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PAGE 2 — The Southern Cross. November 16,1972
44 New Politics” Drove Catholics Out of Democratic Party
The following analysis of last week’s
U.S. elections was written especially for
NC News Service by one of the nation’s
best-known sociologists. Father Greeley,
author of numerous books and
magazine articles, writes a weekly
syndicated column that appears in this
newspaper.
BY FATHER ANDREW M. GREELEY
(NC News Service)
The Democratic party did not lose
the 1972 election. It continues to
control the Congress, a majority of the
state houses, and many state
legislatures.
Liberalism did not lose the 1972
election. There has been a net gain of
five or six seats by liberals in the U.S.
Senate.
The “New Politics” lost the election.
And one of the reasons it lost was that
it drove a substantial number of
Catholic voters away from the top of
theDemocratic ticket. Catholics were
still more likely to vote Democratic
than Protestants. Of the two most
Catholic states in the Union -- Rhode
Islands and Massachusetts - one was the
only state in which George McGovern
won and the other was lost by
McGovern by only a hair’s breadth. But
enough Catholics voted for Mr. Nixon
to assure his election.
However, it was not so much as
Catholics that these voters turned away
from the “New Politics” and the
self-styled “reformers.” There were no
explicitly “religious” issues in the
election. Catholic positions on abortion
and aid to parochial schools were
unimportant factors. Many Catholics
voted for Mr. Nixon because they were
part of that social and economic
segment of the population for which the
“reformers” have obvious contempt.
The “New Politics” threw Middle
American Democrats out of the party
on the grounds that it didn’t need them.
The Middle American Democrats had
their revenge, and it happened that
some of them -- indeed many of them -
were Catholics. The “New Politics”
theorists -- John Kenneth Galbraith,
Arthur Schlessinger, Frederick Dutton --
thought that a “liberal” coalition could
be put together consisting of their
intellectual colleagues, the new
technical and “helping” elites, the poor,
the nonwhite and the “women”
(meaning of course people like Bella
Abzug and Gloria Steinem) and the
“young.” Such a coalition would not
need the “labor bosses” - meaning labor
union members -- and the big city
“machines” - meaning Catholic ethnics.
How such a coalition could have
become a majority is not clear, but the
“New Politics” theorists assured
everyone that the “legions” of new
voters would be Sen. McGovern’s
margin of victory. So Mayor Richard
Daley of Chicago was thrown out of the
Democratic convention and with him a
whole segment of the traditional
Democratic party. They were simply
not needed any more. It turned out that
the “legions of new voters” were not
nearly as “liberal” as theorists like
Dutton thought they were going to be.
The noncollege young were solidly for
Nixon; even college freshmen and
sophomores gave the president a 10
percent margin. Harvard juniors and
seniors, it turned out, were not
numerous enough to make up for the
Catholics and other Middle Americans
who had been told that the Democratic
party no longer needed them.
For all their intellectual excellence,
moral superiority, and sophisticated
organizational skills, the “New
Politicians” were not able to add, at
least not up to 51 percent. Sen.
McGovern himself stopped listening to
the “reformers” as the campaign wore
on; he did his best to recapture Middle
America and its Catholic component. In
many ways he was really closer to them
than he was to the university wise men.
But he was caught in the bind produced
by his own strategy. To gain the
nomination he had to ally himself with
the left wing of the party; to win the
election he had to recapture the center.
But his own left supporters -- whom he
Doctor Prescribes Big Dose
Of Visuals to Fight Abortion
RICHMOND, Va. (CPF) - Dr. J.C.
Willke, slim, sandy-haired family doctor
from Cincinnati, came to Virginia
recently with some eye-opening
professional advice for people who want
to get active in combatting abortion.
In place of a little black bag, Dr.
Willke toted half a dozen suitcases
crammed with his No. 1 anti-abortion
prescription: visuals. Slides, movies, still
photos in full color, still photos in black
and white, brochures in full color,
pamphlets, huge poster displays for
county fairs and small counter-top
displays for drugstores - name it and
Dr. Willke had it.
Many of the pictures weren’t pretty
to look at: crushed, dismembered,
salt-burned babies, the color of candied
apples, wouldn’t be. But nothing beats
visuals in getting across the message that
abortion kills and what it kills is an
unborn baby.
Talk may have its place in a program,
but Dr. Willke, who travels the country
on the pro-life circuit, will sacrifice
words any time for pictures. What kind
of program he gives depends on how
much time he has. He may have to cut
down or eliminate his talk, but he never
leaves out the visuals, even if he can
show only slides of a premature baby
who lived and an unborn child of the
same age who was aborted.
“You’ll win with visuals and don’t
any of you kid yourselves that you’ll do
without it,” Dr. Willke told a dinner
gathering in Norfolk.
But these pictures, don’t they shock
people? Dr. Willke says pro-abortionists
often charge him with “emotionalism,”
when he shows such visuals. Emotional
or not, he says, “the pictures show the
reality of abortion and the reality of the
unborn child and they show this reality
in ways that words cannot.”
Speaking of vocabulary:
“Don’t call abortion ‘murder,’” Dr.
Willke says. “It’s a judgmental term. I’d
have to get inside someone’s skin to
know whether he’s a murderer.”
Instead, he advocates saying “kill.”
“It’s strong enough and it’s not
judgmental.”
“Termination of pregnancy” he
abhors as a “euphemism on the other
extreme from murder.”
And a “fetus” is never a fetus but “an
unborn child.”
“In the public mind today,” he says,
“fetus is equated with ‘non-human,’
even though by definition it is the title
given to the unborn child. ‘Fetus’ is an
easy thing to kill. ‘Baby’ is a hard thing
to kill.”
New WICS Unit Planned
At a preliminary meeting held on
Election Night, November 7th, a small
group of Savannah women met to
discuss the formation in Savannah of a
new unit of Women In Community
Service (WICS).
Miss Alice Simmons, a WICS
Coordinator from Atlanta, talked about
the Program and the work it is doing on
a nation-wide basis to help “deprived”
girls in the 16-21 age-bracked obtain
training and jobs.
Sr. Catherine Moore, O.S.F., offered
the use of her Social Apostolate Office
at 501 E. McDonough St. (Box 8703),
for the WICS program, which will begin
with “support” service and later branch
out into recruiting and screening
services as well.
A former WICS unit, which used to
function in Savannah, had dwindled to
one active member — Mrs. Eugene
Walker, of Most Pure Heart of Mary
Parish.
WICS volunteers help to recruit girls
in need of training, and assist them in
preparing for placement in a Job Corps
Center, for a period of up to two years.
They are then on hand to meet the
“graduates” and help them find suitable
employment in accordance with the job
training they have received.
“The pro-abortionists softened us up
by saying, over and over, ‘It’s only a
fetus. It’s only a fetus. It’s not human.
It’s only a fetus.’”
For Dr. Willke, the entire abortion
matter hinges on the question of when
does human life begin.
It’s a question he said must be
answered and is answered not by
religion and philosophy, but by medical
science. He uses visuals to support his
point.
The screen displays a tiny baby
whose arm is so small that the nurse’s
wedding ring easily encircles it. “That’s
Kelly,” Dr. Willke says. “She was born
three weeks before this picture was
taken. She was 21 weeks in her mother’s
womb. She could have been killed in
New York for three more weeks because
New York says she’s not human. What
would you say?” (New York permits
abortion up to the 24th week of
pregnancy.)
Saying that what he is telling his very
quiet audience is “unknown to 98% of
ail physicians in this country.” Dr.
Willke traces the development of the
unborn child in gestation.
There’s another slide. “Eleven
weeks,” he says. “The baby begins to
breathe - not air, of course, but the
fluid. He has sensitivity to pain. Not
only that, but he demonstrates
conditioned responses. If we sweeten
the amniotic fluid, he will drink more of
it. If we give it a bitter taste, he will
drink less.”
A slide. “Ten weeks. The mid-ground
for abortion. If you hold this in your
hands you can’t help but recognize it as
human.”
“Eight weeks - we seldom abort at
less than that.”
And finally, conception. “The
fertilized ovum. Nothing additional is
needed but food for it to grow.”
Dr. Willke says: “Where do we draw
the line when life begins? A legislature
can’t tell us that. Religion? It’s valid for
the individual but hardly possible on
a culture. . .We can’t draw any line
except at the beginning.”
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often did not control - had already
dismissed the center. Furthermore a
politician of elegance and flexibility
could perhaps have made the move to
the center without looking inconsistent
and unstable in the process. But the
senator’s own spare and austere
moralism made his compromises look
both ungraceful and unconvincing.
He was in an insoluble dilemma. If he
stayed on the left he would have been
rejected as a “radical.” If he moved to
the center he would be rejected as
“inconsistent” and perhaps
“unprincipled.” He chose the latter
strategy and people stopped believing
him, or even listening to him.
But the “New Politicians” and the
“reformers” wrote McGovern off early.
He lost, but they did not. They have no
intention of giving up their control of
the party apparatus. For them politics is
an end in itself and a minor thing like a
disastrous political defeat is quite
irrelevant. Mrs. Jean Westwood will not
give up the chairmanship of the
Democratic National Committee
although she has been one of the worst
in history. According to many
Washington observers she spent most of
the last two months campaigning for
herself rather than Sen. McGovern.
The “reformers” stole the party by
rewriting the rules to give them control.
They will keep control and rewrite the
rules again to give them even more
control. They are quite capable of
forcing another candidate in their own
image and likeness on the whole party
in 1976 (Sen. Walter Mondale of
Minnesota?) even though it would mean
one more electoral landslide for the
Republicans.
The “reformers” are dolts at
macropolitics; they will never win an
election outside of New York or
California. But they are masters of
micropolitics, the politics of cocktail
party intrigue and all night caucuses - a
skill that some of them picked up in
their days as Stalinists, Trotskyites, and
Lovestonettes. They have control of the
Democratic party and are more
interested in keeping that control than
in winning an election in 1976 or 1980
- or even 2000. They will give up their
domination of the party machinery only
when they are forced out, and there
does not seem to be a politician in the
country including, it is to be feared,
Sen. Edward Kennedy - who has the
courage to take them on. The
Democrats, in other words, will go on
winning Congressional and state
elections and go on losing the
presidency.
But why are the “New Politicians” so
eager to dump the Catholic ethnics and
the Middle Americans? The crude
stereotypes which create the world view
of the “New Politics” insist that the
ethnics are “racists” and “hawks.” But
the data against the stereotypes is
overwhelming. The image of the
hawkish ethnic racists tells more about
the emotional needs of the “New
Politicians” than it does about political
and social reality.
But why turn the Catholic ethnics
into stereotypes? To answer that
question one has to run the risk of
bringing out into the open one of the
ugly secrets of American political and
social life. But it is time that secret is
revealed no matter what the
consequences. As Adam Walinsky
recently hinted in an article in The New
Republic, there is a strong - and
frequently quiet explicit - strain of
anti-Catholicism in the liberal-left wing
of the Democratic Party.
Not all left-liberals are anti-Catholic
of course, but many of them are. And
the fact that their bigotry is
sophisticated and subtle does not make
it any less virulent. Why throw the
ethnics out of the Democratic party
even at the risk of losing. The answer is
easy: That way you get rid of Catholics
and you’d sooner lose without them
than win with them. It looks like the
Democratic party is going to be saddled
with the “New Politicians” - including
its anti-Catholic stereotypes - for along
time to come. Mr. Agnew should be
very happy about that.
A CRADLE FOR THE UNKNOWN UNBORN was filled with Pa., during a Festival of Life. About 300 persons of all ages took
flowers by demonstrators in front of the Capitol at Harrisburg, part in the pro-life rally. (NC Photo)
Destroyer Takes Elderly
Across River toNewHome
NEW ORLEANS (NC) - The brass
’band of the eighth naval district struck
up “La Marseillaise” and the “Star
Spangled Banner,” and after 104 years
at the same location, the Little Sisters
of the Poor were moving their St.
Joseph’s Home for the Aged.
The United States Navy, with its
destroyer Putnam and her crew, pitched
in to move most of the 135 residents
across the Mississippi.
In a day of contrasts, the sight of
white-haired men and women bobbing
on the deck of the war machine and
tapping their feet to ragtime seemed
appropriate.
The move was from ancient brick and
splintered wood to gleaming stainless
steel and tiles on the West Bank here.
Miss Mildred Corbett sat on the deck
of the Putnam smiling.
“Thirty years and four months,” she
said looking back on her years at the
home. “And now we’re moving. I guess
I’ve just got to get used to it. It’s the
only home I’ve got . . .the only home I
know.”
“I can’t see .. .can’t do anything.
This is the first time I’ve moved . . .I’m
from the West Bank, so I guess you
could say this is kind of a homecoming
for me. I’ll get used to it. “I’m not hard
to please . . .besides, it’s the only home
I’ve got.”
Miss Corbett clapped her hands to the
music and continued to smile.
“Loneliness is probably the biggest
thing these people have to overcome,”
Mother Charles M. de la Trinite who will
direct the new homes said. “Especially
with those people who have no families
or whose families don’t come to visit
that often. Our staff tries to overcome
that by really caring about them.”
While overcoming loneliness is a
future problem at the new home,
getting there caused some headaches too.
“I lived in San Francisco and crossed
the bridge to Oakland many times,”
Mother Charles said. “It’s a lot bigger
than the bridge over the Mississippi, but
the bridge here seems to be the biggest
barrier in the lives of some of our
people. Many of them just didn’t want
to cross the river. . .
“We solved the problem. When we
were taking some of their clothes over
we’d take two or three of them over just
for the ride. Sister Jeanne (Sister Jeanne
de St. Thomas, L.S.P.) timed me. She
said it only took only one and one-half
minutes to actually get across the
bridge. After that, a lot of the old folks
decided, it wasn’t that far after all.”