Fears of the Catholic Church again becoming the king-maker/king-breaker it once was??
Five years ago, I would have laughed at such a prospect. But I no longer doubt that such could become the case again one day.
All through human history, our kings (our various governments) have always been in bed with/under the thumbs of one of the following three entities at any given time:
religious leaders
military leaders
business leaders
The Founding Fathers wanted very much to eliminate the possibility that the govenment of the new fledgling United States would ever get into bed with religious leaders. Thus the separation of Church and State we are all so familiar with.
But sadly, while we have avoided full-on religious infiltration (so far), our government has gone in another direction and crawled into bed with business leaders instead. Not that the Fathers didn't see that other possibility and try to prevent it. One of the first things they did after 1789 (after the Constitution was ratified and adopted) was to mandate that ALL state capitols in each of the 13 new states be situated in cities that were NOT the key financial cities of each state. Thus, New York City (one of the most important fincnial centers of the New World at the time, and to this day one of the Top Five most important finacial centers in the whole world) was no longer allowed to be the capitol of New York. The legislators of New York traveled over 100 miles northward to Albany to set up that old mill town as the new state capitol (a full 4 days away on horeback). Ditto for Philadelphia -- no longer allowed to be the capitol of Pennsylvania, the citizens placed the new capitol in Harrisburgh, over 100 miles west. The point was to place as much geographic distance as possible between the capitols and the centers of finance in each state. And the capitol of the USA itself also could not be a center of finance. And so Washington DC was situated with the intentionn of placing as much separation as possible between the seat of government and the seat of finance -- separation from New York City (the original American capitlol) and separation from Philadelphia (the second choice US capitol after New York). Washington DC was a kind of an odd effort at economic quarantine so that the people running government wouldn't be living next door to the same folks running finance, nor attending the same churches as them, nor attending the same clubs, etc.
Look at all the other states:
Illinois has Chicago as the seat of finance, but Springfield as the seat of government.
Nebraska: Omaha is their financial center but Lincoln is their governmental center.
California: San Francisco is their finacial center, but Sacramento is their governmental center.
All the states (except for a few of the New England states -- too old and too geographically tiny to be able to restructure themselves like that) have done this as a deterrent to government being in bed with finance.
And yet ... we failed even in that. Washington DC is totally owned buy huge corporations. And that 4 day horseback journey from New York City to Albany is now (thanks to modern transportation) a 2.5 hour journey. So I do not doubt that we could one day step sideways into a situation with our government getting swooped up into the clutches of religious leaders as well.
As for that OTHER villanous bedfellow -- military leaaders -- that possibility is also something I don't doubt one day happening.
I guess trying to keep those three evil infiltrations out of government is like trying to battle the three-headed hydra. Try to lop of one head, and two more grow back in its place. So there is no winning this battle for as long as humans are what they are.