From a parish newsletter: "Maybe we need an Obama to shake us out of our complacency"

The "we" referred to here is the Church. The comment is taken from a parish priest writing in a parish newsletter (not my own parish).

This week I listened intently to the inaugural speech of President Barak Obama. It was powerful oratory but it was also shot through with gospel content and it was challenging to say the least. I'm sure what he had to say did not appeal to a certain section of Americans especially when he said there must be "an end to petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for too long have strangled our politics". I couldn't help drawing a comparison with the church. Maybe we need an Obama to shake us out of our complacency.

Let's try to "read behind the lines" and to identify the "false promises" and "worn-out dogmas". Presumably they refer to the policies of the previous administration, now about to be reversed by the new one. But, of course, a politician of the previous administration could quite easily take exactly the same words and apply them to the policies of the new administration. The oratory is certainly powerful, but it is hiding what is nothing surprising or special - that President Obama is not President Bush and wishes to overturn some key aspects of his predecessors policies.

There is another point in the inauguration speech where one can do some "reading behind the lines". "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.....Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake". President Obama explicitly relates this to the Founding Fathers assertion of "the rule of law and the rights of man". I think we are intended to "read behind this" a reference to the detention centre at Guantanomo Bay which is widely seen, and with justification, as an abandoning of the normal rule of legal process to facilitate the imprisonment of those seen as a threat to the United States.

Compare this assertion of faithfulness to American ideals with: "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified." This is interesting because the political/ethical question about the balance between the role of the state and the role of the individual or family is put on one side, in the interests of an essentially pragmatic principle. Or, dare one say, in favour of a principle of expediency?

The final measure of President Obama will not be just the content of his inaugural speech, but of his actions. See here and here, for example, and the intention expressed by President Obama to work with the US Congress to restore American funding to the UN Population Fund, funding that was first removed in response to concern about that Fund's involvement with population control in China. President Obama's support for legalised abortion is very clear - and though he might decry the "politicisation" of abortion he nevertheless has a stance on the issue that is profoundly political. Independent Catholic News here reports the reaction from the Vatican to President Obama's first actions in office.

One can find passages in President Obama's inauguration speech that echo the values of the Gospel, perhaps particularly the suggestion that resistance to evil is as much a matter of a moral and spiritual resistance as it is a resistance based on the exercise of power.

But to suggest that we "need an Obama to shake the Church out of its complacency" ..... A bit naive to say the least ....