Communion and Liberation’s Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete has written an excellent piece on Rubio’s church hopping. Rubio, if you recall, claims to be a faithful Catholic and a southern baptist at the same time. Drawing out some key doctrinal distinctions, Albacete calls the southern baptists an “ecclesial community” rather than a church (the same words used by Pope Benedict in his new and excellent Light of the World book). Bottom line:
“It is impossible to be a Catholic in good standing and a Baptist in good standing at the same time. And so the question arises: what does Senator-elect Rubio believe?”
And the conclusion:
“This trend to reduce the meaning of a Catholic identity to folklore, to cultural traditions and to a content-free spirituality also threatens American Catholics in general. I am reminded of the observation of Curtis White in Harper’s Magazine (December 2007) already quoted in an earlier column here. We are dealing with the American kind of nihilism. For Nietzsche, European nihilism was the failure of any form of belief. “American nihilism is something different. Our nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It is all good!”
This American nihilism has a willing ally among that segment of the American Catholic right that wants to draw the Catholic Church closer and closer to the evangelicals, for purely political reasons. In the meantime, we are seeing the erosion of a distinct Catholic culture. We are seeing a relentless assault on the social teaching of the Catholic Church. What’s next, I wonder?
(Hat tip: Michael Sean Winters).
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