authentic,” we mean pro-life and pro-conservative fiscal types. That was the image, at least, that was portrayed of the GOP by the GOP during the Reagan era: lower taxes, better economic might and a leadership faithful to God and appointing judges protective of the unborn. There would be no common ground sought after or found with liberal tax-and-spend, anti-life Democrats.

On the Republican side. true conservatives feel betrayed. So we reached out to some true conservatives on this week’s “Mic’d Up”: Ambassador Alan Keyes, journalist Ben Shapiro and popular blogger Matt Walsh to have them gauge the anger and outrage on the conservative side.

The “no compromise” image of the past has gone bye-bye. The current-day reality? A leadership content to let those authentic Republicans die on the vine as they lead their party more and more to the left. Why are GOP leaders becoming more and more liberal — certainly on values issues and more often than not economic issues as well?

Because they sense the center-left tilt of the country. The country is more and more comfortable with sexual immorality, abortion, divorce and remarriage; you name it, they’re pretty much down with it. And they don’t want to lose their power, so they go along with the voters.

Republican leadership seems to have taken a page out of the U.S. bishops’ playbook. And the way there are huge numbers of disaffected GOP voters, there is an equal if not greater intensity in various Catholic quarters owing to the same sense of betrayal. Faithful U.S. Catholics are feeling lied to, mistrusting of their bishops, and are growing more and more fed up with what they see as a sellout of the Faith on the part of the leadership.

What we see with shrinking minorities in both theologically orthodox and politically conservative circles is a parallel track of justified anger. Faithful Catholics are fed up with the constant compromise on the part of the leaders with the secular culture, liberal Protestantism, socialist-minded politicians largely centered in the Democratic Party and its allied institutions. They feel betrayed time and time again by an out-of-touch collection of bishops comprised part 25 percent liberal and 75 percent wimp.

On the political side of the fence, a rebellion broke out, which was quickly subdued, called the Tea Party. That was the warning shot that political conservatives fired at leaders six years ago. Now it has re-appeared in the form of an all-out revolution that will see anti-establishment Trump or Cruz seize the nomination while leaders plot and scheme a way to make sure that doesn’t happen. Good luck with that.

In the Church, things don’t work quite that way. We are hierarchical, not democratic. However, for leaders to think that the equivalent of a Catholic underground Tea Party has not and is not forming would be a huge miscalculation. A resistance movement is finding its footing among faithful Catholics — and it is long overdue.

Catholics were raised to trust their leaders, as we would hope we could, but a clericalism abused that hope and trust, and now what we are left with is the abysmal situation of not being able to trust anything that is said. This encourages within any bishops an immediate irritation when faithful Catholics demand accountability, feeling as though they don’t have to be accountable to anyone.

We are at an almost unbelievable impasse in the Church these days, and the only way to solve it is for the bishops to understand that the faithful laity are deeply wounded, hurt and disenfranchised. They are deeply suspicious of almost anything the bishops do or say.

This is why media apostolates like ours and others have arisen from seemingly nowhere. It’s why more and more Catholics have turned to parish shopping, starting their own schools or home-schooling, abandoning the LAtin rite and attending at other rites, dropping out of the mainstream Catholic life and becoming more “Tea Party” minded in their thinking and analysis.

This is a situation that the US bishops need to step up and admit and own.

They need to publicly disavow the wickedness and ignorance of previous bishops and their ill-fated decisions and do a major course correction.

Like republican leadership, Church leadership has spent entirely too much time stoning the sheep while making nice nice with the wolves.

It’s a good thing for many Church leaders that there isn’t a Bishop’s primary going on right now.

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