Senator Obama's campaign also highlights some particular issues in regard to religion.  Most specifically is the failure of the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago to implement its theological vision among Chicago's Catholic electorate and the city's Catholic politicians.

        One Catholic expresses her positive view of Obama this way: "It is time for an end to cynicism and apathy in regard to politics.  The time has come for transforming the way the system works." 

        This was said before Senator Obama flip-flopped on many of his positions.  It also completely ignores the senator's support for abortion which is "the old system" of death at work.

        On the website CatholicsforObama.com, we read that Mark Linton, Obama's "national outreach director" claims he supports the senator because of his "unifying message of hope and change."  No one followed up this statement to ask, "Mark, what happens to hope when the wire enters the womb?"

        Today's Democrat Party in Chicago has aligned itself with groups and interests that are at odds with Catholic teaching and theology.  How could this have happened? 

        This is an especially intriguing question, because the church teaches about the evil of abortion, while many Catholic Democrats will vote for Senator Obama who fully supports abortion on demand.

        The senator has been a supporter of abortion rights from the time he first held elected office in Illinois. U. S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, an Obama supporter, said: "The facts are clear...Senator Obama has always had a 100 percent pro-choice rating."

        Adding to this endorsement, Pam Sutherland, president and CEO of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council claims:  "He has always voted in favor of abortion rights." 

        For a political party that wants to ban smoking, handguns, drilling for oil in ANWAR, and pate de foie gras, a woman's right to choose is an inconsistent right to defend.  Consistency demands that if you are in favor of bans, you would also ban abortions.  If men cannot choose to own a handgun or to smoke at a bar, why should women have the right to choose an abortion?

        But politics in Chicago is not about consistency.  It is about power, and Chicago Democrats, even if they are Catholic, will support abortion to get and keep power. 

Abortion Is Obama's Linchpin

        Just outside Chicago's Loop there is a ring of almost abandoned yet beautiful Catholic churches.  They were built by European immigrants from Italy, Germany, Poland, and Ireland. 

        Regrettably, many in the next generation from these immigrant groups fled to the suburbs. The belfries of these old churches are now filled with cobwebs, just like the thinking of their suburban parishioners. 

        If that new generation had stayed the way some of the Irish stayed in Chicago to meet the great wave of black migration from the southern United States, Chicago would have a different politics, today.

        The social processes that lead to the rise of the Irish politicians in Chicago is complex and varied.  In summary, we can see these processes coming to fruition around the same time that many Catholic immigrants were upwardly mobile and moving to the suburbs. 

        Black immigration from the south to Chicago paralleled that move.  It all came to a head in the 1960s, and from that time forward liberal Democrats have managed to run Chicago as a one party state. 

        The conservative values of the European immigrants and their old Democrat Party gave way to the new socialist and liberal values of a secular elite.  In short, to keep power Chicago Democrats sided with the heretics.

        Support for abortion became the linchpin for liberal, Democrat politics in Chicago.  Without that linchpin, the wheels would fall off the bandwagon that Senator Obama hopes to ride into the Oval Office. Turn voters away from abortion and the senator's campaign will skid to a halt. 

        Labor unions especially must look at what they used to be in Chicago and what they have become. Traditionally, labor unions were a socially conservative mainstay of Chicago's Democrats.  As unions disappeared from the city with changing economic times, unions of public employees picked up the slack. 

        Democrat Party regulars understood that if the old unions can't supply jobs, then the city could.  With that stroke of political insight, modern Chicago was born as a socialist, one-party city-state in the heart of a capitalist nation. 

        In his article, "The Decline of Chicago: The City that Does Not Work," Steve Bartin writes:  "The largest employer in the city of Chicago is the federal government.  Followed by the City of Chicago Public School system."

        Bartin continues, "Other major employers are the city of Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Cook County government, and the Chicago Park District.  These thousands of government workers provide the backbone (votes) of the coalition for... 'political stability.' "

        By siding with the Irish politicians and their policies, the Catholic Church in Chicago sided with not only policies that support abortion but also policies that support segregation.  "The entire Chicago Public School System is only 9 percent white.  Not a single public high school has a population that is majority white."

        Early on in the process that transformed the city, the church was niggardly in its mission to convert black Chicagoans.  It still has a niggardly mission, today.  Catholic school enrollment is declining in Chicago and little is being done about it. 

        As the Democrats in Chicago catered to the wishes of the city's minorities, it slid downward into an "enlightened" socialism.  The church followed the Democrats in that downward slide.

        The failure of influential Catholics in Chicago to speak out against Senator Obama's support for abortion is a failure of nerve.  It is also a betrayal by silence. 

        Will the Church's hierarchy continue to be silent into November and not criticize Senator Obama's policies the way the hierarchy has been silent about the city's Democrat mayor?  In the multicultural city of Chicago, it looks like Catholics have become sheep and their shepherd is the wolf.