One of the obvious ironies in Rick Santorum’s absurd attacks on education is that the Catholic Church, (some of) whose beliefs he so loudly espouses, has a long tradition of serious scholarship. Jesuit schools, in particular, are justifiably viewed as excellent educational institutions. Notre Dame, Georgetown and many other Catholic universities are among the finest colleges in the country. Catholic blogger Mark Shea blasts him for it:
It’s this kind of insanity that makes me wonder how anybody in his five wits can trumpet this guy as Mr. Catholic.
Yeah, I’m aware of the dangers of the academy. So what? Grow up and learn how to think. This moronic notion Santorum puts forward that Obama is the President of All Colleges and is engaged in a some sort of conspiracy to oversee the indoctrination of Your Precious Child into his image and likeness via the university system is pure atavist red meat.
Yes, of *course* there is honorable work to be found without a college degree and of *course* those who do not have a college education are of equal dignity with those who have one. But Santorum makes it sound like it is despicable and disgusting for the Prez to desire a college education for as many people as possible. He comes off sounding like a champion for ignorance–because he *is* championing ignorance and playing to the very worst atavist instincts of, yes, class envy and resentment in his audience.
Time was when Catholics (who, you know, *invented* the university) worked and saved and struggled so that their kids could get through college. Now you have guys like Santorum talking like dimestore Protestant preachers denouncing them fancy pants college boys with their degrees and championing the glories of Know Nothingism as a moral virtue…
No thanks. Obama is a lousy president. But it does not follow that “If Obama’s for it, I’m agin it.” A President who advocates an educated population is just doing what any normal President does. A demagogue who declares education to be evil just to whip up the mob is, alas, also doing what any normal demagogue does.
What an embarrassment this guy is. But, as ever, he will get, not merely a pass for this–as for his endorsement of cold-blooded murder, pre-emptive war, and torture–because “conservative” Catholics have embraced the false soteriology that opposition to abortion taketh away the sins of the world.
Harsh and absolutely accurate.
34 comments
Skip to comment form ↓
gvlgeologist
March 5, 2012 at 12:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Link to Shea’s blog?
jamessweet
March 5, 2012 at 12:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ooo, that’s a new word for me.
It’s one of the peculiar things about religion that it is so obsessed with headpin-dancing angels that you get big -ology words for the study of minuscule stupid little crap. I’ll file this one up with theodicy and eschatology….
timothyyoung
March 5, 2012 at 12:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s good when Cathlics on occasion get some notion about what it is they are actually supposed to be out there believing.
raven
March 5, 2012 at 1:01 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Don’t forget that Santorum has BA, MBA, and JD degrees from public Pennsylvania universities.
As a lawyer and former senator, he managed to make 3.6 million dollars last year, AFAICT, as a lobbyist.
He doesn’t want to be poor and ignorant. He wants YOU to be poor and ignorant. At least he has that hypocrisy sacrament down well.
TCC
March 5, 2012 at 1:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
jamessweet: There’s a lot of stuff like that in systematic theology. You also get Christology and pneumatology (Holy Spirit), among other things.
raven
March 5, 2012 at 1:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
IIRC, even in the Michigan primary, more Catholics voted for Romney than Santorum. And these were mostly GOP Catholics.
Santorum is a CINO, Catholic In Name Only. He is really channeling straight fundie death cult xianity.
Raging Bee
March 5, 2012 at 1:16 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Jesuit schools, in particular, are justifiably viewed as excellent educational institutions.
Yeah, a Jesuit high school (St. Ignatius in the SF, CA area) taught my dad to question both the validity and rationality of the Catholic Church, to the point where he got sent to the principal’s office for doing it a bit too loud in class. (And said principal grudgingly agreed that he was right in that case, only he shouldn’t have used the word “Hell” in his argument.) Jesuit education, FUCK YEAH!!
slc1
March 5, 2012 at 1:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re Raging Bee @ #7
Seconding Ms. Bee as my sister got her law degree from Santa Clara.
Raging Bee
March 5, 2012 at 1:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
…Catholics (who, you know, *invented* the university)…
Not so sure about this. Didn’t the pagan Greeks have something called an “Academy,” which the Catholics shut down before they “invented” the university?
One could probably make this case if “university” means something the early Medieval institutions had that the ancient Greek schools didn’t. Not sure what that something is though, other than an organizational feature not directly relevant to the act of teaching things to people living in a certain location.
Raging Bee
March 5, 2012 at 1:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That’s Mister Bee, pal. Didn’t I already clarify that more than once in these parts?
Raging Bee
March 5, 2012 at 1:24 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
TCC: Don’t forget angelology.
slc1
March 5, 2012 at 1:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re Raging Bee @ #10
Apologies to Mr. Bee. I had the impression from comments on other threads that it was Ms. Bee. And just for the record, its Dr. SLC1.
richardelguru
March 5, 2012 at 1:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Raging Bee, since you obviously passed the ‘imitation game’ test in its original form, I have to ask if you are also passing the Turing test. :-)
lofgren
March 5, 2012 at 1:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Well at least we don’t have to worry that he is just a puppet of the pope.
Although there is an equally long tradition of discord in the Catholic church over the role of education. The Jesuits have been accused of being too worldly with their focus on the way things actually work rather than other Catholic values such as faith, penance, deference, (fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, a fanatical devotion to the pope), etc. Of course the world has been rather obsessed with this current fad of “reason” for the past couple hundred years, so the church is willing to roll with it for now. I have no doubt which branch will be first to be declared heretical during the next ascendency of the church (what we would call “the dark ages II”).
Synfandel
March 5, 2012 at 1:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Christianity loves to pick narrow slices of its own belief system and give the study of them fancy names. We have…
Hermeneutics: the study of Bible interpretation.
Homiletics: the study of preaching.
Demonology: the study of evil spirits.
Hamartiology: the study of sin (I hope this one has a co-op practicum).
Paterology: the study of God the Father.
Pneumatology: the study of the Holy Spirit.
I don’t know if there is a name specifically for the study of God the Son—maybe Filiology?
The allegedly scholarly study of some trivial bit of dogma sounds much more legitimate if you give it a Latin-based name. It still amounts to puffed-up navel gazing (“Umbilicointuology”?).
lofgren
March 5, 2012 at 1:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Bees are always female in my imagination, so I always picture you as a woman. I think bees are a female image to many people.
Reginald Selkirk
March 5, 2012 at 2:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Apparently he’s a drone.
d cwilson
March 5, 2012 at 2:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@raven:
Santorum was on course to win Michigan, then he attacked JFK and college education in general. He not only lost MI, but his lead in Ohio has evaporated. It’s hardly shocking that Catholics are abandoning him.
I’ve said many times that Santorum is philosophically far more in tune with apocalyptic evangelicals than with his fellow Catholics. He’s been actively courting former in the believe that they are the key to the GOP nomination. All he’s really doing is driving all the non-fundie republicans into Romney’s camp.
davem
March 5, 2012 at 2:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh, I so using that in lots of situations…
As to universities being invented by catholics – well, they might be pedantically correct, but I’m given to understand that they were originally monastery schools that evolved. Indeed, their evolution is nearly complete, and they just have a few atavistic remains, eg theology departments…
juice
March 5, 2012 at 2:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
When someone blasts Santorum, I’d rather people didn’t describe it in detail.
Randomfactor
March 5, 2012 at 3:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The Catholic church MAY be smelling the incense at last:
http://www.bilerico.com/2012/03/catholic_church_withdraws_from_maine_marriage_equa.php
Randomfactor
March 5, 2012 at 3:16 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It still amounts to puffed-up navel gazing
Omphaloskepsis. Really.
Synfandel
March 5, 2012 at 3:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Greek. Even better.
Raging Bee
March 5, 2012 at 4:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
richardelguru: huh?
Michael Heath
March 5, 2012 at 4:37 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
raven writes:
Garry Wills makes a ‘no true Scotsman’ argument, claiming Rick Santorum is a papist rather than a Catholic. I think its obvious you’re both wrong. Instead Mr. Santorum merely needs to be categorized into a subset of Catholics, equivalent to Bill Donohue and the crew who run Fox News, the Bishops, and the Pope. Their political power is growing, not receding, though they help drive off increasing numbers of congregants.
Tony
March 5, 2012 at 10:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Raging Bee:
It sounds so silly, I can’t believe it’s actually a word. I wish I hadn’t just googled it. Studying angels? How exactly do you apply the scientific method to them? Is there an emoticon for facepalming?
Tony
March 5, 2012 at 10:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
lofgren:
I never thought about bees with regard to their gender. For that matter, I think dogs and cats (and possibly a few other creatures that I’m forgetting right now) are the only animals I think about it gendered terms.
TCC
March 5, 2012 at 11:37 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Consider these sub-disciplines like you would astrology or phrenology. Asking about the scientific method is useless.
Aquaria
March 6, 2012 at 2:04 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The Jesuits have been accused of being too worldly with their focus on the way things actually work rather than other Catholic values such as faith, penance, deference, (fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, a fanatical devotion to the pope), etc.
My late stepfather went to Jesuit schools in Boston, and he frequently credited their outstanding education with contributing to his leftist activism as an adult.
We had a lot of Jesuit priests in the Central America movement who were the most staunchly and vocally opposed to Reagan the Scumbag’s vicious policies in the region. But then, they’d been the ones who had actually worked with the most oppressed peoples in nations America had made oppressive, particularly by Reagan the Scumbag, like El Salvador and Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras. Some of their stories of things the death squads did in these countries were just plain horrifying.
Their higher-ups in the Vatican food chain were always giving them grief over their political activism, as if it was a radical idea to think that the poor were people who deserved not to be murdered in cold blood by America’s proxy death squads.
Then again, I guess that is a radical idea. Maybe even a sociopathic one.
Aquaria
March 6, 2012 at 2:22 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As for Raging Bee: I was never sure which gender (now I know) he was, so I tried to be careful about any pronouns I used with his posts. It wasn’t the bee that confused me, but just the “tone” of his posts. As a former literary editor, I’m usually pretty good at spotting men and women online through their word choices and sentence structures. I bow to you, RB, for confusing even me.
I used to have a different nym in the blogosphere, but I changed it to a more “feminine” one because everyone kept thinking I was male. This wasn’t necessarily bad, but it frequently resulted in some hilarious misunderstandings when I had people hitting on me with that presumption. I’d feel so terrible when I’d have to disappoint them with the awful truth, although a couple of them were like–”That works, too!” O_o.
One of the funniest comment threads over at Atrios was when one of the conservatards was blasting me when he thought I was a man–and then became a slavish puppy dog at my feet when I set him straight. My inner dominatrix had no problem with that sort of reaction (I do sort of expect it from men), but I definitely wasn’t interested in it from the likes of him. Ew!
dingojack
March 6, 2012 at 2:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
lofgren posted: “Bees are always female in my imagination, so I always picture you [RagingBee] as a woman. I think bees are a female image to many people”.
Since the vast majority of bees are, in fact, female that’s not such an illogical assumption as it might at first appear.
Dingo
Aquaria
March 6, 2012 at 2:42 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think its obvious you’re both wrong. Instead Mr. Santorum merely needs to be categorized into a subset of Catholics, equivalent to Bill Donohue and the crew who run Fox News, the Bishops, and the Pope. Their political power is growing, not receding, though they help drive off increasing numbers of congregants.
Bang on. The conservative Catholics include two of our most odious Supreme Court (in) justices–Scalia and Thomas. Roberts may be another in this mold. There’s also the moronic Bill Bennett and now Newt Gingrich.
Something’s in the communion wine, looks like. Or maybe all the smart people are deserting the RCC in droves and leaving it to the most corrupt, dishonest and hateful of the flock.
wheatdogg
March 6, 2012 at 9:54 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There is a subset of Catholics called Charismatic Catholics, who I believe worship in ways similar to Protestant churches like Assembly of God. Kind of like Holy Rollers meet the Holy Father (the Pope, I mean).
lofgren
March 6, 2012 at 11:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
While true, it has nothing to do with logic. Everybody has certain association with words, especially animals, and for me bees are a feminine image. If Bee were called Raging Scorpion I probably would assume a male.
I find it interesting that others were also unsure of the gender. I have known for some time that Bee is male since he set me straight a long time ago. But I still have trouble keeping with my pronouns because I am always imagining myself talking to a giant bee, and like I said, bees are feminine to me.