Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine belongs to the strange subculture of people fixated on the Catholic Church and eager to change nearly everything about it. Kaine’s latest attempt to play pope unrolled last week, when he addressed the gay activist Human Rights Campaign, assuring them that the Church would drop its 2,000-year-old teaching on marriage.

Kaine thinks that the Church should base one of its seven sacraments not on Genesis, Leviticus and St. Paul, but on Obergefell v. Hodges. Forget the decrees of apostles, popes and bishops: Let’s reshape our faith to suit a secular court’s 5-4 majority, he seemed to say. Thomas More was willing to see his head hacked off rather than let the state tear up God’s rules about marriage, but Tim Kaine is more of a Henry VIII-style Catholic — that is, he makes up the rules as he goes along.

That would explain how Kaine could go from running for office in Virginia as a pro-life candidate to hobnobbing with baby-parts magnate Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood, and running on the Democratic Party’s rabidly pro-abortion platform — which opposes even the slightest protection for viable unborn children, protections that exist across even socially liberal Western Europe.

Now, I respect people who have lost their faith in one church’s creed and search out another — admitting what they’re doing like honest adults. According to Pew Research, some 40 percent of American Catholics leave the Church and don’t return. There are also those who feel unsure about one piece or another of the Church’s complex teachings, so they quietly ponder and pray.

But Kaine isn’t either such person. Instead, he’s one of those tribal Catholics who grew up believing that they somehow own the Church, so they have the God-given right to knock down its walls and install jacuzzis. Too many Catholics in positions of power and influence seem to agree. As I wrote in the Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism:

When a large group of highly educated people who have dedicated themselves to an organization with firm doctrines, strict rules, and stern demands — such as the Catholic Church— reject those doctrines, rules, and demands, what do they do with themselves instead? Shrug and join the United Methodist Church? … When families (like the Kennedys or the Bidens — and millions of less famous Irish and Italian American clans) have strong ethnic and historical connections to the Church, what do they do when they reject its teaching authority? The history of the Catholic Left after Vatican II gives us the answer: Such people focus on the parts of the original mission that still appeal to them — and jettison the rest.

Apparently the “parts” of the Catholic mission that Kaine is willing to cling to are those that can be soldered onto a left-wing political juggernaut. The New York Times reports that back in the 1980s, Kaine went with a band of radicalized Jesuits to Honduras. Once he was there, “Mr. Kaine embraced an interpretation of the gospel … known as liberation theology.” Columnist Ken Blackwell correctly notes that liberation theology (condemned by three popes, including Pope Francis) is “an avowed Marxist ideology inimical to the institutional Catholic Church and to the United States.” Blackwell also observes that

around the time Kaine was there, Jesuits were arrested for gunrunning, and, the next year, the Honduran government banned any more American Jesuits from coming to that country because of their left-wing activism.

They also expelled one American-born Jesuit, who also had to leave that religious community because he was too radical even for them. That priest was Father Jim Carney, and he was the one The New York Times tells us Kaine sought out across the border in Soviet-supported Nicaragua….

I spent my years in Catholic high school contending with Tim Kaine’s ilk: Disgruntled feminist nuns who admitted they hated Pope John Paul II, scraggly ex-seminarians who denied that Jesus’ body had risen from the dead, wizened oddballs who hated our faith but couldn’t find other jobs. They showed us Sandinista propaganda films in religion class. They lied to parents about what they were teaching, and bullied students who disagreed. I’ll never forget what one of those Tim Kaine clones said when I disputed his latest revision of basic Christian doctrine, and I cited the words of Jesus in the Gospel.

The teacher smiled thinly and said, “Jesus didn’t have an M.A. in theology from Catholic University. I do.”