Once Again, Steve Hayward… Doesn’t Know… Much.

This is no surprise. Once again, Steve comes to a snap judgment — without understanding the data in the chart he posts. He’s just a chucklehead.

This time, it is whether Roman Catholic priests (on the basis of their own subjective self-evaluations) are more — or less — “progressive” than their predecessors self-reported to be, in the early 1960s.

In the main, priests who would have answered in the early 1960s would have felt less free to indicate how they really felt, prior to the elevation of the progressive (for the times) John the XXIII.

Also, in the main — most of those early 1960s priests… are either retired or long dead.

But most importantly, what has changed in 62 years… is what the word “progressive” means, to the average US priest. In 1960… it would NEVER have included a favorable view on a woman’s right to an abortion. It would have referred to Christ’s “social gospel” (Matthew 25:31-46) — of all of us being our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers — and thus being supportive of the US Civil Rights movement, and MLK’s “War on Poverty”, LBJ’s Great Society programs… and later, opposing war in Vietnam.

So here in 2020s, when a US priest says he is “orthodox” — in the main, he means he doesn’t agree that women may abort a zygote, without sinning. That’s all. That is the litmus test for US priests.

They mean… can they in good conscience say that human beings are not formed at conception, or a day after — when just a dividing cell line. The orthodox answer of course is that humans begin at conception.

And that is the central dividing line in the US Catholic church at the moment. To be progressive is to say that a fetus may be aborted up to and through the second trimester (the old Roe dividing line). [I suspect, but cannot independently verify at present that most EU Catholics would see it the same way, as well.]

So what has happened in 62 years is that the definition of “progressive” has shifted.

That’s all, Steve. Please offer contra- evidence — if any there be. I would also note that, in his own chart, the tiny minority — 20% in 1960 who claimed to be “progressive” — are now the same 20% who use that word to mean something else, in 2020. Same, as to the 80% who claim orthodoxy, in their views. [We are seeing in the chart what appears as a minority viewpoint — not what the word itself means here, three generations later.]

To be clear, despite what might be inferred from the first graphic above, I speak as a recovering US Roman Catholic — here, raised in a mountain town, as a “conservative” Catholic family of nine children. That was how I was raised — but it is not the lens through which I view the world, this evening.

So, in sum — I know a little more about it than Steve does.

So… do sit down, Steve.