Catholic in all but Catholicism

By Diogenes ( articles ) | May 11, 2003

Boston-area Democrats feel widespread disaffection with the state and national Party leadership, according to a telephone poll conducted by the Boston Globe. 65 percent of local Democrats have voted exclusively or primarily for Republican candidates in the past four years, according to the poll data, up from 58 percent in 1999. 76 percent of the respondents support the total abolition of Social Security, and 61 percent believe think the Party should rethink its position on woman's suffrage. Lynda Bartolini of Brookline said, "When my daughter asks me why Bill Clinton isn't breaking rocks in the federal pen, I don't what to tell her."

OK, I made that up. But it points to the flaw in a poll of Boston-area Catholics that the Globe reports on this morning. Catholics who don't believe what the Church believes are, for that very reason, not Catholics. Not that the figures given by the Globe on the proportions of dissent are implausible -- in fact, they're congruent in nature and number with the dissent registered in a survey of the priests of England and Wales published last month.

As St. Athanasius remarked on a similar occasion, there's a problem here somewhere.