Shoot to get hot, shoot to stay hot

So Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination today.  This startling reality--because let's face it, who foresaw this back in December 2015?--reminded me of an article earlier this month wherein Peter Wolfgang took a stab at reading the "Why did Trump win?" tea leaves.  Wolfgang first address some clear points:

The first theory is that Donald Trump is popular among religious voters because other things have replaced religious belief as a motivating factor for how people vote, even for religious people. And the dwindling number of Republican voters who do still oppose Donald Trump out of religious conviction can expect the right to turn on them with a vengeance.

and

The second theory is that Donald Trump’s popularity among religious voters is confirmation of Ross Douthat’s thesis that we have become “a nation of heretics,” not in the classic Protestant vs. Catholic sense, but in the sense that much of what we call Christianity in America—whether Protestant or Catholic, liberal or conservative—has ceased to be Christianity in even a bare bones C. S. Lewis/Mere Christianity way. By this reading, the New Age-y or Prosperity Gospel ideologies in our churches have diminished our powers of discernment and softened us up for Donald Trump.

and

I am sympathetic to this view, but there are some important signs that contradict it. Douthat has a whole chapter against Glenn Beck, for instance, and Beck is actually the last man standing against Donald Trump in Conservative Big Media. And I am not aware of a single Catholic equivalent to, say, Trump supporter Jerry Falwell, Jr. Many Catholics do support Trump but I cannot name a single prominent Catholic leader who supported Trump prior to his becoming the presumptive nominee.

Read it all here.

When the Levee Breaks Amoris Laetita version

When the levee breaks, got no place to stay...

Yes, it's important to remember the classics.

When reading R. R. Reno's reservations about Amoris Laetita, the image of resisting an apparently impending flood kept recurring.  Given my previous post about the AL tidal wave--an apt image for all the reactions it has generated--I wondered if Reno trying to stop the leaks by sticking thumbs in dyke walls or whether he, having seen the first floor of home flooded, decamped to the second or third or higher floors.

Reno recognizes the face value of the new document;  nothing has changed.

Francis doesn’t actually say that divorced and remarried Catholics can receive communion. Amoris Laetitia explicitly affirms the church’s teaching on marriage. But in long digressions into the complexities of moral and pastoral discernment, Francis provides plenty of justifications for others to say that, yes, in particular situations, divorced and married Catholics can receive communion. All the while, Francis insists that the Catholic teaching on marriage must be affirmed. The ambiguity seems intentional, designed to increase scope for pastoral discretion.

The Catholic teaching on marriage is clear: It is permanent and cannot be dissolved. This is not a merely canonical matter, as though church officials at some point resolved to make indissolubility a feature of Catholic marriage. Christ warns us not to put asunder what God has put together. St. Paul associates the covenant of marriage with the unbreakable bond of God’s love for us in Christ. Then, in a move characteristic of Catholicism, the Church teaches that in our wedding rites, the sacramental promise of permanence becomes real, just as Christ’s promise to be with us until the end of the age becomes real in the transubstantiation of the bread and wine on the altar.

Marriage's reality--beyond the mere psychological or emotional apprecation--is where the trouble starts.