Will the Bishops Protect Us? by David Carlin

By David Carlin, The Catholic Thing, March 4, 2022

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America and, most recently, Three Sexual Revolutions: Catholic, Protestant, Atheist.

During the presidential campaign of 2016, TV news coverage showed Hillary Clinton speaking at a number of black Protestant churches – and speaking not in the more or less secular church basement, but in the sanctuary itself, apparently during Sunday services.  This reminded me that we would never find anything like this in a Catholic church.

This Catholic unwillingness to welcome political speeches in the sanctuary can be explained by at least three main factors:

First, the dignity of the Mass itself.  We feel that it would be, quite literally, a profanation if so secular a thing as partisan politics were allowed to intrude upon the most sacred of our sacred rites. …

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