Over at the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Hahn speculates about the succession in Chicago and manages to trash the memory of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin along the way.
He and like-minded conservatives are worried that the legacy of Bernardin sounds an awful lot like what Pope Francis is saying. They should be worried. Their attempts to smear the "seamless garment" approach to public issues, then and now, reflects a desire to prioritize the Church's teachings on specific issues at the expense of grasping the whole of the Church's teachings. You saw the same dynamic at work in Professor Robert George's articulation of five "non-negotiable" issues for the Church when, in fact, all the Church's teachings are non-negotiable. Reduce religion to ethics. Then reduce ethics to legalisms. Then reduce legalism to politics. It is the neo-con way. How depressing to find this canard manifesting itself in yet another generation of Catholic writers.
