Politics & Power Quote by Roger Mahony

A clergyman doesn’t lob a line like this just to sound civically engaged. Mahony’s phrasing is deliberately sober, almost bureaucratic: “the nature” of parties, not their platforms; “has changed,” not “has gotten worse.” That restraint is the point. It signals pastoral authority - the voice of someone trained to diagnose moral weather without turning the pulpit into a campaign rally. The sentence is a doorway, not a verdict.

Its intent is to legitimize concern while postponing partisanship. By framing the shift as structural, Mahony implies that old assumptions about bipartisan balance, shared facts, or a basic commitment to the common good no longer hold. The subtext is less “vote for X” than “the civic ecosystem you relied on for stability is now volatile.” Coming from a Catholic cardinal, it also gestures toward a recurring Church dilemma: how to speak about public life when the electorate is split, the issues are fused (abortion, immigration, poverty, religious liberty), and both parties claim moral high ground while treating the other side as illegitimate.

Context matters because Mahony’s career spans the postwar era through the culture-war realignment, the rise of evangelical-political identity, and the hardening of partisan media. For many religious leaders, those decades brought an unsettling trade: access and influence in exchange for being drafted into someone else’s narrative. This line reads like a quiet refusal of that draft notice. It invites listeners to notice the transformation - from parties as coalitions that negotiate to brands that mobilize - and to ask what that does to conscience, compromise, and the thin social trust democracy runs on.