My Spacebar Is Now Stuck in My Head...

after repeatedly banging...

Drudge linked to a Newsweek article with the following statement:

In truth, though, Obama's pragmatic approach to divisive policy (his notion that we should acknowledge the good faith underlying opposing viewpoints) and his social-justice agenda reflect the views of American Catholic laity much more closely than those vocal bishops and pro-life activists.

The page header for the article provocatively reads "Is Obama More Catholic than the Pope?"

I face this problem with adjectives all the time, and it's something of a curse within academic fields. In secular, anthropological terminology, reporters get confused by how they should use the adjective "Catholic." The article would seem to favor an interpretation in which the word "Catholic" describes some kind of collective, majority viewpoint among people identifying themselves as "Catholic." If most Catholics think X, then X must be a "Catholic" trait.

The problem is, of course, that when these Catholics think X, they aren't necessarily thinking it as Catholics. They are most likely thinking X as Americans, or as materialists, or as confused individuals.

This is an understandable enough definition if, say, you are trying to cordon off a field of study based on identity politics. You can waste whole classes just by asking students to try to determine where we should make distinctions between British and American literature, or what makes a feminist author, or whether there is such a thing as a gay text as opposed to a straight text. The reason this takes so much time is that there is no real authority to determine any of these cultural boundaries.

Not so with the Church. There is an authority to determine "mere Catholicism" if you will...but the problem here becomes tautological. People can't recognize the authority because they don't recognize the authority. Or is it that the don't because they can't?

I suddenly feel like I'm about to be launched into a Jim Henson skit...

UPDATE: I actually hadn't finished reading the article when I made this post. I just finished the article, and I can tell you that keys Z-M and the entire numpad are now permanently imbedded in my face. I'm sorry, Isabel, I think I just ruined our wedding pictures.

Here's perhaps the most aggravating line of the whole article:

That attitude has resulted in some heinous decisions. Most famously, in the lead up to the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" in 1968, an advisory body of theologians and laity empaneled by the pope advised that the church should reverse its position on birth control and concede that the issue should be a question for morality and for science. But authority—not truth, not love—prevailed: Pope Paul VI, listening to the advice of Wojtyla, disagreed with the majority of these advisers, who had voted 69 to 10 for change, fretting that to change this position would weaken his authority.

I'm sorry...just copying and pasting that has brought up some bile in my throat...I'm going to have to excuse myself from the computer...