Deacon Keith Fournier has written a fine response to Robert Novak’s biting editorial, “The False Conservative,” which painted presidential candidate Mike Huckabee as a political deviant from the Goldwater-Reagan bequeathment of traditional conservative-libertarian outlook.
Here are some snippet’s of Deacon Fournier’s timely piece:
Mr. Novak’s efforts to claim the word “conservative” for only those who adopt every position of the eclectic libertarian/conservative coalition which has held power in the Republican party for several decades is a mistake.
I am pro-life, pro-family, pro-freedom, pro-poor and pro-peace. Each of these is important to my politics, economics and social participation. I have spent many years of my life seeking to inform my economic, cultural and political participation by the social teaching of the Catholic Church. This Social teaching is not “left” or “right”, “liberal”, “conservative” or “neo-conservative”, Democrat or Republican.
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The Catholic Church does not endorse any particular economic theory. She ‘walks the way of the person’, defends marriage and the family as the first social institution, and proclaims the primacy of an authentic view of freedom. She promotes the common good and insists on what is called a preferential option for the poor, a demonstrated concern for their well being and the development of a social and economic order which includes them within its embrace and promise of advancement.
She also upholds the dignity of all human work and the basic right to a living or family wage. In recent encyclicals the market economy has been recognized as having a real potential for promoting all of these, when properly understood.
However, the Church does not take a position on which economic theory is the “best.”
She properly and prophetically stood against the materialism of the atheistic Marxist system. She has also properly cautions Nations which have adopted a form of liberal capitalism that there are dangers in any form of materialism which promotes the use of persons as products and fails to recognize the value of being over acquiring. She reminds our consumerist western culture that the market economy must be at the service the person, the family and the common good, lest ‘capitalism’ conflate its claims to offering freedom and become “savage” in its practice
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Thus it is absolutely unacceptable for any candidate to support the taking of innocent human life in the womb, either by actively supporting the current approach which renders abortion a “right”, or by claiming that they hold a personal opposition to this position but will, in effect, do nothing to stop the killing.
Similarly, for any candidate to say they support marriage as the lifelong relationship between one man and one woman, but then support its redefinition, from the bench or from the legislature, is unacceptable. . Catholic Social teaching demands that we hear the cry of the poor and answer it. Thus, any candidate should have a demonstrated and real concern for the poor and be committed to doing all they can to alleviate their suffering and expand their economic and social participation. They can articulate that in the language of expanding the market economy and creating expanding opportunity for participation, but they cannot neglect the poor.
Now, I believe all this, I certainly am not what is now known as a “liberal”. I never have liked being called a conservative either. I am simply a Catholic.
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Maybe Mr. Novak, whose writing, humor and genuine faith I really admire, would now lump me in the category he has created; calling me a “false conservative.”
Well, he will have to lump a lot of others in there as well. Many of us have been uncomfortable with the conservative label since it was first assigned to us.
We are growing in number.
And, we vote.
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