White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs's Catholic Side
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is not predisposed to showing his personal side. So I was surprised to hear him invoking his Roman Catholicism in today's White House press briefing in L'Aquila, Italy, on the eve of Obama's first visit with Pope Benedict:
...the question as it relates to the influence of Catholic social teaching on the President, I would say something that I've been quite impacted by myself, I would offer. The President, in both his words and in his deeds, expresses many things that many Catholics recognize as fundamental to our teaching.
I was also surprised by Gibbs's grasp of Catholicism's influence on Obama personally and the way he framed it as a basis for pushing the president's healthcare plan. This is not the kind of thing Democratic press secretaries were doing five years ago:
One is that the President often refers to the fundamental belief that each person is endowed with dignity, and as it relates to the issues I work on most frequently with the President, the President often underscores that dignity of people is a driving goal in what we hope to accomplish in development policy, for example, and in foreign policy. That's one.
Two, I've also heard the President speak very movingly about what Cardinal Bernadin called the seamless garment of Catholic teaching. That garment speaks to not just taking care of the poor and the needy but also investing in the kind of health care infrastructure that would ensure that people like those on the South Side of Chicago, who the President is very familiar with are oftentimes finding their health care not in publicly funded hospitals but in Catholic hospitals, for example.
And here's deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough at the same briefing, laying it on pretty thick for Pope Benedict before Obama meets him tomorrow:
Given the influence of the Catholic Church globally, as well in the United States, and frankly, given the influence of the Catholic Church and Church social teaching on the President, himself, he recognizes that this is much more than your typical state visit. So I do believe that it's fair to say that the President looks very much forward to this visit since a very good conversation he had with the Holy Father as President-elect in, I believe it was in early December. The President has been looking for an opportunity to visit the Holy See and to meet in person with the Holy Father.
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Tags: religion | Catholicism | Robert Gibbs
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Recent comments by President
Subject: This is awful!
This policeman is completely out of line. Why aren't you in the media questioning why he did not produce his badge when asked for HIS identification. In my opinion it should not have been necessary for Dr. Gates to ask a policeman (who is being paid by the tax-payer) for I-D. It is indicated that Dr. Gates asked him several times for his I.D.
What the President said was correct: Stupidity is to do something that you know will result in a negative but you do it anyway. This policeman has been trained to know as Kenny Rodgers said years ago" when to hold and when to fold". That he did not allow his professionalism to guide his actions is inappropriate and stupid.
Someone should point this out. The American people should be informed with the facts.
Pesent truly evil America, so to speak!
While I am a staunch conservative Christian Republican that is pro-lfe from conception to the grave, and against Capital punishment plus against America's more and more the most inhumane Nation ever, as militarism has a choke-hold so to speak, on America, greatly and furiously supported by most so called Conservative Christians as proven of late as two bogus wars have America more and more on the road of self-destruction like all previous Empires of the past, never to forget the brutal and inhumane British Empire.
By the way, is America not here today due to satanic Imperialism? And yet now America, absolutely contrary to the hopes and dreams that of the Founding Fathers, nobody will convince me that presently and every day more so, America is now also additionally destroying itself with is deep love affair, by the Democrats and truly also the Republican, with all that partains Socialism/Communism, which has America also now in full economic bankruptcy in as much as the true National Debt now stands at over 100 trillion dollars, according to conservative sources due to all the present Socialistic/Communistic programs that have been foisted upon the American taxpayer by the Federal Government dictator like, without ever given the American citizens the right to vote those programs up or down.
Now Americas war machinery circles the globe with the true bogus argument to protect these United States plus trying to impose at gun point upon other nations, which is not what every other Founding Father had in mind. Yes, while Americas borders do not really exist anymore; the laws of immigration treated no better than toilet paper by somebody relieving itself. As now million upon million of illegals have actually been invited in by so called patriotic Americans, mostly the same ones supporting the killing of thousands innocent people in faraway pieces of sand, where now women mothers leave their babies behind, encouraged more and more to become bloody warriors along with men.
In summary, if the Founding Fathers were to rise and speak up, which most born Americans truly do not even know who they are, they would immediatly be arrested, especially during George W.s reign as a brutal Emperor and King, sent to Guantanamo to be waterborded.
George Washington: "Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty". These words are insulted daily by present America with the most inhumane and hoorrendous war machinery ever, now circling the globe, and even more to the one who spoke them for the good of America firtsly and all nations, in tow!
How about these words of a more recent venture: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed". By Dwight D. Eisenhower.
God Almighty have mercy upon America!
papal audience
Perhaps Gibbs should "brush up" on Catholic teaching which has condemned socialism and statism for over 100 years (beginning with Pope Leo XIII Encyclical: Rerum Novarum which was later reconfirmed by Pope John Paul II the Great (arguably Pope Benedict's best friend)).
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