The Vatican Echoes Ponnuru

A leading theocon, given a major position in the Vatican, is using his ecclesiastical authority to attack one party in the United States, and intervene in the US election:

[Archbishop Raymond] Burke, who was named prefect of the Vatican’s Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature in June, told the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire that the U.S. Democratic Party risked “transforming itself definitively into a party of death for its decisions on bioethical issues.” He then attacked two of the party’s most high profile Catholics vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for misrepresenting Church teaching on abortion. He said Biden and Pelosi, “while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.”

Theocon Republican, Ramesh Ponnuru, wrote a book called "The Party Of Death," to stigmatize the Democrats among American Catholics. The goal of Ponnuru and George and Hudson and Neuhaus is to transform the American Catholic church into a wing of the Republican party, and to use the sacred authority of Christ's church to target Democratic candidates, along the culture war lines pioneered by Rove and Bush. This is not new, of course, and I detail the abuse of religion by the theocons for their partisan purposes - and their own power - in my book, "The Conservative Soul."