For at least thirty years, the right-wingers' rap on liberals is that we're out-of-touch elitists who think we know what's good for people with less money, status, and influence, even if those people disagree with us. Well, over on their side, there's this guy:

ORANGE, N.J. -- The Rev. John A. Perricone, an erudite Roman Catholic priest who uses Latin phrases and refers to T. S. Eliot in conversation, is known nationally as [a] leading proponent of the centuries-old Latin Mass, which was banished in favor of a more accessible service by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's.

This month, Father Perricone was called from his academic post as a professor of philosophy at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and assigned here as administrator of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a working-class parish not far from Newark.

So far, the match has not gone well.

A group of parishioners is enraged that in their view, the priest is imposing on them aspects of the traditional Latin Mass, called the Tridentine Mass after the Council of Trent in the 16th century. Today, nearly three-dozen parishioners — some carrying signs denouncing the priest ("Get Rid of John Perricone Now," read one) — picketed Our Lady of Mount Carmel before and after the 10:30 a.m. service, which drew nearly 200 people....

One protester, Carmine Guerriero yelled, "Our people built this church!" He said his grandfather, a mason, had helped build the church, whose golden spire rises gleaming above Route 280. "He put his sweat and blood in this church, and his money," Mr. Guerriero said....

If any conservatives are reading this now, they're probably approaching a breakdown like HAL's in 2001, the kind that comes from being told something that utterly contradicts what they consider an inviolate rule: It's impossible that a conservative could arouse the ire of the working class! Conservatives' ideas are utterly in sync with the thoughts of the working class! Liberals always think they always know better, not conservatives! Peggy Noonan says so, so it must be true!

Er, no:

"He came in with the attitude of, `I'm here; I'm going to rule; this is a dictatorship; if you don't like it, leave,' " said a protest organizer, John J. Sammaro, 38, whose great-grandparents belonged to the church. "He's not serving God and the people. He's serving himself."...

You'd think the good father might be somewhat abashed, or at the very least ask himself whether he'd done the right thing but gone about it the wrong way. You'd be wrong.

"I guess if the people want to be captious, they will alight on anything," he said, adding that the complaints would have no effect on him. "I'm perfectly in conformity with the teachings of the church and the archbishop," he said, adding that the traditional Latin Mass is particularly popular among younger people engaged in a "cultural repudiation" of the excesses of the 1960's. "There's a sense of a right order in it," he said.

"Captious," for those of you who are intellectually inferior to the good padre, means "marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections." Nice way to talk about your parishioners.

Father Perricone, 53, also denounced the criticism of his celebration of the Mass as either "lies" or the carping of some parishioners who simply do not like the fact that they have a new priest. "I can't imagine an instance where I showed insensitivity to anyone," he said.

How about just now, when you called them "captious"?

Think this is doctrinal rather than political? Actually, it's both: Check out this speech by Father Perricone, to a Catholic organization, in which he says his message especially needs to be understood by

the very young present whose religion classes consisted in self-affirmation exercises and committing to memory all the sacred articles of Democratic platform....

He ends the speech as follows:

On September 11, 1964, William F. Buckley Jr. addressed the national convention of the Young Americans for Freedom. Barry Goldwater is going to lose the coming election, he tells them. But, he continues, the Goldwater campaign and the conservative efforts that will follow are the parts of the decades-long assault on the walls of fortress liberalism. On the day after the election. he says, "We must emerge smiling, confident in the knowledge that we weakened those walls, that they will never again stand so firmly against us."

Today I bid you Church Militant - soldiers - continue your assault on the walls of fortress modernism. Use your intelligence in a thousand different ways. Most of all use your sanctity and your virtue to persevere in a battle we shall soon win. For we must always stay smiling, because all of you must be confident in the knowledge that we have weakened those walls, and that they will never again stand so firmly against us.

This is expressly political.

There's a conservative movement in the Catholic Church that has much closer ties to the GOP and the VRWC than, say, Al Qaeda ever had to Saddam's Iraq. Consider the crowd who attended Robert Bork's baptism (by an Opus Dei priest); consider the people who ran the scurrilous ad accusing Democratic opponents of William Pryor's confirmation of anti-Catholic bias (despite the fact that four of the nine Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who voted against Pryor are themselves Catholic). I left the Catholic Church when I was 14, so maybe I'm no expert, but I don't think this movement reflects the thinking of the rank and file. I think it's an arrogant imposition on the rank and file. And, in addition, it's bubbling up in our political life.