Rigid bishops one-up the popes

Those who thought the lack of a Catholic presidential candidate might spare us the Catholic-versus-Catholic ugliness and the “wafer wars” of recent years have been disappointed.

As Mary Barron reports in this issue, the “vehement rhetoric of Catholic against Catholic” has emerged suddenly and harshly. Catholic leaders determined to show their ecclesiastical muscle are at it again.

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, fired one of the first salvos, taking off in his usual over-the-top style against Sen. Barack Obama’s National Catholic Advisory Council, not to mention the candidate himself. In his view, council members are all dissidents unworthy of calling themselves Catholics. In one startling exchange, he compared Obama to Hitler.

We try to ignore Donohue’s rants and exaggerations, but it has become harder now that he has become an attractive find for screaming “debate” shows, some of which have even referred to him as a Catholic official. We’ll grant him the best of intentions, but as we move toward November elections, this needs to be clear: Donohue is not an official, except of his own organization, which attracts enough money from like-minded folks to keep him in business.

The power of the pulpit was used against law professor Douglas W. Kmiec, an outspoken abortion opponent and former lawyer for Ronald Reagan. He reportedly was blasted during a Mass for a group of Catholic businessmen for supporting Obama. Then there was the widely reported public scolding of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, by Kansas City, Kan., Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann.

The archbishop, of course, has every right to use his column in the archdiocesan newspaper to call out a Catholic politician on public issues. It should be noted, however, that Naumann’s asking the governor not to present herself for Communion and essentially to make a public confession is fundamentally an argument over political tactics, not moral beliefs.

Sebelius argues that she vetoed legislation outlawing late-term abortions because it violated U.S. law. It contained no exceptions for pregnancies that endanger a woman’s health or life and was so broad it would have widely jeopardized the privacy of women’s medical records. She believes her strategy -- including that of providing more funds for adoption and aid for pregnant women -- is a politically effective way to decrease abortions, a claim she backs up by citing a decline in abortions in her state.

The question we are left with is what does the archbishop hope to win by his brinkmanship?

The archbishop suggested the governor obey divine law instead of civil law. For the sake of consistency, one might reasonably ask him if he’s looked down the road in his archdiocese toward Fort Leavenworth, where a noted center of military instruction researches and teaches the art of making war. Has he done a roll call of Catholics there? Or does he think there’s maybe room to fudge on divine law on love of enemies and against killing?

Has he queried his fellow Republicans, the federal legislators for Kansas, perhaps, about where they stand on the Bush administration’s justification of torture, another “intrinsic” evil listed by the U.S. bishops?

Were our bishops to hold their flocks accountable in regard to divine laws related to war and torture, it would get messy. They would quickly find themselves marginalized as radicals, cut off from civil respectability and its numerous benefits.

Alas, we have little fear that anything of the sort will occur.

More likely Catholic leaders will continue to waste away their credibility by investing all their political capital in a single issue.

In that context, it is good to note that -- contrary to some reports -- no effort was made to bar offending political candidates from receiving Communion at recent papal Masses in Washington and New York. In fact, punitive use of Communion has not been the papal style. Pope John Paul II, no slouch on the issue of abortion, personally distributed the Eucharist in a large public Mass in 2001 to Rome’s mayor, Francesco Rutelli, a high-profile Catholic and former member of the party that led the battle to legalize abortion in Italy. Two years later, John Paul gave the Eucharist in a private Mass to then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was then not only a pro-choice politician but an Anglican.

We are grateful for those U.S. bishops who follow the papal lead. If the past election season is any indication, some at the highest level, among them Cardinal Francis George of Chicago and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then-archbishop of Washington, refused to engage in Communion politics. That didn’t prevent them from speaking out strongly on abortion, but it protected the Eucharist from becoming a hostage to partisan and one-issue politics.

We think that’s the wisest path, politically and theologically.

National Catholic Reporter May 30, 2008