Boston Globe, NOVEMBER 21,
2011
The Catholic Church sets foot in tricky waters
By James Carroll
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NOVEMBER 21, 2011
RELIGIOUS
LEADERS have long been powerful in US elections, but this year something new
is happening. Leading members of the American Catholic clergy have escalated
their conflict with the Obama administration, most notably in the new “religious
liberty’’ campaign launched by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The slogan picks up on a long-standing evangelical Christian theme: the idea that government policies on a broad range of issues - including abortion and contraception, same-sex marriage, sex education in schools, and even anti-bullying programs that defend gay students - amount to un-American religious coercion. With the bishops’ new “liberty’’ initiative, the political partnership between the Catholic hierarchy and the largely Protestant religious right is more solid than ever.
It is no surprise that today’s Catholic bishops are lining up with Republican aspirants for the White House. After all, these bishops were vociferous in objecting to President Obama’s being honored at the University of Notre Dame in 2009; they worked against Obama’s signature health care reform in 2010 (and might have succeeded if the Catholic Health Association’s endorsement had not given swing-vote Catholic lawmakers cover to support the bill). In September, key bishops denounced federal regulations about the provision of contraception as “a radically new and unprecedented attack on religious freedom.’’ This month, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, the conference president, warned the Obama administration that its refusal to stand behind the Defense of Marriage Act would “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.’’
Such salvos echo those of far-right Christian groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council - self-appointed advocates of public prayer, Christian supremacy, family autonomy, and “a culture of life.’’ Traditional values are, in a favorite phrase, “increasingly belittled’’ by secular society. Religion is striking back.
But Catholic participation in this extremist counter-culture is uniquely risky. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest nongovernmental organization in the world, carrying out tremendous works of charity and justice across the globe. In the United States, church agencies like Catholic Charities, and institutions like hospitals and schools, are essential to the common good. A narrowly politicized American episcopate can gravely weaken the integrity of such outreach.
Catholic and Protestant evangelical leaders didn’t always sing from the same hymn book. When the religious right was first empowered during the Reagan era, Catholic bishops hummed a very different tune. In numerous declarations, they blasted the economic injustice of the unfettered market, defended the social safety net, criticized prevailing assumptions about the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and mustered decisive opposition to the wars in Central America. They did all this without launching partisan electoral campaigns.
Those were different days, and different bishops. Yes, they were concerned about sky-high abortion rates, but they also regarded Christian morality as, in the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s phrase, a “seamless garment’’ involving more than narrowly sexual questions. The great Catholic tradition of social teaching on the rights of workers, justice for the poor, and the limits of capitalism informed their proclamations, many of which would be familiar to today’s Occupy movement.
Most of that generation of bishops had personal memories of the Second Vatican Council, and, unlike today’s ambivalent hierarchy, believed in its reforms. They knew that, when the Council used the phrase “religious liberty’’ (as it did in Dignitatis Humanae, a key 1965 declaration), the Catholic doctrine of “no salvation outside the church’’ was being overturned.
By affirming religious liberty for those outside the church - the right of every person to act according to the “dictates of conscience,’’ even if that leads to rejection of Catholic claims - Vatican II led to the first true freedom of conscience for those inside the church. That so many contemporary Catholics openly differ with the bishops on the contentious issues defining the new “religious liberty’’ campaign is a direct result of Vatican II’s prior embrace of a more authentic religious liberty - the real thing.
The Catholic hierarchy’s election-year enlistment in the culture wars is bad news for Obama, Democrats, and most other Americans. But the pain for many Catholics goes deeper. Politics is not enough for us. Religion, our first network of obligation and meaning, is an even stouter pillar of the common good, which is why we wince to see our bishops fracture it.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.