Recent policies by President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats have made such opposing without denouncing very difficult.  Simply stated: it seems to me that so many of the policies that the President has been following, or allowing, are undermining the very structures of our democracy.  In a recent article in The Nation, William Grieder offers an analysis of what I, and so many other liberals (yes, I’m not afraid of that word), have been feeling.  So in this blog, I’m going to turn it over to Grieder:

Political events of the past two years have delivered a  profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled and captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of major media.

What the capitalist system wants is more — more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct unless goverment intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of goverment interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections. Many elected representatives are implicitly enlisted in the cause.

The administration of Barack Obama has been a crushing disappointment for those of us who hoped he would be different. It turns out that Obama is a more conventional and limited politician than advertised, more right-of-center than his soaring rhetoric suggested. Most Congressional Democrats, likewise, proved weak and incoherent, unreliable defenders of their supposed values or most loyal constituencies. They call it pragmatism. I call it surrender.

Such policies of surrender are preferring capitalism over democracy.  Capitalism is moral only when it is democratic.  If it’s not democratic, it must be opposed, and maybe  denounced.

Does "trickle down" work in the Catholic Church?

That’s one of the statements that echoed in my mind and feelings as I flew home from the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America, in Cleveland, June 10-13.

This image of a “spiritual Reaganomics” operating within the Catholic Church was offered in the Plenary Address by Catherine Clifford and Richard Gaillardetz to the over 400 Catholic theologians assembled from around the USA and Canada.

A  Reaganomics of spiritual truth and beliefs, the two speakers pointed out,  claims that truth is delivered from above – from God’s revelation and then through the bishops, especially the Bishop of Rome.   It then is to “trickle down” to the ordinary faith.  In this understanding, the primary role of theologians is to help it trickle.

Such an understanding of how things work, Clifford and Gaillardetz made clear, does not conform to the nature of the Catholic Church, especially as the church as been understood in the Second Vatican Council. In their lecture, which they presented as a verbally danced duet, they gathered, refocused, and recharged what has been the pretty standard “ecclesiology’ (understanding of the church) that Catholic theologians have advanced since the explosive breakthroughs of the Second Vatican Council:

• That the beliefs of the Catholic Church are to be worked out through the collaborative and dialogical mining of three sources: the people of God (or the sensus fidelium – the sense of the faithful), the bishops (with the Bishop of Rome providing the unifying center), and theologians.
• While each of these sources of Catholic belief have different roles within the Church, none of them can be placed “above” the other.
• Each of these sources – bishops, theologians, people — has to “receive” (that means, listen to) what the others are saying.
• If any of the three sources has a certain “primacy” it is the “the people of God.” Therefore, as Clifford and Gaillardetz stressed, the exercise of the bishops’ and Pope’s teaching office must begin with listening carefully and respectfully to the “sense of the faithful.”   The role of the theologians is “to help the bishops listen carefully.”

But the problem that is rankling the Catholic Church today – and one of the primary reasons why a lot of people  are opting to move out of the Church – is that this leadership of the Catholic Church – yes, the bishops and yes, especially the Bishop of Rome – are NOT LISTENING. Clifford and Gaillardetz pointed out what most of their audience of theologians knew only too well:  many bishops in the US look on theologians with “a presumption of suspicion” that theologians are up to no good and are the primary causes of unrest in the church.

So the conclusion to Clifford and Gaillardetz’s presentation was that theologians, as well as ordinary Catholics in the pews, have to carry out the responsibility given to everyone in their baptism: the responsibility of being prophets.   If theologians and ordinary Catholics always have to listen carefully and respectfully to the bishops and Pope, they sometimes have to speak up and resist honestly and humbly.

In the present state of turmoil and confusion in the Catholic church, that responsibility of speaking up weighs more heavily than ever on the shoulders of Catholics and especially of theologians.  The job description of the theologian is to be a researcher and a teacher – but also to be a prophet.

The problem is that so often when theologians exercise their jobs as prophets and speak up to the bishops and Pope, they get into trouble, even lose their jobs – especially if they are priests or religious.

The power structures today in the Catholic Church do not correspond to the nature of the Church as a community of co-responsibility between people, theologians, bishops.

If the church, as is often said, “is not a democracy” (I’m not so sure about that), neither should it be the monarchy or oligarchy that it seems to be today.

In a recent THE NATION article, Harvard Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig, lays out compelling evidence for the following conclusion about the state of our democracy due to the state of our Congress:

“Rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution ‘dependent on the People,’ Congress has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash.”

“The point is simple, if extraordinarily difficult for those of use proud of our traditions to accept: this democracy no longer works. Its central player, Congress, has been captured. Corrupted. Controlled by an economy of influence disconnected from the democracy. Congress has developed a dependency foreign to the framers’ design. Corporate campaign spending, now liberated by the Supreme Court, will only make that dependency worse. ‘A dependence’ not, as the federalist Papers celebrated it, ‘on the People’ but a dependency upon interests that have conspired to produce a world in which policy gets sold.”

And why is Congress so vulnerable to such dependence on corporate money? Because it is so expensive to get elected to Congress! Here is the noxious chain of dependency: It costs an incredible amount of money to be elected and to stay elected. Right now, there is only one primary source for such money: corporations and the vested economic elite. Therefore, political survival requires dependence on corporate economic power.

So if, as Lessig states succinctly “dependency betrays democracy” and if dependency is rooted in our campaign system, the logical solution is: “to enact an idea proposed by a Republican (Teddy Roosevelt) a century ago: citizen-funded elections.”

Voila! — Therefore, we need to support the “Fair Elections Now Act” sponsored in the house by Democrat John Larson and Republican Walter Jones, and in the Senate by Democrats Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter.

To restore democracy in Congress we have to remove the dependency in Congress.