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"Why is the resignation of the Bush's chief Catholic advisor—a position of much greater power than the governorship of New Jersey—getting so little attention?" asks The Revealer's Jeff Sharlet. The Washington Post today runs a 700-word summary on page A-6. Yesterday's The New York Times also treated it as a minor blip on the campaign trail. Sharlet says the story should be bigger, since no one can counter The National Catholic Reporter's point that Deal Hudson controlled Catholic access to the White House. "Even leaving aside the undisputed charges of profound sexual misconduct," his resignation should warrant more attention than the resignation of the Democratic Party's religious-outreach director, who had yet done little for the Kerry campaign.

The story made a splash on some Catholic blogs—discussion is still going strong on Amy Welborn's Open Book, and Amy is doing her best to keep the conversation healthy and on-topic—but other conservative Catholic blogs you'd expect to hear from are silent. Carl Olson is ostensibly on vacation but still posting on other matters. Nothing on the Envoy site, either. RatzingerFanClub has a bit, but almost all of St. Blog's is quiet. And it's not just the Catholics. So far, nothing on Andrew Sullivan, GetReligion, WorldMagBlog, or most other religion & politics blogs. National Review Online's The Corner hasn't said anything, and that publication ran Hudson's pre-emptive strike! (Catholics for a Free Choice, on the other hand, has a call for "the Republican National Committee and the White House [to additionally] distance themselves from Hudson and other conservative Catholics who have been disrespectful of women and have engaged in a politics of personal destruction for some time." Whatever. If the group wants want to change the conversation from Hudson's alleged sexual misconduct to abortion, Hudson probably wouldn't mind.)

Over at Open Book, Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher says it's a troubling story:

Powerful and charismatic older male violates his vows by taking sexual advantage of troubled, emotionally unstable young person, using alcohol. This is a familiar Catholic narrative of late, isn't it? … I used to write for Crisis about a decade ago, and know Deal Hudson a little bit, so I'm not going to kick him while he's down. This is an ugly and sad situation for his wife and children. I only want to say that it's important for those of us who consider ourselves conservative Catholics remember not to be hypocrites when one of our own, so to speak, is revealed to have had feet of clay. Attacking the alleged motives of NCR and its reporter does not make the facts go away, or any easier to take.

But that doesn't mean that the story wouldn't have quietly gone away on its own, he suggested shortly before the NCR article was published. "Deal Hudson made this a national story by writing about it in his National Review Online column! If he hadn't done that, and hadn't point-blank revealed that there was sexual indiscretion of some indeterminate sort in his past, the Times probably wouldn't have noticed."

Religion & politics:

• Some friendly advice | Attention, Kerry/Edwards Campaign People: Stop ignoring the phone calls and emails of every single reporter writing a story about religion and the campaign (Amy Sullivan, Political Aims)
• First-time voters for life | What a Pace Poll suggests about new registrants and abortion rights (Duncan Currie, The Weekly Standard)

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48