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Expanding the Catholic view on faith and politics
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A NATION FOR ALL: HOW THE CATHOLIC VISION OF THE COMMON GOOD CAN SAVE AMERICA FROM THE POLITICS OF DIVISION
By Chris Korzen and Alexia Kelley
Jossey-Bass, 145 pages, $24.95
If the three books under consideration could somehow transform into individuals around a table, the result would be a high-level, compelling Catholic conversation rich with a sense of history and an understanding of the complexity and tensions inherent in considering the place of belief and believers in the public debates of the day. Not a bad group to consult before the upcoming election. The discussion, it is worth noting, would also be blessedly free of shrill extremes, a luxury one can organize in a conversation but not in real-life politics.
In terms of the current election, the timeliest book is the one with the most immediate title, Can a Catholic Support Him? Its author is a most unlikely partisan. Douglas Kmiec has been an administrator and law professor at The Catholic University of America and the University of Notre Dame and is currently professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University’s School of Law. In those positions and as President Ronald Reagan’s constitutional lawyer, he advocated in “the strongest terms for the overturning of Roe,” he writes, referring to the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
Few have more “street cred” in opposing abortion. So if the orthodoxy of the antiabortion movement confines political support only to those who would vote to ban abortion, with no mitigating circumstances allowed, what’s he doing supporting Barack Obama?
Mr. Kmiec is not only deeply read in the social justice tradition (he’s taught courses in it), he also understands the subtleties of moral reasoning and he knows well the documents that popes and bishops have produced. And none would uphold single-issue politics.
He goes to the heart of the extremist argument: that a politician who refuses to work to ban abortion is complicit with evil and so, by extension, is any Catholic who votes for such a politician. According to this argument, there can be no mitigating circumstances.
CAN A CATHOLIC SUPPORT HIM? ASKING THE BIG QUESTION ABOUT BARACK OBAMA
By Douglas Kmiec
The Overlook Press, 174 pages, $12
Mr. Kmiec accepts that but writes that doesn’t mean that Catholics are prohibited from voting for politicians who may think it unwise to overturn Roe v. Wade yet work to restructure economic conditions to, for instance, make abortion less likely.
“It certainly does not mean that Catholic voters cannot make candidate choices that can reasonably be thought to establish social justice policies that advance the culture of life,” he writes.
Whenever a person of stature and learning publicly makes such a dramatic and fundamental switch, it grabs our attention and, perhaps, skepticism. Is it real? Are there hidden motives? Mr. Kmiec’s change of party allegiance, at least for this election cycle, certainly seems real and deeply considered. And he’s paid a price in the scorn of the far right. In one searing incident about which he writes movingly in the book, he was publicly humiliated from the pulpit and then denied Communion.
The greatest value of Mr. Kmiec’s small book is that he provides Catholics with accessible language and a rationale from deep within the Catholic tradition to counter the single-issue terrorists who hold out excommunication and hell as the punishment for thinking differently about a complex public issue.
Archbishop Charles Chaput has an engaging and conversational style of presenting a rather gloomy assessment of American culture -- one that might find resonance across the divisions of party and church factions -- and yet an understanding embrace of pluralism and the democratic process.
RENDER UNTO CAESAR: SERVING THE NATION BY LIVING OUR CATHOLIC BELIEFS IN POLITICAL LIFE
By Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
Doubleday, 258 pages, $21.95
(In an interesting connection, Mr. Kmiec speaks approvingly of Archbishop Chaput’s book Render Unto Caesar, but one wonders what he might say of the archbishop’s pronouncement earlier this month that vice presidential candidate Joseph Biden, a Catholic senator who does not support overturning Roe, should refrain from receiving Communion.)
If the futility of the Republican focus on overturning Roe became the turning point for Mr. Kmiec, fear that Catholics are too accommodating to a sometimes hostile culture that finds religion repugnant is a key motivation for Archbishop Chaput’s concerns.
The archbishop ranges over a wide spectrum of subjects, including an engaging section on church and state and a retelling of the historic tensions between Christianity and the political cultures in which it has resided. His reading of the abortion issue is straightforward but allows the benefit of the doubt to those who might vote for someone who does not support overturning Roe, though only after they have struggled mightily with that decision and only for the most compelling of reasons.
One gets the impression that Archbishop Chaput enjoys a bit of back-and-forth and would be a provocative conversation partner at the imaginary table. One strong theme that colors much of the book, however, is his belief that early and virulent forms of anti-Catholicism have morphed into subtler and more insidious forms. Given the prominence of Catholics, however, from the Supreme Court, to presidential candidates, to Congress, to leaders of finance and industry, one wonders how deep anti-Catholicism runs. Or is it more a case of the archbishop’s impatience with those who don’t follow a certain brand of Catholicism?
If there is an alternative to his sense of gloom about the Christian/Catholic enterprise in society, one might see it in Chris Korzen and Alexia Kelley’s A Nation for All, an explication of the Catholic vision of the common good. Catholic social teaching and the common good can remain fairly squishy concepts unless applied to particulars. The most difficult part is to define the teachings -- what are they, where did they come from, to whom do they apply? The authors have taken the main themes treated in the “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,” released by the Vatican in 2004, and applied them to the United States and to a Catholic vision of the common good. The book is a good primer on key themes: human dignity, common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, preferential option for the poor, the rights of workers and care for creation, among others.
It provides a look at the origins of some of the strains of teaching, at how popes from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI have built on the church’s convictions about the common good, including strong critiques not only of Marxism but also of capitalism. The demands of justice can be severe coming from the papal pulpit, a reality that is not often preached from parish pulpits.
Whatever the outcome of this year’s election, one gets the sense that a new front has been established in the discussion of religion in the public square. Mr. Korzen and Ms. Kelley represent, respectively, Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, two of the new groups on the political landscape intent on revitalizing the notion of the common good. Their contribution and those of Mr. Kmiec and Archbishop Chaput all elevate the Catholic contribution to our political conversation.
Tom Roberts is NCR editor at large and news director. His e-mail address is troberts@ncronline.org.
National Catholic Reporter October 17, 2008
Section:
I. Book Reviews 
As a Catholic and a
As a Catholic and a Religious Sister, I am unequivocally pro-life. I support all lawful, official and economic means that will help end this national tragedy. But more needs to be done to expand the dialog and to assist in the education of Catholics about the common good. One way is to make our vote count. As a nation in order to truly uphold the value of life, we need to work at ways to reduce abortions and pay attention to the economic reasons that remain core to abortion. It is imperative we not just say we value life with mere words but with viable actions.
Abortion would be less of an
Abortion would be less of an issue if the morals of this country, this modern world, were any better. We don't know how to do this. Parents are unable, too busy. Entertainment isn't entertainment unless it's bedroom or bathroom oriented.
Many children are raised with a number of dads or moms, all of them the biological parents who knows any more of which one. So we harp on this but do nothing to make it different. It will take a lot of work to be a better people, a really strong people. We are not a happy people and we don't know why in spite of all we have---or had.
The bishops themselves are so out of touch and the church is not strong. The church does not teach justice, peace, caring for each other. The church can only scream "condemn, condemn" with no regard to the struggle of the ordinary men and women and those leaders that try to make it better.
The right to life is equal
The right to life is equal for children who die from abortion, war, poverty and other abuses (see Evangelium Vitae 57:4-6). The Catholic Vote: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Clarke E. Cochran and David Carroll Cochran, Orbis, 2008, helps me respond to injustice done to any of these children. It is a compact resource 134 pages) of Catholic social teaching—principles and issues—and political savvy that helps any voter form proportionate reasons and “prudential judgments”. I'm disappointed that NCR did not include it here. Both authors are political scientists and Clarke Cochran is also a deacon and deacon formation director of his diocese. They call us to go "beyond Left and Right".
I believe I will have to explain myself to all of these children of abortion, war, poverty, etc. in the next life, where they will not be divided. I believe I can do this if I follow a procedure for voting (see below) that does not divide us from any of these children, and allows us to avoid moral, if not political, compromise. It also allows us to give appropriate weight to issues from "most serious" to serious (more below). I own Archbishop Chaput for the perspective on proportionate reasons by recalling the aborted children we must face in the next life. Yet the vision did not stop there for me.
When we write candidates that (1) we withhold final commitment to any candidate until the election, (2) we thank each candidate for the specific Catholic teachings each supports, and (3) we urge support for all of the specific Catholic concerns each candidate still does not, then we help insure that all candidates keep working to maximize what they do for every one of our Catholic issues. This conditional support still allows us to work for a candidate, yet also say that "things can change in a heartbeat". But if candidates can count on us, they minimize what they do for us. This is how they gain slack to court other voters with different interests.
This "active persuasion—delayed selection" also allows parishioners who work for one concern to support parishioners working for other concerns.
Issues of justice and culpability such as lack of legal protection are what give different "weights" to the right-to-life cases, and this is where aborted children get their heavy weight. Yet it is combined weights that form proportionate reasons that indicate total good and evil for each candidate. They also allows us to consider, not dismiss or ignore, all serious issues—and all issues of Catholic social teaching.
Pope Benedict XVI has a “not negotiable” list in Sacramentum Caritatis (no.83): "...regarding fundamental values, such as respect for human life, its defence from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one's children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms (230). These values are not negotiable."
Again, respect for human life and its defense till natural death includes the innocent children whose right-to-life is violated in war. poverty and other abuses. Promotion of the common good cannot be ignored. To honor these requirements when our major political parties are inevitably involved openly or quietly with intrinsic and other serious evils means to consider proportionate reasons.
It seems to me that denying
It seems to me that denying people communion and making an example of certain Catholics has done more to drive and keep people away from the Catholic Church than it has to change people's minds on the seriousness of abortion as a moral issue.
I must say that I too am for
I must say that I too am for life. In my opinion one can not be against life and say one is a Christian. But, how can we say that "I am pro-life" and vote for a political leader who stands for aborting the life of hundreds of innocent civilians in a war that was rationalized with a lie. We can not say that we are pro-life and support a party that condones the Bush Doctrine. What is the difference between aborting a child's life prior to its birth and aborting a child/adult's life after birth through a war based on greed? I think we have to be careful about being so one issue oriented in our religio/politico thinking that we become myopic.
I'm sure we all find it
I'm sure we all find it puzzling that the Republican candidates who claim to be genuinely "pro-life" tolerate without rebuke or disavowal cries of "Kill him" "Off with his head" after they have labeled Senator Obama as a terrorist. There seems to be a blinkered and earplugged agenda operating here.
This is not a single issue, it's a partial- and incomplete-issue. Pro-life? Unfortunately no.
I am a father of seven and a
I am a father of seven and a Catholic - clearly, I am pro-life. I marvel at how we are allowing the "pro-life" debate to expand to include all that afflicts modern society. The past eight years has produced the most unfortunate set of political circumstances that one could ever imagine. So, rank and file Catholics, as well as the Priest/Religious communities resolve for overturning Roe v Wade is being tested. We are scurrying around looking for ways to justify our voting for people who are clearly pro-abortion by expanding the "pro-life" debate to be all-inclusive. We are tempted to listen to the "common ground" argument that's designed specifically to capture pro-life votes. It’s a mystery to me how we could ever find “common ground” until we stop the killing.
The gospel message and the
The gospel message and the words of Jesus address all that afflicts society not just a myopic one-issue pro-life position!
First things first is the
First things first is the order of the day in this struggle against what is arguably the most demonstratively evil thing that the US has perpetrated on the most valuable of valuables. As a species we must not continue to condone the killing of the innocent and thereby discard all that they may have provided to the betterment of humankind and the honor and glory of God. There is no greater challenge that we face as a civilization then to stop the killing of our precious, precious children. I find it hard to believe yet I am grateful that God has thus far delayed in punishing us for this atrocity. You can find a place to hide inside the words of Jesus if you want, but as for me – first things first!
I don't think that abortion
I don't think that abortion or any other political/moral issue is the Gospel.
"Moreover, brethren,I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, By which also you are saved,if you hold fast that word which I preached to you--unless you believed in vain. For I delievered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures."
I Corinthians 15:1-4 (Apostle Paul)When we believe this we receive the righteousness of God through Christ and we are given a new heart with new deisires. If we have the mind of Christ we are not for immorality and the Holy Spirit that indwells us convicts us of our sin. (Colossians 3:1-6)Unbelievers are spiritually dead in their sins and trespasses and use human reasoning in all the issues anyway. (Ephesians 2:1-10). The Gospel was not intended to improve the world, but is the good news how a sinner such as myself can stand before a holy, just God. There is never going to be world peace as long as this world rejects its creator Jesus Christ. (Colossians 1:6-16)
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