Watching the race for the Republican presidential nomination come to an end when former senator Rick Santorum effectively pulled out of the race, I had two thoughts.  The first: I would have loved to see how Catholics would have voted in fairly Catholic states like New York, Pennsylvania and California for, in effect, the GOP primary contest had turned out to be a referendum on the Catholic bishops and their attempts to inject themselves more in the affairs of state and, as important, the affairs of women.

In state after state, with the subject of the Obama Administration’s alleged conspiracy against the Church so current in the news, the Catholic Santorum was getting trounced by his opponent, Mitt Romney, a Mormon, for the Catholic vote.  Were there ever a time when Catholics would rally to defend the right-wing bishops and their outdated perspectives, this would have been it.  This, after all, was the Republican primary!  If the bishops could not count on Republican Catholics to support the Church’s policies that Santorum made the core of his campaign, they must be the ones, not President Obama, who must be waging a war against Catholics.

My second thought emerged from a column that suggested that Santorum left the race to limit the damage his doomed, prolonged candidacy was inflicting on the GOP this year so as to position himself to run again in 2016.  The image and positions that Santorum cultivated during his campaign evolved from that of a judgmental, moralistic Catholic whose views take second seat to charity and love, the commandment that supersedes the others.  In that way, Santorum is the new Pat Buchanan, who finally has left the national scene when MSNBC at last dispatched him and his even more odious views from the screen.

This has not been a good year for Catholic bishops, Rick Santorum and Pat Buchanan.  But it has been a good year for the rest of us.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.