And further, it’s going to turn out to be an enormouse test of Catholic leadership in the United States.

The John Kerry candidacy, of course.

Are they up to it? Can they put aside their 501 (c) (3) fears?

Why don’t we pray that they can.

(And what is it they should be doing? Defeating Kerry? No, that’s not the point – the point is preventing him from playing Catholics and using and abusing Catholic buzz-words, phrases and his faith to win the Catholic vote. Calling him on it every time. )

Here’s the weekend round up:

Kerry quotes Scripture, wonders where compassion is. I dunno, John. In your support for the right to abort kids, maybe?

A Plain-Dealer article about the issues

Ryan and Flynn say a little overtness might help. Both believe Kerry’s campaign needs a Catholic moment – a time when the candidate reaches out to Catholic voters. They believe it could make a difference in battlegrounds like Ohio, Wisconsin and New Mexico, states with large Catholic populations. Nearly 20 percent of Ohioans are Catholic, and the number is higher in cities like Cleveland and Cincinnati.

Clinton made a strong impression with a highly publicized speech at the University of Notre Dame two months before the 1992 election, Flynn said. Clinton, a Baptist who graduated from Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, discussed his own religious conviction and called for a renewed national sense of tolerance and mutual obligation.

“Catholicism no longer carries the stigma it once did,” said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “It would probably help Kerry to talk more about his faith in a personal way.”

Zogby says the candidate’s Catholic moment will happen.

“It is a bond,” he said of Kerry and other Catholics, “and he will take advantage of any bond he can make.”

In other words: Take advantage of Catholics’ sloppy and inconsistent thinking.

The TIME article

How might the rift between Kerry and the church he calls a “bedrock of values, of sureness about who I am” affect the election? Catholics are among the narrow slice of the electorate considered truly up for grabs this year, and they constitute a major share of the voters in the Midwestern and Southwestern swing states. Those who are most strongly antiabortion are probably already in Bush’s camp. But many Catholics are, like Kerry, struggling with contradictions between the church’s teachings and what they practice. Still others say abortion is not the only issue that matters when they vote. “There are literally millions of American Catholics who struggle with different feelings and different issues at different times,” Kerry says. In the Democratic primaries, Kerry ran particularly strong among Catholics—winning significantly larger shares of their votes in states like New Hampshire, Missouri and Tennessee than he received from Protestants.

Most Catholic officials expect that the church’s response to Kerry’s candidacy will vary from diocese to diocese. You may not see many Catholic bishops appearing at Kerry photo ops this campaign season, and there’s a possibility of some uncomfortable moments on the trail. “All you need is a picture of Kerry going up to the Communion rail and being denied, and you’ve got a story that’ll last for weeks,” says Father Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America.

You know, this is really not too hard. Oh, the Communion business is, but that’s not my problem. The issue that could be so easily pounded, that doesn’t violate any separation, real or imagined, between church and state, and that anyone with any sense would bring up daily and hourly and bring to Kerry’s face is this whole compassion card. Make it work, John. Please explain to us how compassion jives with the act of inserting a sharp instrument into a woman’s womb and dismembering the child within. Tell us how that makes any sense.

Hint: It doesn’t.