God’s election

I mentioned last week that America’s Catholic bishops were meeting in Colorado to decide how to handle Catholic politicians like John Kerry (and even Catholics who vote for them) who violate Vatican policy by supporting abortion rights, stem cell research, euthanasia, and other such renegade views.

Well, they decided not to wait until after the election before setting out some interim rules. On 18 June, the Bishops overwhelmingly approved a statement saying that when “Catholic public officials …[act] consistently to support abortion on demand [this] risks making them cooperators in evil.”

They did not say that priests must deny communion to these cooperating evildoers who espouse incorrect views. Nor did they say that priests must not deny them communion. They adopted a “different strokes” policy – call it pro–choice if you like – which sounds dangerously like moral relativism, but never mind.

The bishops also declared that “the Catholic community and Catholic institutions” should not give “awards, honors or platforms” to Catholics who “act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.” Thus, Catholic universities ought not to give honorary degrees or speaking invitations to politicians who support the right to abortion.

This will no doubt annoy the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, which has given honorary degrees to former New York State Governor Mario Cuomo (1984), and former Senator Bill Bradley (1987), both of whom support abortion rights.

Other matters of “fundamental moral principle” eluded the bishops’ condemnation, on the ground that abortion is always wrong, whereas capital punishment and war are sometimes permissible.

So it was not strictly speaking self–contradictory for the bishops to let Catholic University of Washington, D. C., bathe its collective conscience in a warm glow. By the bishops’ decree, Catholic University has nothing to be ashamed of for having granted an honorary degree to Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002. When Ashcroft, in a run–up to his own presidential effort in 1998, granted a sycophantic review to Southern Partisan, which defends the Confederacy, Ashcroft’s soft words for the pro–slavery South evidently did not qualify as “defiance of our fundamental moral principles.”

And Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, need not blush for having invited Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie to address its webcast this past 11 March.

There, Gillespie deplored a 6–1 California Supreme Court ruling “that Catholic Charities must provide contraceptive coverage to its employees.” Gillespie deplored the attempt by Senate Democrats to obstruct the appointment of the dissenter in that case, Justice Janice Rogers Brown, to fill a vacancy on the U. S. Court of Appeals, to which she has been nominated by President Bush.

The Colorado decision sends the Catholic hierarchy hurtling still further from the conscience of its constituents, and so is not necessarily good news for the forces of Team Bush. American Catholics are way out of synch with church policy not only on abortion but on contraception, and for that matter, the use of nuclear weapons. (“The growing momentum to delegitimize and eliminate nuclear weapons must now be accompanied by political action by all States,” said Archbishop Renato Martino, Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, on October 19, 1998. “Nuclear deterrence as a national policy must be condemned as morally abhorrent because it is the excuse and for the continued possession and further development of these weapons,” said 75 American bishops in June of that year. I don’t know that Catholics have been polled on nuclear deterrence, but would be amazed if they went that far.)

According to a poll of rank–and–file American Catholics commissioned in early June by the organization Catholics for a Free Choice:

• 76 percent disapprove of Catholic bishops denying communion to Catholics who support legal abortion and 78 percent believe that politicians who are Catholic and who support legal abortion should not be denied communion.
• Just 16 percent believe that politicians who are Catholic have a religious obligation to vote on issues the way Catholic bishops recommend; 83 percent believe there is no religious obligation.
• Three–fourths (74 percent) rejected the notion that Catholic voters have a religious obligation to vote against candidates who support legal abortion.
• Finally, American Catholics indicated the extent to which the bishops have lost their moral authority with Catholics. When asked how important the views of the Catholic bishops in the US are in deciding whom to vote for, only seven percent indicated that the bishops’ views were very important, 23 percent somewhat important, 30 percent not very important, and a full 40 percent stated the bishops’ views were not important at all in deciding whom they would vote for.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, in one of his better documented efforts, thinks the Democrats are idiotic – that is, myopic secular humanists – for failing to cultivate the religious vote, which is not necessarily in the Republicans’ pocket. He rightly notes that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both carried the evangelical vote. To most Americans, Brooks writes, the “president doesn’t have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God…. John Kerry doesn’t seem to get” what Clinton got, at least before he fell off the evangelical wagon and knew sin. A recent Time magazine survey revealed that only 7 percent of Americans feel that Kerry is a “man of strong religious faith.”

Brooks has got something here, but what? It remains true that, in American political discourse, certain phrasings are permitted Southern Protestants that are denied other mortals. Kerry ought to bear this in mind when he chooses his running–mate. But how does Brooks, or anyone, pretend to know precisely what Kerry actually believes about first and last things? I don’t, though if he did not in some fashion accept the wafer as the body of Christ, certain Catholic bishops would not have been peeved at him in the first place. But I do know that the right would rip Kerry if he flagrantly pandered (as did Howard Dean at one point during the primary season), and they would be right to do so.

Brooks leaves out the other, harder part of the church–state tangle when he sniffs at secularists, who have the nerve to be a pushy minority. Americans may like to feel a soft mist of religiosity sprayed by their leaders, but they don’t like being pushed around by the Pope and his Roman Catholic hierarchy, or by Jerry Falwell and his Protestant legions, or by anyone who has the power to influence the state at his or her disposal. Kerry doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – pretend to have the ear of God as the incumbent does. But he has another mission. For a religious man to draw a bright line between his beliefs and the state’s requirements would be a special measure of his civic devotion.