Will Barack Obama’s and the Catholic Church’s Consistent Life Ethic come together again?

Video below

We might find out on Thursday when Pope Francis and President Obama meet.

I walked down Race St. in Philly from St. Peter & Paul's Rectory to hear Daniel Berrigan speak at the Friends Meetinghouse with my friend  sculptor Jim Victor and Jim's friend Father John McNamee. It was 1966. The Vietnam War made the Quaker City a gathering place for peace activists and the Catholic Church in Philly was no small part of that activism.  Jim and me couldn't understand most of what Dan Berrigan said but Father John was visibly moved by his talk.

Later on when John McNamee chose a parish, instead of a parish in a Philly suburb he chose St. Malachys in North Philly. John McNamee became a foot soldier in the anti-poverty and social justice that came out of the Second Vatican Council. 

John wrote a book about his experience at St. Malachys called "Diary of a City Priest" it was made into a movie. 

John McNamee has a friend across the river in Camden, NJ. Rev. John Doyle pastor of Sacred Heart Church. Sacred Heart Church underwent a restoration.

Othmar Carli was one of my teacher’s at the York Academy of Arts. As a child in Nazi controlled Austria a teacher brought his class to a destroyed synagogue as a way of teaching “this is what happens to Jews”. Othmar’s life in restoring churches and other religious buildings began at that moment.

Mr. Carli is now a world class artist and restorer. I saw him again in Elizabethtown PA at the commemoration of a small art school he opened.  John McNamee’s friend, Father Michael Doyle spoke at that commemoration.

"Beauty saves humanity," Father Doyle said. "God didn't make an ugly weed - not even one. Everything that God made is beautiful. So beauty is necessary to the development of the human spirit. I wanted the walls, ceilings and stations to speak to people and comfort them, nourish them." 

FROM: 

Church's artwork restored to former glory At Camden's Sacred Heart, century-old works have been given back their luster, and new art is being added. 

By Edward Colimore INQUIRER STAFF WRITER 

POSTED: March 31, 2002

The separate lives of Father Mac, Mr. Carli, me and my friend Jim Victor were linked together. For me it completed a circle. 

I’m wondering if the Catholic Church can complete a circle and come back to the promise of a Consistent Life Ethic.

It seems like the Vatican’s ethic drifted away from the teachings of Pope John Paul II.
Maybe now it’s drifting back. I think that President Obama and Pope Francis are birds of a feather and they will have a great time.

The New York Times
Sunday, March 22, 2014

The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism

"CHICAGO — In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and attracting more believers. 

“He so quickly got us,” said Andrew Lyke, a participant in the meeting who is now the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s Office for Black Catholics. The group succeeded in inserting its priorities into the congress’s plan for churches, Mr. Lyke said, and “Barack Obama was key in helping us do that.” 

By the time of that session in the spring of 1987, Mr. Obama — himself not Catholic — was already well known in Chicago’s black Catholic circles. He had arrived two years earlier to fill an organizing position paid for by a church grant, and had spent his first months here surrounded by Catholic pastors and congregations. In this often overlooked period of the president’s life, he had a desk in a South Side parish and became steeped in the social justice wing of the church, which played a powerful role in his political formation. 

This Thursday, Mr. Obama will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican after a three-decade divergence with the church. By the late 1980s, the Catholic hierarchy had taken a conservative turn that de-emphasized social engagement and elevated the culture wars that would eventually cast Mr. Obama as an abortion-supporting enemy. Mr. Obama, who went on to find his own faith with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s Trinity United Church of Christ, drifted from his youthful, church-backed activism to become a pragmatic politician and the president with a terrorist “kill list.” The meeting this week is a potential point of confluence."

MORE AT:  

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/us/the-catholic-roots-of-obamas-activism.html