PAUL RYAN'S FELLOW ROMAN CATHOLICS ON RYAN'S BUDGET

Mitt Romney expects his running mate to help deliver the Catholic vote and smooth over any discomfort among Catholics about Mormonism. (This is the first major-party ticket to go Protestant-less.) Yet after Ryan claimed his budget was shaped by his faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops deemed it immoral.

“A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote in a letter to Congress.

The Jesuits were even more tart, with one group writing to Ryan that “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” (My emphasis)

The nuns-on-the-bus also rapped the knuckles of the former altar boy who now takes his three kids to Mass. As Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice group Network, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s sad that a Catholic doesn’t understand that “we need to have each other’s backs. Only wealthy people can ever begin to pretend that they can live in a gated community all by themselves.”

Even Ryan’s former parish priest in Janesville weighed in. Father Stephen Umhoefer told the Center for Media and Democracy, “You can’t tell somebody that in 10 years your economic situation is going to be just wonderful because meanwhile your kids may starve to death.”

Ouch!  So much for Ryan's adherence to the social justice teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.  Thanks to Maureen Dowd for putting it all together.  And do read the entire column.  There's other good stuff there like Ryan's votes in favor of Bush's break-the-bank budgets, including two off-budget wars.

Paul Ryan then:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said in a speech in 2005.

Paul Ryan now:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview."

Has the leopard changed his spots?  I report; you decide.  It's the budget, stupid.  Focus, focus, focus on the budget.

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS AND THE GIRL SCOUTS

From Bryan Cones at US Catholic:

I suppose this whole thing would be a little comic--the USCCB investigating the Girl Scouts sounds more like an article in The Onion than one in the Associated Press--except for the fact that the Girl Scouts do such great work in helping girls defend themselves from a consumer culture that encourages them to think of themselves as sex objects with credit cards (as we explored in our May issue cover story). The bishops with this move also manage to irritate the last segment of the female population still available to offend: preadolescent girls and teens (having already tweaked both women of childbearing age on contraception, and religious women for whatever it is the sisters have been doing at their annual meetings).

Seriously, some honcho at the USCCB needs to put a stop to this. It looks a little, um, unhinged.

The overreach by the bishops for some sort of nebulous purity within the church begins to look like the spreading madness of an inquisition.  What an embarrassment to thinking Roman Catholics.  Who's next on the bishops' hit list?

Click on the cartoon for the larger view.