I was watching some talking heads show on CNN or CNBC or something. The heads were discussing Catholics and noted something sad, though not surprising. In years past, presidential hopefuls looks to earn the "catholic vote." Basically, this means catholics voted as a block (bloc?), and our opinions were all very similar. These days, that no longer seems to be the case. Zogby, Pew, CNN, and everyone else has come to the painful conclusion that catholics are as divided as the nation.

For every conservative catholic, there seems to be a liberal one. For every archbishop who loudly refuses Kerry communion, there is another who quietly mumbles something contradictory.

These are painful years. These are bipartisan years. These are years in which we only see the world as left and right, when such a dialectic may be hurting us as a people more than it is helping us and teaching us to grow.

As I read this letter from the Archbishop and Coadjutor Archbishop of KC, I was startled to find myself becoming angry. Not so much at the opinions expressed, but at the lack of empathy for other, possible opinions. Does that make me an immoral catholic?

Maybe.

I found myself startled when killing an innocent life was considered an intrinsic evil. Does that mean killing other kinds of life some other form of evil, and perhaps not evil at all?

I don't know. I only know that I'm sad and dissappointed that America has progressed to the point that the people of catholicism are so obviously divided down a political line. When did pre-emptive war become debatable in its immorality? The question seems to be not whether it was right to attack Iraq. The question is where does it stop? Saddam killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people (the northern, insurgent Kurds) and put them in mass graves. We stopped him. Since our war began, some estimates suggest 100,000 Iraqis have died. Should we continue this practice? Should we attack anyone who kills its citizens?

Is the new point of catholicism to stop death with more death?

I'm sorry. I'm not frustrated. I'm just so sad that our foreign and local policy solutions must always seem to fall under one of two alternatives. I'm sad a nations creativity for alternate solutions to problems seems to have died in some shallow grave somewhere. I'm sad that when we agree with one part of a policy, we feel the need to agree with other segments that may be wrong. And I'm sad that we assume the alternative is agreeing with the other side.

I suppose I'm rambling now. It's just, what if we started something new? What if we started something incredible? We could call it Catholics for Creative Alternatives. We could stop accepting what the left and right are telling us as scripture. Instead, we could take all the facts we are provided with, come up with goals, and make our own solutions. The politicians in washington aren't smarter than us, and they definitely are caught up in a culture where you are either left or right and nothing else. What if we changed all that?