Jeb to Evangelicals: “The blessed sacraments give me great comfort”

From The Daily Beast: 

Evangelicals aren’t typically the target audience for Roman Catholic theology talk. Low-church Protestants from the Bible Belt have historically been hostile to Catholicism, even sometimes fearing that Catholics’ devotion to the pope will lead to one-world government, and that their political clout in the United States presages the end times.

So it was perhaps a little surprising when Jeb Bush, who converted to his wife’s Catholicism, launched into an emotional testimony before a predominantly Evangelical audience on Friday about the joy he felt when he left Protestantism.

Catholics and Evangelicals haven’t always played well together. In 2008, Rev. John Hagee—a Texas pastor and one of the country’s most powerful Evangelical leaders—apologized to Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for intimating that the Catholic church was the “great whore” of Revelation, and for telegraphing the kind of anti-Catholic rhetoric typically associated with 19th-century nativists. (Among Southern Baptists, in particular, there’s long been a flamboyantly anti-Catholic strain of thought and rhetoric.) And while conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants are simpatico when it comes to certain public policy goals, they usually avoid public discussions about areas of theological disagreement.

But here in a ballroom in a hotel in D.C.’s Woodley Park neighborhood, Bush decided that courting the country’s leading social conservative activists could entail discussing one of the elements of Catholic theology that’s least amenable to Evangelicals—namely the blessed sacraments, which include confession and communion.

“I converted to the Catholic Church—Christ came into my life a little earlier, but I converted to being Catholic in honor of my wife and because I believe in the blessed sacraments and they give me great comfort,” he said at the beginning of his speech before the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “On Easter Sabbath of 1995, I had lost an election in 1994 and found a total serenity and solace in the RCIA class, and converted to being a Catholic and it’s been an organizing part of my architecture, if you will, as a person and certainly as an elected official.”

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