written by Betty Clermont, published by Clarity Press USA 2009
Recently I heard the retired Archbishop of San Francisco, John Quinn, say that for the first time in American history the U.S. bishops had sided with the Republican Party. He also wrote an open letter to the U.S. church to this affect. This book examines how hawks and neoconservatives in the Republican Party forged a nexus with powerful rightwing Catholics that would change the face of American Catholicism, the structuring of social policy in the United States and the American agenda in the world. At the start of the 1980s, the Church’s social justice agenda had been committed to alleviating poverty, to demilitarization, to affirmative action, and to ending capital punishment – an agenda antipathetic to the Republican platform. By the end of the 90s, its mission had been totally redefined, with the justice agenda marginalized, and political action mobilized around concern for the dying and the unborn. This book examines how and why it was accomplished.
