Anthony Albanese is a Catholic.

Down the Eastern seaboard, the three state premiers, Dominic Perrottet (NSW), Daniel Andrews (Victoria) and Peter Malinauskas (SA) are Catholics.

There are many other high-profile Catholics at ministerial level and as opposition leaders.

Others, like Queensland Premier, Anastacia Palaszczuk attended a Catholic school.

Given that Catholics make up only a fifth to a quarter of the Australian population, they seem to be overrepresented right now.

That could change quickly.

But federal politics has had a run of Catholic or Catholic-educated leaders, including Liberal prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott, Nationals Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, and Labor Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

Just to list their names makes it blindingly obvious that they are men (almost all men) with very different values.

They are not only spread across the political parties, but within the parties, they occupy very different places on the ideological spectrum.

Turnbull and Abbott are prime examples of deeply different values on matters like climate change and same-sex marriage, within one party.

If you look a little deeper, it is also clear that their adherence to orthodox, institutional Catholicism varies too.

That should not be surprising given the decline of Catholic church adherence in the wider community.

As only 10 per cent of Catholics are regular church attenders, it would be surprising if attendance by Catholic politicians was much different.

As more Catholics depart from official church proclamations, it would surprise if some Catholic politicians didn't too; but when it happens in the public eye, as it did recently over the Thorburn affair with Daniel Andrews and Archbishop Peter Comensoli, it is newsworthy.

All these facts together make for an interesting relationship between church leaders, who have many different political interests to pursue with government and political leaders of the same faith.

They can try to utilise the relationship during campaigns and policy debates, or they can be embarrassed by them if they appear to be neglecting church teaching.

It also raises questions for the political leaders themselves, whose faith can give them the inside running with church leaders and with some Catholic voters during election campaigns.

During the recent federal election campaign, for instance, there was plenty of mutual cosying up between Catholic church leaders and the then Labor Opposition.

Their faith can also be an embarrassment for political leaders at times when they would prefer not to be too aligned with the official church, for example when the latter is in disrepute over institutional responses to child sexual abuse or central to tricky policy debates such as education funding.

The relationship is becoming more complicated in recent times. Continue reading

These groups should prepare for the possibility of censorship and organize effective countermeasures, they said.

"You might not know the hour nor the day you will be censored," Joshua D. Holdenreid, vice president and executive director of the California-based Napa Legal Institute, said at a roundtable on internet censorship.

Holdenreid said those involved in public debates "need to plan ahead and assume that if they are a religious organization or faith-based organization operating in the public square and focused on an issue that's related to pro-life (topics), marriage, sexuality, Christian anthropology, they should just assume that they will eventually run afoul of these vague and arbitrary terms and conditions that exist with these Big Tech platforms."

The Ethics and Public Policy Project (EPPC), a D.C. think tank that aims to apply "the Judeo-Christian tradition to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics," hosted the Aug. 26 roundtable "How Big Tech Censors Religious Voices, and How to Fight Back."

The roundtable follows years of debate and discussion about how major technology and media companies treat some religious voices.

The most likely to suffer, Holdenreid said, aren't necessarily organizations running soup kitchens or homeless shelters, but those who are "weighing in on the most important cultural issues" and "speaking the truth about certain issues that doesn't align with what folks in Silicon Valley think should be appropriate for the digital public square."

His organization, the Napa Legal Institute, provides legal and financial education to faith-based non-profits on corporate, tax, and philanthropic issues.

Another roundtable speaker, EPPC president Ryan T. Anderson, saw one of his books delisted from Amazon in February 2021.

The book, "When Harry Became Sally," offers a philosophical and moral critique of transgender advocates' claims.

Anderson said his book ranked highly on bestseller lists and was listed for sale on Amazon for three years.

In removing his book, he charged, the company did not follow its own procedures, such as contacting the author and publisher first to notify them and attempt to reach a solution.

He also questioned Amazon's claim that the book violated its content policy.

"Well, how did the book not violate the content policy for the first three years?" he asked. "I didn't go back and rewrite anything."

The book's title refers to a popular 1989 movie "When Harry Met Sally," which dramatized an argument that men and women are so different that they can't just be friends.

"Whereas today the argument is that men and women are interchangeable and that the concept of male and female is on a spectrum," said Anderson, who is also the John Paul II teaching fellow in social thought at the University of Dallas.

Those who have not read the book, Anderson suggested, might see him as "some bomb-throwing bigot who wrote a book, making fun of transgender people" which in their view might justify a company like Amazon refusing to sell "hate speech."

Anderson characterized his arguments as measured and careful. He warned that policies that silence the voices of writers like him encourage more radical voices to see moderation as a failure.

"It silences reasonable voices and then it radicalizes more extreme voices, which would have a really, really bad polarizing effect," he said. Continue reading

• Kevin J. Jones is a senior staff writer with Catholic News Agency. He was a recipient of a 2014 Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship.

"There's something very, very wrong when so many people who claim to be religious act as if they have to hide out, as if their understanding of things couldn't support daylight," Marilynne Robinson said Friday during the Trinity Forum livestream event, "Story, Culture, & the Common Good."

The event was the latest entry in the Trinity Forum's schedule of online events aimed at creating virtual spaces for engaging life's deep questions in a faith context during the pandemic.

Referencing the many times when she's been asked whether she was afraid to write about Christianity for a broader, secular audience, the novelist said, "I've had no problem with that, zero!"

"I think one of the strangest things that happens is that many people who consider themselves Christians consider themselves strangers in the world, in the sense that if people found out what they really thought or believed, they'd be ridiculed," she added.

Robinson's books make no attempt to disguise her love for and fluency with theology, which shows itself in the deeply religious lives of many of her characters, such as Gilead'sReverend John Ames.

Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her forthcoming novel, Jack, continues with the story of Ames' prodigal son, John Ames Broughton.

Unreasonable suspicions of interactions with the broader world, Robinson argued Friday, cause Christians to "restrict their own work, their own imaginations, because they're afraid."

Holding up her own career as a test of what happens when a Christian artist resists those fears, she said, "I think I have been as genuinely and fairly read and reviewed as any writer that I know."

Robinson also weighed in on the contours of a current cultural moment marked by the pandemic and a nationwide reckoning on racial injustice.

"I've never seen such crazy times in my life, but I do think the balance is probably on the side of the restoration of American democracy," Robinson said, adding that democracy is "the only way we can possibly honor the fact of the brilliance, the importance of every human life."

Conceding that "the government itself seems to be in pretty bad shape," the author said she sees signs in movements to combat racial injustice that the "populace seems to be in pretty good shape" and she believes "we have a good possibility of having it all work out."

"We're just living, in a kind of condensed form, human life … people have always had to deal with pandemics, plagues… people have always dealt with unrest," she said. "We're not habituated to it because we've been very fortunate, but that doesn't mean we're exempt from what people have lived through time out of mind."

Fear and a "tendency to condescend horribly to one another" have been destructive forces at a time that instead calls for a "discipline of generosity," the author said.

Humans have an "unlimited capacity for generosity," she explained. "That means that in any work you do at all - that certainly means any artistic work you do - we have that capacity to create society around us by acts of generosity towards the society, and of course the repayment of that sort of choice is very clear… you make the society you want to live in."

History, Robinson argued, could be providing models for moving society forward.

Too often, however, people are approaching history with either uncritical nostalgia - "that's when people were right-minded" - or blanket condescension - those who "existed with evil" must have been evil themselves. Continue reading

• The analysis or comments in this article do not necessarily reflect the view of CathNews.

The separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution, novel for its time, is a good example of this theo-political balancing act: No single person can be trusted to wield power; therefore, power must be shared among many and policed by a legal system of checks and balances.

Yet our founders also recognized that the U.S. Constitution is but one part of a larger whole called the American political economy.

As I have previously noted in this space, while the United States does have a single document called "The Constitution," with an uppercase T and C, the American system also presumes nonconstitutional values and customs that are just as vital, if not more vital to the health of our democracy.

Among these indispensable customs are decorum and civility in public argument, which largely distinguish a polity from a mere mob.

A presupposition of our political economy is that reasonable people can and do disagree about important public matters and that they will do so through spirited yet civil public argument.

Americans have not always been civil or decorous with one another, of course; but until recently this was the minimal expectation, and when one failed to meet it, some social penalty was often applied.

Yet the words of the previous paragraph now seem as quaint as a telegram.

The public discourse has devolved to such an extent that the value of civility itself is now openly questioned as often as its conventions are routinely violated.

"You talk about somebody that's a loser," President Trump recently said about a journalist.

"She doesn't know what the hell she's doing…. But she's very nasty. And she shouldn't be. She shouldn't be. You've got to treat the White House and the office of the presidency with respect."

That last bit is true.

But the president should be treated with respect because all people should be treated with respect.

That is the value that justifies civility.

Embedded in the very notion of democracy, of a free and fair society, is the principle that we are all worthy of respect or none of us is.

When challenged about his lack of decorum, Mr. Trump responds by telling us that he is the victim of slander and is therefore justified in employing a bombastic style.

People hit him, so he hits them back, his handlers tell us.

Yet that is the moral reasoning of a 12-year-old.

Few parents would accept the excuse "Everybody else is doing it" from their children.

So why do we accept this justification from the president?

Why do some offer it in defense of his actions?

I am well aware that Mr. Trump is not the only demagogue in the country.

A quick glance at my Twitter feed is enough to establish that sad fact.

But Mr. Trump is the only one who happens to be president of the United States and, as such, has a greater duty than most to deploy his rhetoric with prudence, decorum and moral clarity, an extra-constitutional but nonetheless essential duty of his office, one he consistently fails to execute.

While Mr. Trump is far from the only culprit in the demise of the civic discourse, he is the most visible; and, whether we like it or not, he establishes the standard for others.

As we used to say growing up on Cape Cod, "a fish rots from the head."

It is unlikely that Mr. Trump will change his ways.

But we can—if we want to.

I fear that too many of us, while loudly complaining about the polarization and coarseness in our public discourse, quietly rather enjoy it, even if only subconsciously.

Deep down in places we don't like to talk about, we seem to get a thrill from the politics of destruction. Continue reading

• Matt Malone, S.J., is the President and Editor in Chief of America Media.
• Image: America

Cultivating that relationship with God is the purpose of faith and the mission of the Catholic Church.

Yet, this can be quite a challenge in an atmosphere that looks suspiciously upon faith, which cannot be measured, tested or quantified. Great advances in technology, science and human progress seem to have reduced faith, in the eyes of many, to something arcane or irrelevant.

Ironically, compounding this relegation of faith to an obscure corner of American life is the success of a prominent Catholic, the late President John F. Kennedy.

In 1960, as Sen. Kennedy was making his bid for the White House, he needed to convince American voters that a Catholic could be an acceptable choice. He took his case to 300 Protestant ministers in Houston, where he declared, "But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured. ... So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again — not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I believe in."

As history shows, Kennedy was successful. But as Archbishop Charles Chaput explains, "His speech left a lasting mark on American politics. It was sincere, compelling, articulate — and wrong. Continue reading

Image: Lancaster Online

Fr Allan Wolfe is pastor of San Juan Bautista Catholic Church in Lancaster. He is also a correspondent for Lancaster Newspapers Inc.

The question is especially urgent today when so many divisive issues, including contraception mandates and same-sex marriage, complicate the nation's politics. Economic concerns still dominate the public's interest, but it is these hot-button issues that get people's blood pressure rising.

The question is urgent for another reason, too. As John Allen demonstrates in his article, the recent appointments of three gung-ho new archbishops — Baltimore's William Lori, Denver's Samuel Aquila and San Francisco's Salvatore Cordileone — could signal a trend in episcopal appointments. "In the teeth of a perceived war on religion in America, the church is sending clear signals that it has no intention of backing down," Allen writes.

NCR does not believe the church should "back down." The church's involvement in the public square is vital. The church's voice has been raised consistently on behalf of the poor and the marginalized, the undocumented and the unborn. The question is whether the "culture-warrior" model of the new trio of archbishops is the right model for such involvement.

Recently, three other American bishops evidenced a different approach. Continue reading

Image: Bilgrimage