Brownback To Be Backed By Monaghan?

Domino’s pizza founder Tom Monaghan, one of the nation’s richest and most controversial Roman Catholic philanthropists, wants to deliver Sen. Sam Brownback to the White House.

Monaghan is advising the 2008 presidential exploratory committee for Brownback, a longtime social conservative who converted to Catholicism a few years ago.

Monaghan is expected to play a lead role in “Catholics for Brownback.” But, more important, his support and network is likely to spice up Brownback’s fundraising, which is currently regarded as the weakest part of the Kansas Republican’s candidacy.
Kansas City Star

Unfortunately the article only follows the "quote a Democrat, quote a Republican" school of lazy journalistic balance. Here's a familiar face:

"In the Catholic community, he’s looked upon as kind of on the fringes," said the Rev. Robert Drinan, a liberal Roman Catholic priest and former Democratic congressman who teaches at Georgetown University. "The world view is, 'We have to get back to a Catholic civilization.' They want to go back to a Christian society imposed from above. [...] It's just another world they want to build."

That makes me shiver in all the wrong ways. Drinan himself is a collaborator with secularists who have no reservations about imposing their society, if that is the right word. His work running interference for pro-abortion Catholics has done untold damage to the church and the Democratic Party, not to mention efforts to protect the unwanted unborn.

"There is certainly a degree of presumption, even hubris, in marketing institutions of this type on the premise that all the other schools are failing to educate Catholics effectively," said Richard Yanikoski, the president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

Another bad example of false balance. It's obvious to all but the willfully blind that Catholic higher education is compromised spiritually, ethically, and academically, though usually not financially.

Drinan and Yanikoski are hardly the only opponents of Monaghan, and it's misleading to depict them as his only naysayers. The New Oxford Review has raised some serious concerns about Monaghan's autocratic rule at Ave Maria School of Law, and the AMSoL graduates at Fumare have been detailing Monaghan's faults and recording their alma mater's afflictions for years.

Monaghan's massive support for various traditional Catholic charities and media have made him many friends. His critics' concerns suggest that these friends aren't doing the fraternal correction they need to be doing, for Monaghan's sake and for the sake of his projects. Such an adulatory echo chamber could cripple his new political endeavors.

Related news: Brownback voices pro-Rudy sentiments.