National Catholic Prayer Breakfast Misrepresents Catholic Values and Vatican II Reforms

I recently saw a news item that reported on the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast and its keynote speaker, Vice President J.D. Vance.  I found it curious that a gathering of Catholics would honor the Vice President with such an opportunity given the opposition of the Catholic Church to the immigration policies of the Trump Administration.

I found myself asking what is the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast?  Who sponsors it?

In an earlier letter, I explained the historic split in the Catholic Church between those who embraced the spirit and new directions provided by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s and those who resisted them.  I noted that Georgetown and other Catholic colleges were not considered to be authentically Catholic by the John Henry Newman Institute but a select few were.

Of the eight colleges listed as sponsors of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, seven of them are acceptable to the John Henry Newman Institute including Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia.

I would suggest that a renaming of the event is in order.  Clearly people of any faith can say a prayer of thanksgiving before breakfast.  If the event had included endorsements from colleges such as Providence College (Dominican), Saint Bonaventure

(Franciscan) or Loyola Marymount (Jesuit), it could be labeled “national.”  To say that the gathering was Catholic lacks precision.  It might be more accurate to say that the event was sponsored by pockets of resistance to the reforms of Vatican II.

Mass deportations and vilifying all undocumented people in our country as criminals is an affront to Catholic Social Teaching, the first principle of which is to recognize the dignity of all human beings documented or otherwise.

Recently, the Vice President, echoing earlier comments by Steve Bannon, said that organizations such as Catholic Relief Services and the Jesuit Refugee Services are only interested in migrants because they get government money.  This slander earned the Vice President a rebuke by the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who is not listed among liberals.

If you support mass deportation of all undocumented people, casting them all as criminals, you can justify your position as a Republican, a conservative or a MAGA adherent but you cannot justify such a position as a Christian and Catholic.  The words in the 25^th Chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me” are hard to get around.

Denying food and medicine to poor children in the world’s poorest countries is a violation of the Gospels.

In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy was the Democratic Party’s nominee for President.  There were two primary sources of opposition to Kennedy’s candidacy.  First were American Protestants who feared that Kennedy would be too Catholic and take orders from the Pope.  Second, were Catholics in Rome who thought he would be too American, too devoted to pluralism and democracy.  Kennedy chose to be an American.

Imagine if President Kennedy had promised upon taking office that he would sanction any locality whose library contained books not approved by the Catholic Church.  Imagine if he had decreed that no motion pictures could be produced that did not pass muster with the Legion of Decency.

The ultra-traditionalist Catholics in Warren County and at Christendom College, who want to take over Samuels Library, are quick to discriminate between institutions they consider less than authentically Catholic.  However, when their narrow worldview is challenged, they cry that their critics are anti-Catholic.  They want their cake and eat it too.

Tom Howarth
Warren County, VA

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