In a rather odd, presumably tongue-in-cheek post on WaPo’s On Faith, Tony Stevens-Arroyo proposes, in a positive sense, a “secret” connection between Barack Obama and Catholicism. He suggests that Obama may have been influenced by Catholic social thought when he was working as an organizer in Chicago–and although the influence is not so much as hinted at in Obama’s account of that experience in Dreams from My Father, it’s not utterly impossible.
But the actual evidence of connection is, shall we say, curious. For example, Stevens-Arroyo claims that James Dobson criticized Obama for his 2006 keynote address to “the Catholic organization, Call to Renewal.” But Call to Renewal is not a Catholic organization at all, but a liberal evangelical one. And it was Obama’s speech at the 2007 U.C.C. convention that Dobson was attacking. “That same day,” Stevens-Arroyo writes, “Obama articulated the Catholic ethical principle of proportionality, modified his stance about abortion and confessed admiration for the saintly Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker organization.” In neither speech did Obama do anything of the sort. Hardly anyone of the numerous commenters on the post have noted the counterfactuals. To the extent that it was intended in a spirit of fun, nobody got it.