Keeping Catholicism Weird

Being a faithful Catholic in the modern world seems weird to those who have embraced the modernist radical materialism that permeates so much of the culture. The recent claims by Kamala Harris and her campaign surrogates that J.D. Vance is “weird” is really a coded attack on his Catholic faith and his belief that what the Church teaches is true. 

Most faithful Catholics are used to being viewed as “weird” because of our certainty that Three can be One, that the Holy Eucharist can be the Real Presence of Christ, and that we can believe in what we cannot see.

The truth is that Catholicism has been viewed by many as “weird” for more than 2,000 years.    And craven politicians have been calling their faithful Catholic opponents weird for almost as long. On October 9, 1774, John Adams attended a Catholic Mass in a chapel in Philadelphia during the First Continental Congress and found it so weird that he wrote about it in a letter to Abigail:

The poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood, their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias. Their holy water—their crossing themselves perpetually—their bowing to the name of Jesus wherever they hear it—their bowings, and kneelings, and genuflections before the altar. The dress of the priest was rich with lace—his pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar piece was very rich—little images and crucifixes about—wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Saviour in a frame of marble over the altar, at full length, upon the cross in the agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds.

For John Adams, Catholicism was the religion of the ignorant. He wrote,

“Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination. Everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” 

Similar attacks have befallen the faithful Catholic politicians of the past. But the attacks on religion subsided during the 1960s when Catholic politicians like John F. Kennedy realized that in order to reassure a skeptical public that they would not be guided by their Catholic faith they had to distance themselves from their religion. Since that time, the attacks on Catholic politicians have pretty much disappeared as today’s modernist Catholic Democrats running for office jettisoned the moral teachings that made Catholics appear “weird.” Attacks on Catholic politicians pretty much disappeared when today’s modernist Catholic Democrats running for office jettisoned the moral teachings that made Catholics appear “weird.”Tweet This

Embracing a corrupt culture that values “reproductive choice,” “assistance in dying,” “same-sex marriage,” and gender ideology, today’s Catholic-in-name-only Democrat politicians like President Biden or Nancy Pelosi would never be seen as weird because they have publicly rejected the teachings of their Church. 

It is clear to all faithful Catholics that last week’s attack on J.D. Vance is really an attempt to mock his religion—and the religion of those of us who believe in the Truth of what the Catholic Church teaches. Taking one of the ugliest pages from John Adams on the “ignorance of Catholics,” the Kamala Harris campaign appears to be coalescing on the idea that J.D. Vance is “weird” because he actually believes in Catholic teachings on the sacredness of human life and views marriage as a permanent union of a man and a woman capable of knowing and loving each other and the children they may be blessed to create. His Catholic faith tells him that children are a blessing—a gift from God—to give our lives meaning. His faith teaches that those who struggle with fertility issues must be supported and never marginalized or criticized.

Despite all of this, Harris and her surrogates have been working overtime to mock Vance and his religious beliefs. Democratic campaign surrogate Tim Walz, Minnesota’s progressive governor, has taken the mocking of Vance’s religion to a new level in a recent MSNBC interview when he claimed that Vance and his like “are weird people….They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.” J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, continued the criticism on CNN when he said that “the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans has a weird view of America, honestly.”

Catholicism is indeed countercultural. It is a supernatural religion and its very mystical qualities put faithful Catholics at odds with the modernist radical materialism which believes that all experience and phenomena can be explained by physical causes. Faithful Catholics know that not all phenomena are physical.

Faithful Catholics in today’s modern world know that being a faithful Catholic who truly believes in the truth of the teachings of their Church is going to be viewed as countercultural—or fundamentally weird. This may actually appeal to those in every generation who want to break free from the “normal” and find real meaning in their world.