I’ve read it a couple of times now and I don’t know what event Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and friends are talking about here. In their post about the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, I learn that “the organizers bring Rovian style tactics to our faith, perpetuating the sharpening of religious differences on a narrow selection of social issues.” A group I’d never heard of before they started sending me e-mails about the breakfast last week, accused the breakfast of being a “shameful attempt to shoehorn authentic Catholic teaching into a partisan political agenda,” as a write-up on the U.S. News website reports.

Now, I was there Friday morning (as I have been in the past). The breakfast and its organizers did the opposite of sharpen religious differences.

That’s not to say that they’re weren’t a lot of Republicans there. If I had to bet money, based on the reaction to John McCain’s presence in the audience, it was a majority Republican crowd. But it was not exclusively a Republican event — not on stage or in the audience.

After the president spoke — in a speech which was more a praise for the work of Catholic schools and other Catholic institutions, especially in the inner-city, but also more generally in the culture – we heard from a speaker from the Catholic Worker movement. According to their website, “Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.” (Which is, I’m sure, exactly how KKT would describe the Bush administration.) He was “articulating principles of Catholic social teaching through public service,” as KKT and co. say is a big part of their lives. There were prayers from a rabbi, an orthodox priest, and we prayed for the Assyrian Church in Iraq, lead by an Iraqi who was not the first to shed a tear on stage in an emotional event.

Archbishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City was the keynote speaker. Here’s an excerpt to give you a taste of his reflection on the papal visit to the U.S.:

Time and again the Holy Father has shown a burning desire for unity: among Catholics, among Christians, between religions. But he does not wish merely to “make mankind happier by bringing religions together.” He offers rather an authentic ecumenism: which rests in the New Covenant established in the living and life-giving blood of Jesus Christ; and which alone perfectly fulfills the eternally valid covenant of Abraham. In whatever words he shares with us these days, the Pope will represent to Catholics, to other Christians, to the Jewish people and to all men and women, “believers and non-believers alike,” a living and life-changing proclamation.

I’m hard-pressed to find anything political in his speech.

Anyone who wants to try to make a partisan case against the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is trying to create a fiction about the event. I walked in to people praying the rosary and left after a series of prayers. And no one even prayed for the defeat of Democrats. Maxine Waters was there. KTT & friends say that the breakfast was about “division,” not “hope.” But I’ll tell you: I walked away with a lot of hope, having sat next to an energetic, articulate, prayerful, orthodox young parish priest (pastor, actually) of whom I couldn’t get enough.

Let’s not fight about it, let’s just pray.

B16 was omnipresent last week

The common view from a packed ballroom at the Reagan Hilton.