O'Malley's Church: The "Catholicism" of a 2016 Presidential Candidate

(May 1, 2013)
Back in 2009 when The Archdiocese of Washington, DC threatened to withdraw from providing social services if the DC city council passed a same-sex marriage law, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley told DC-politics lover Mark Plotkin on WTOP radio, "That's not the Catholic church I know."

The governor was joined in his bashing by Virginia's then chief-executive, Tim Kaine, another Catholic, who likened ADW's digging-in to "picking up one's marbles and going home." Kaine added that it might "set a bad example."

O'Malley and Kaine were being quite sincere. I believe that both were genuinely perplexed by an official Catholic refusal to compromise for the sake of a partnership with government. Neither could comprehend a church not overlooking moral principles for the sake of the poor, moreover moral principles that many regard as esoteric and outdated.

Martin O'Malley is one of those from whom God needs to preserve us if only because he has aimed to be President of The United States since he was five years old. Is it a coincidence that the woman he married is the daughter of a prominent Maryland Democrat?

To make himself serious Democratic candidate material for possible 2016 or 2020 campaigns, he has gotten gay marriage legalized in Maryland. He has also paid tribute to the environmental gods by pushing through a costly wind-farm program that will be subsidized by all Maryland taxpayers and utility customers.

Most O'Malley enthusiasts are liberal, affluent suburbanites of Baltimore and Washington DC. They are gleeful at gunowners' anger. They don't mind, don't notice and even applaud being nickled and dimed for utopian fancies and propitiating nature's deities. They would gloat if rural Marylanders -- those rednecks anyway -- were crushed under the costs of replacing septic systems, a (nother) threat to The Chesapeake Bay. O'Malley has had his eye on tony tanks for years and I wouldn't be surprised if, as president, he made a federal matter out of them.

Can't afford to keep your car emitting rosy-smelling exhaust? O'Malley's Maryland will suspend your registration.

As for the Catholic church that Martin O'Malley knows, I know all about it. As O'Malley did, I grew up in Washington DC's Maryland suburbs. We both went to Catholic grade schools. O'Malley went to Gonzaga, the Jesuit high school near the U.S. Capitol. I went to Georgetown Prep, the Jesuit high school that fled from the city to Rockville, MD in 1919. We became classmates pursuing a Politics B.A. at The Catholic University of America where Ed Gillespie and Terry McAuliffe passed through a few years before we did.

I do not know Martin O'Malley, but I do remember him. He was the rare student who appeared wearing a suit. He was already a rising political star, working for Gary Hart's 1984 campaign. I also remember him as being the only Politics major other than myself to be inducted in 1986 into the International Honor Society in Social Science.

Later, I thought that it was highly funny that the serious, well-tailored guy in Dr. Norman Ornstein's class led an Irish rock band called O'Malley's March. But of course sitting at the feet of Ornstein or reading Walter Oleszek isn't what gets one elected.
Despite our common background O'Malley and I ended up having two very different understandings of what the Catholic Church is.

My Catholic Church is a continuation of the church that Jesus Christ, God and Man, instituted 2000 years ago. Central is its identity as the church in which Christ becomes really present in the Eucharist. The most important thing that ever happens in The Catholic Church is the changing of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood.

It is a church that reminds me that I, that all of us, are sinners. The first thing that Catholics do at Mass is acknowledge their sinfulness. However it is a church that also proclaims the good news of God's liberal forgiveness to those who seek it and repent.

Our response to God's love for us is Charity, a word that has, unfortunately, acquired the very narrow meaning of materially helping the materially poor. Charity means love of God. Without it, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, everything else, including faith itself and feeding the hungry, is for nought.

A few months before he retired, Pope Benedict XVI reminded Catholics that charitable activity must be “managed in conformity with the demands of the Church’s teaching and the intentions of the faithful.”(1) In January 2013, Benedict further stated, “We must exercise a critical vigilance and at times refuse funding and collaborations that, directly or indirectly, favor actions or projects that are at odds with Christian anthropology.”

We are charitable to others because we love God. St. Francis of Assissi loved animals because they were creatures of the God he loved, not because they were cute and less demanding and less risky than people. Love of God and awareness of our fallen state drive us to examine our consciences, to acquire wisdom, to build civilizations, to be creative, to correct and even to punish others, to care for the body out of care for the soul, so that both may hear the Good News of salvation.

In my Catholic church the moral issue of the age is the right to life from conception to natural death. Without a right to life and a culture of life, that is, a culture that does not solve problems by ending or frustrating life, all other rights are meaningless.

In Martin O'Malley's church, some "Catholics" go so far as to declare that rights include abortion and gay marriage.

Church Deviant
To understand the church that Martin O'Malley knows, one has simply to understand left-wing political thinking. Throughout The Twentieth Century its miasma rose from the statist and Marxist soils of Europe and thickened to the point where in the 1960s and '70s, it nearly smothered, not just officially communist countries, but the entire world.

The poison was odorless and colorless. Special oxygen tanks and masks of background, spirit and intellect were required to detect and avoid inhaling it. People of last century's middle decades breathed in the poison, became adjusted to it, saw it as the normal atmosphere.

Being no more likely than the rest to think critically or to sense change, bishops, priests and Catholic academics were no more protected and resistant. For many Catholics, lay and clergy, the authentic church became the one that had made its mission the pursuit of stock, liberal social-activism causes: "peace," equality of outcome, endless entitlements, paternalistic government.

Congressman Henry Hyde's characterization of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as "the Democratic Party at prayer" could only have been more precise if he had included the adjectives "liberal" or "radical."

Many Catholic clergy fully embraced the left's agenda. Party affiliation being like the Thanksgiving Day menu, others simply could not see that the old Democrats, progressive but rooted in Judeo-Christian religous faith and values, had been supplanted by a new crop who sees religion not as a partner but as a pestilence to be contained. This is a generation lately typifed by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Martin O'Malley himself.

This is why throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, the U.S. bishops, organized as a national body, had plenty to say about racism and a nuclear threat and spoke of abortion merely as another thread in a weave of a "seamless garment" along with capital punishment. It is only within the past few years that Catholic leaders have reprimanded pro-abortion Catholic politicians and have urged Catholic voters to consider candidates' positions on moral issues .

Like their secular counterparts, Catholic liberals had contempt for tradition. Things of the past were inadequate if not downright evil. Therefore they were to be discarded in the name of progress.

The Catholic left also had that liberal need to feel superior. For some this meant outdoing Jesus Christ in the mercy department by preaching and practicing conditionless forgiveness and therefore reducing incarnation and church to absurdity. For most it meant intellectual snobbery, not inflated by the discipline of Latin or by the authentic reason of Thomas Aquinas --That was all bad old stuff -- but by the so-called progressives' newly hatched pseudo-intellectualism and by avant-garde theologians out to deconstruct and protestantize Catholicism.

Yet despite the smugness and the need to be convinced of their superior intelligence, the Catholic left also suffered from what is called liberal self-loathing. Actually it is not self loathing so much as it is loathing of one's own kind. These people were always ready believe evil of their church.

Fourthly, no surprise since American liberalism was, at its height ultimately nourished by communism: liberal Catholics were Marxist in their outlook. They divided humanity into classes, usually along socioeconomic, racial lines. There were classes who could do no wrong and deserved everything even unto abortion on demand. There were classes who could do no right and deserved nothing. The latter were white Catholics, especially the less educated ones and those outside of cities.

The dominance of liberal Catholics as the establishment for almost four decades had the following disastrous results:

1) The extensive loss of blue-collar white and hispanic Catholics. Such are people of sense who relate best to concrete things, sacramentals, and who live out their faith by following rules and performing actions such as reciting formulaic prayers. The progressives denigrated devotions such as the Rosary, Eucharistic adoration and processions with statues as trappings of an outmoded "immigrant" church. These were no longer necessary because the once-boring Mass was now made more interesting by egomaniacal priests strutting around the altars, adding their embellishments to the prayers, pausing the liturgy to insert witty remarks.

In place of prayer and action, the smarties with Ph.D's. blew out pretty bubbles such as "evangelization" over the faithful and urged them to reflect, to find the answers for themselves. The problem is, most Catholics don't want to find the answers for themselves. No matter what ecclesiastical councils or evangelizers wish, everyone is not cut out to be a theologian or someone who ponders and reflects. Many just want to be told what to do.

Catholicism has become mainly an urban professional faith. The less educated, blue-collar Catholics who were, in effect, abandoned, have become like the Deltas and Gammas of Brave New World in that they can't conceive of being anything other than what they are. Because the church is no longer a part of many such folks' lives, it isn't there to encourage them to better themselves, to keep them from meth and tattoos.

2) The phony vocation shortage
Granted, Baby Boomers were less likely than prior or posterior generations to be priest or nun material, however the vocation shortage that we Catholics heard about in the 1970s and two decades thereafter turned out to be, in Omaha Archbishop Elden Curtiss's words, "artificial and contrived."

In a 1995 editorial, Curtiss explained that "the vocation crisis is precipitated by people who want to change the church's agenda."(2) Very simply, the liberals who dominated the American church also took over many seminaries. Their gatekeepers -- often feminist nuns, ex-nuns or psychologists who weren't even Catholic -- kept out candidates, or drove out seminarians, sometimes with physical violence, who assented to the church's traditions on celibacy and a male priesthood and the church's teachings on homosexuality. Then the same characters turned around and said, "See. Nobody wants to be a priest anymore because of celibacy."

Published in 2002, Michael S. Rose's Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into The Catholic Church(3) remains a classic on the subject. I was working in an office located in a seminary when I first read it. I saw exactly what Rose wrote about, even unto a seminarian watching soap operas!

As for dissenting American sisters, because they are women and because the nostalgic image of the nun that they exploit is too popular and powerful to contradict, they have gotten off very lightly following recent Vatican visitations. Their vocation shortage, too, was artificial.

The dissolution of convents was deliberate. Sisters in favor of the dissolving were then able to have their own apartments and cars, often at the order's expense. This is way more costly than women living together with one community car. Also -- and outrageously -- it takes money away from the care of aged and infirm sisters who served honorably.

Some orders possess very valuable assets. The fewer sisters there are, the bigger the pieces of the asset pie each can enjoy. When it's all about sharing the pie, who wants more community members dipping their fingers in?

And of course many nuns, infected by feminism, also thought themselves to be above the traditional roles of teaching children and working in hospitals.

Liberal clergy and nuns tend to not like dirtying their hands in parishes and other gatherings of the Catholic faithful. They prefer cushy jobs directing things.

3) The contraction of Catholic charitable organizations
It would be interesting to study how much Catholic charitable activity has shrunk over the past several decades while the size of the federal government has grown. Liberals, including the Catholic ones, really don't like private charity. It can't help everybody; therefore it's worthless and unfair. It gives people the false impression that hunger and other human problems are being solved and that there's no need to expand government.

Of course, this disdain for private charity arises from the conviction that the state should do everything and moreover that the state has the unlimited resources to do everything, a hallucination that persists even as European welfare states and the U.S. run out of money. These are the "rational" and "intelligent" people: right.

Heard of a Catholic orphanage lately? At one time American Catholic dioceses collectively operated hundreds of institutions for poor youth, teaching them "how to fish." While there was abuse at some -- probably no more abuse than there was at non-catholic institutions -- these charities, unlike government welfare, did not produce a shiftless, unskilled and foul-minded population that expects "fish," contraception and everything else to be handed to it and which repays the taxpaying benefactors with contempt.

The church still has various relief organizations with "Catholic" in their titles, but because relief draws liberals like flies, some organizations have been caught with ties to Planned Parenthood. One office was headed by a partner of a gay couple who adopted a child. As a dissenter-sister proudly boasted, “Catholic Charities in general have been the most progressive wing of the church other than the nuns.”(4)

It is to be hoped that charitable activities grounded in fidelity and reality will expand when new generations of Catholics are guided (the old ones will refuse to be) by Pope Benedict XVI's encyclicals Caritas in Veritate(5) and Deus Caritas Est (6). They are, perhaps, the two most intelligent works on charitable endeavor ever written. A quote from the latter:

"Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable.[20] The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need."

4) Catholic school students graduating from the church
The Catholic schools that Martin O'Malley and I went to, the Catholic schools of recent decades were, as they have always been, great at teaching worldly achievement, career success. On their playing fields, however, many souls have been lost.

It will be one of the long-remembered ironies in ecclesiastical history that American Catholics born between about 1957 and 1980 lapsed from the Catholic church mainly because they went to Catholic schools, in many cases from first grade right through senior year of college.

It seems that 95% of two generations of our fellows have left the church. Of the few percent who stayed, many make up a peanut gallery of ignoramuses who, while the first movement of a symphony that is the Millennial Renewal of JPII and BXVI is being played, bitch and moan loudly that it isn't John Lennon's Imagine.

By the time I reached Catholic elementary school, the progressives had scrapped The Baltimore Catechism -- the original Catholicism for Dummies -- and had replaced it with psychobabbly and unmemorable "religion" texts about discovering oneself.

Kids my age who went to Catholic high school experienced the faith-killing "Religion" curricula that Evelyn Waugh recalled encountering in his school (The Church of England was decades ahead of other faiths in self-destruction.). No apologetics were taught, no tenets of the Catholic faith. The subject matter was faith-related, but it was uncoordinated bits of this and that. I remember, in my freshman year at Georgetown Prep, studying The Book of Isaiah, a pretty micro subject for 14-year-olds. Later, and as Waugh had, I studied Church History. I also remember focusing on a lighted candle in the dark in a Comparative Religions course taught by a Jesuit novice who was, years later, caught trying to make free with one of the boarders.

Fortunately, Georgetown Prep had on its faculty, Fr. John Nicola, a great priest and one who taught Thomistic Philosophy. Likewise Catholic University, when I went up there, was adorned by the formidable Msgr. Robert Paul Mohan who taught Ethics and probably saved many an Economics and Business major's soul.

Otherwise the faculty included a priest who ridiculed the real presence and a non-Catholic who had been imported from Yale to be Heffer Professor of Philosophy. Bluffer Professor is what he was.

Rooting For Team Catholic
As I have written (7) and will write in detail elsewhere, my own faith was scathed by growing up in the hijacked church. However during the years of my unbelief (not unbelief in God but in the Catholic faith), I never missed Mass.

My apostasy was penned in by my parents' fortified Catholic household. A strong Catholic surrounding, be it a home or a civilization, can prevent total destruction in those times when faith is weak or lost. As my youth was not showered with a bounty of ever-upward career movement, marriage, children, a smooth, wide path to retirement and the grave, the embers of childhood faith, among them the parent-taught prayers at the bedside, were bellowed into reconversion by extreme disappointment.

My parents and maternal grandmother were raised in Catholic homes and schools that taught them, as the Catholic schools of my generation did not, that the Catholic faith is the truest and best. I smirk when I compare my grandmother who bet on racehorses because they had Catholic-sounding names to all the DC Catholics I've met who shrug their shoulders in so-what fashion at the faith and who readily swallow any of the bad propaganda about it. They're like people who call themselves Yankees fans but who root for the Red Sox.

But as jingoistic as the Conway/Tombak, small-town Pennsylvania Catholicism sounds, it shown forth in almost perfect charity. My father, as a soldier in World War II, without a blink, stepped right over racial lines in the segregated army to play basketball with African American troops. As she watched movies, my mother would elucidate the moral lessons in them: That's bad. That's good. That's what we want to be like. Heavily attended by people who had been touched by their greatness, my parents' funerals were like the closing scene of "It's a Wonderful Life."

They had those oxygen tanks and masks of background, spirit and intellect that I mentioned above. They also read William F. Buckley who was, I believe, the only popularly known commentator of the 1960s and '70s who wrote about how things were going wrong in the church. I remember Mom and Dad, who had studied the five proofs of God's existence in high school, screwing up their faces at my psychobabbly religion texts.

The Gray Hairetics
Fortunately the American church is well-past the heyday of liberal-agenda Catholics. They are becoming straw, overgrown by new generations of bishops, priests and laypeople whose faith has been shaped by John Paul and Benedict.

Born in 1963, Martin O'Malley is among the younger of the gray hairetics. Despite all the societal detriment that he and his ilk can cause, he is one of their rearguard, their last hurrah.

The Catholic left, however, like the political left, is not going to die quietly. Its members have seniority and such things as tenure at universities, leadership of conferences and respect among the chattering class.

As the New Evangelization is taken up and the bar for calling oneself or one's institution "Catholic" is raised, Renewal Catholics who value prayer and study will be accused of being exclusive, divisive, "holier than thou," unfeeling encyclopedias of Catholic trivia ruled by their heads instead of their hearts. Those are the cries I've always heard wherever I have witnessed skirmishes.

This already lengthy piece isn't the place to discuss evangelizing Catholic Liters. Being well aware that it is no easy task, I do not make this suggestion lightly, but the appropriate folks at the bishops' conference should be thinking up a list of minimal beliefs and practices that should be as well-known in the pews as The Our Father. Weekly Sunday Mass attendance and daily prayer shoud be requirements 1 and 2.

To those lapsed Catholics who went to Catholic schools for twelve or sixteen years, I would pose this: You spent all those years in schools affiliated with the church in which you were raised. And yet you've left that church. You must agree that something wrong happened.

Martin O'Malley in 2016
Martin O'Malley is reported to be waiting to see if Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions reemerge for 2016 as they likely will. In addition to name recognition that far exceeds the Maryland governor's, Clinton is able to make herself more things to more people.

O'Malley, because of his record built to impress the Democratic party's base, has painted himself with the tar of a liberal and will be easy to feather. On the other hand, Clinton inspires a lot of intense, personal hatred, and the Democratic party may prefer younger faces such as O'Malley's and Andrew Cuomo's to hers and Joe Biden's.

You can be sure that O'Malley, the pro-choice, gay-marriage "Catholic" will be unabashed about playing the Catholic card if he campaigns. At this writing, while he is in Israel, he is, so his flaks brag, planning to attend Mass in Bethlehem.

Like O'Malley, Biden and Cuomo are also children of the Church Deviant. If one of them or Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2016, the causes of a Culture of Life and Religious Freedom could be set back decades simply by their appointments to The Supreme and lower federal courts.
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(1) Motu Proprio “De Caritate Ministranda” (“On the service of Charity”)
(2) Archbishop Elden F. Curtiss, "Crisis in Vocations: What Crisis?" Our Sunday Visitor, October 8, 1995 as quoted in
(3) Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into The Catholic Church, Michael S. Rose, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, DC, 2002
(4) "Planned Parenthood infanticide supporter was on board of Catholic Charities: report," Ben Johnson, LifeSite News, April 8, 2013
(5) Caritas in Veritate
(6) Deus Caritas Est
(7) p. 4, Rev. Franciszek Kasaczun: a Polish Priest's Legacy, by Neal J. Conway