October, 2008

It's an article of faith in U.S. politics that, when it comes to the popular vote at least, Catholics determine the winners in our presidential contests. In fact, with the notable exception of George W. Bush eight years ago, no candidate in recent memory has entered the White House without securing a majority of the votes cast by Catholics, who now make up more than a fourth of the U.S. population. Karl Rove, Bush's strategic eminence grise, thought he'd found a way to pry Catholics, as ostensible social conservatives, out of the Democratic embrace and into a new conservative coalition using so-called wedge issues -- such as abortion, same-sex marriage and aid to parochial schools and social service agencies. But that approach isn't working for John McCain, particularly in Pennsylvania, where strategists in both parties seem to agree the Republican nominee's chances will rise or fall.

The conventional wisdom about the 2008 election is nearly unanimous. John McCain closed the gap with Barack Obama when he emphasized cultural and moral issues, especially in his vice-presidential choice of Sarah Palin who put some lipstick on the often angry face of social conservatism. But, the Wall Street meltdown in late September moved moral issues aside. With the nation fixated on the economy, Obama opened up a large lead in the polls that seems destined to carry him to victory. The conventional wisdom is not exactly accurate. The economy did not displace moral issues: The economy is a moral issue. Providing for one's family is a moral obligation, one that is suddenly uncertain. Buying a house and making the mortgage payments is a moral accomplishment, requiring discipline and delayed gratification. Faulty economic theories were part of the reason for the credit crunch, but greed has played its part.

Most analyses of the "Catholic vote" presume there are three basic camps: pro-Obama Catholics, pro-McCain Catholics, and the undecided. For purposes of electoral handicapping, that's a natural way of slicing the pie, but it neglects another important constituency. This block has no candidate, no network of think-tanks and advocacy groups, and it only registers indirectly in the polls: Catholics alienated from both parties, who aren't undecided but rather disenfranchised. John Carr, a veteran policy expert for the U.S. bishops, has said that Catholics who take the church's social teaching seriously wind up "politically homeless" in America. Just like the real homeless out on American streets, the politically homeless are often forgotten, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Beginning with Leo XIII's magisterial encyclical on the rights of workers to a living wage (Rerum novarum, 1891), the Roman Catholic Church looks at public policy through the moral squint of its social teaching. In the words of Benedict XVI's "Message for the 92nd World Day of Migrants and Refugees," "the Church sees" the suffering of our sisters and brothers "through the eyes of Jesus, who was moved with pity at the sight of the crowds wandering as sheep without a shepherd. (Cf. Mt 9:36)." How then, as citizens of faith, do we fulfill the Gospel's prophetic mandate, in our present day? Inspired by the great biblical injunctions of justice or righteousness (sedaqah), right judgment (misphat), and love of neighbor (agape) marking the reign of God, modern Roman Catholic social teaching turns to the distinctively modern idiom of human dignity and the rights that follow from it.

Let two points be stated here at the outset in the clearest and most unequivocal terms: First, the official teaching of the Catholic church on the morality of abortion is not in question (see, for example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 2270-75); and second, it is morally permissible for a Catholic to vote for Senators Barack Obama and Joseph Biden for president and vice president respectively. Needless to say, it is also morally permissible for a Catholic to vote for Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin for president and vice president, or, for that matter, for such minor-party candidates as former Congressman Bob Barr and perennial candidate Ralph Nader.

Barack Obama grew up in a middle-class household. Abandoned by his father as a boy, he was raised by his grandparents and a single mother who sometimes needed food stamps to feed her children. John McCain grew up in a military family. His father and grandfather were both distinguished four-star admirals in the Navy. Sens. Obama, a Democrat, and McCain, a Republican, both promise that if they are elected president, they will make the fight against poverty in Buffalo and other cities a high priority. But they rarely talk about the poor in debates, interviews or public appearances as they stump for votes throughout the country.

I think most Americans, pro-life and pro-choice, know that abortion is unlikely ever to be banned in our country. Many pro-lifers are aware of the difficulties for women such a ban could cause. Many pro-choicers are concerned that too many abortions are performed and understand why so many on the other side of the issue see abortion as a grave moral problem. Reducing the number of abortions would be a good thing in itself, and all the steps on the road toward achieving that end -- from preventing unintended pregnancies to helping and supporting women who want to bring their children into the world -- would be desirable in any event.

Conscientious Catholic voters face difficult choices this Election Day. Like both of this year's presidential nominees, few U.S. politicians fully endorse the church's social ethic, a moral framework that defies the ideological and partisan categories of American politics. In frustration, some might say it would be easier if Catholic bishops simply told us for whom to vote. Appropriately, they do not. Nonetheless, some Catholic leaders and commentators imply that the bishops have done exactly that. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has chosen to focus instead on how Catholics should form their consciences in advance of the election.

The Wild West weirdness of the nation's immigration policy reached new extremes last week in Mesa, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb where the county sheriff, Joe Arpaio, has gone off the rails as the self-appointed scourge of people without papers. About 2 a.m. on Thursday, Sheriff Arpaio sent out a strike force of 30 detectives and 30 members of his volunteer "posse," with semiautomatic weapons and dogs, to look for illegal janitors. Three janitors were arrested at the library. Thirteen other people were picked up at their homes. All are "illegals," according to the sheriff's office, which keeps a running total of its immigration arrests on its Web site.

It has become commonplace in American politics: Certain Roman Catholic bishops declare that the faithful should cast their ballots on the basis of a limited number of "nonnegotiable issues," notably opposition to abortion. Conservative Catholics cheer, more liberal Catholics howl. And that is usually the end of the story. Not this year. Catholics, who are quintessential swing voters and gave narrow but crucial support to President Bush in 2004, are drifting toward Barack Obama. And this time, some church leaders are suggesting that single-issue voting is by no means a Catholic commandment.

The United States stubbornly refuses to ratify many key human rights treaties widely accepted by the international community. Does this kind of ideological resistance continue to make sense in today's world? That will be one of the crucial questions considered at a forum in Baltimore this week marking the approach of the 60th anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The launch of the "global war on terror" seven years ago spawned policies that have torn at the fabric of international and American law alike, and produced a new legal vocabulary that includes such ominous terms as "extraordinary rendition," "enhanced interrogation" and "indefinite detention." In this climate, renewing and reinforcing the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would seem more necessary than ever.

As our candidates for public office never tire of reminding us, these are difficult and scary times for middle-class Americans. Family budgets are strained, savings are thin, debt for college and other basics has swollen, job loss is a real threat. Wall Street's troubles are the average household's troubles, and recession looms. Is now the time to ask the hard-pressed to lend a helping hand, as the Interfaith Hunger Initiative did on Thursday with its "Un-lunch Hour" on Monument Circle? When we look around at the thousands of people in Indiana, and the millions worldwide, who awaken each day wondering where they'll obtain the basics of living, the question answers itself.

When Americans choose a president a month from today, many voters will be guided by their own religious views. That's a good thing to do, but only if people will think about the full range of values their religion teaches them and about which candidate would be most in harmony with them. It will be a mistake if, instead, they base their choice on only one or two issues and the positions the candidate holds on those limited matters. As we think about the election and faith, let's remember two things: The Constitution forbids a religious test to hold office, and Americans cherish freedom of religion. In such a nation, what's at stake in national elections is the common good, not the stance of one faith group on one or two issues. And the common good inevitably requires accommodation, a willingness to allow different interpretations of what constitutes that common good.

Today the rough spots for church officials occur when laws diverge from Catholic teaching. Abortion is an obvious example, but it is not the only one. Consider capital punishment or states' requiring Catholic employers to cover contraception. The Church expects its faithful in offices affecting the making of policy, legislative or executive, not to enact or "unabashedly pledge themselves to the perpetuation of abortion." Yet this obligation need not place Catholic teaching in conflict with public duty, since America is founded on the acknowledgement of a Creator as "self-evident truth" and the universal values of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." While difficulties can emerge in the details, and some issues are without compromise, clash can be mitigated.

In an election cycle filled with its share of quirks, oddities, and surprises, the emergence of Roman Catholic pro-lifers as leading supporters of Sen. Barack Obama-himself a favorite of the National Reproductive Rights Action League-must rank as one of the strangest of twists and turns. Whatever its effect on the election, this unexpected development may also portend a new hardening of the battle lines within the Catholic Church, no matter who is inaugurated president in January. The argument, in sum: the constitutional and legal arguments that have raged since Roe vs. Wade are over, and Catholics have lost; there are many other "intrinsic evils" that Catholics are morally bound to oppose, and Republicans tend to ignore those evils; liberalized social-welfare policies will drive down the absolute numbers of abortions and Senator Obama is an unabashed liberal on these matters. Therefore, a vote for Obama is the "real" pro-life vote.

It's usually encouraging to see Christians expressing concern for their poorest neighbors, but a new Barna survey of evangelicals raises questions about whether some of those concerns are misplaced or even contrived. The survey says 90 percent of evangelicals want Christians to take a more active role in caring for the environment, but only 27 percent firmly believe global warming is real, and 60 percent are concerned that proposed solutions to global warming would hurt the poor. "The Christian community is in tension about environmental engagement, being surprisingly active and engaged, but unsure about what to do next or whom to believe," David Kinnaman, president of The Barna Group, said in a statement. "There is a void in Christian leadership on environmental issues, as well as an inability to articulate clearly and confidently a biblical understanding of creation care."

Every election year Catholics are asked, by bishops or political activists, to uphold Catholic values when they vote. They are told they must vote with a well-formed conscience, put on the seamless garment of the church's social teaching, and not try to renegotiate the nonnegotiables. These are all good rules as far as they go-and they go farther together than separately-but they must be applied in complicated circumstances. They do not by themselves yield any conclusions about how a Catholic should vote in a particular election. In addition to even the best rules, voters also need prudence. If politics is the art of the possible, prudence is the virtue of the possible. It is not just caution or moderation or tact, though those good things all require it.

Among the most ignoble legacies of the George W. Bush administration will be the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Administration officials drunk on executive power, disdainful of due process and indifferent to international opinion established -- in a territory they wrongly thought was beyond the reach of law -- a prison camp whose inmates comprised both dangerous terrorists and bystanders caught up in the post-9/11 dragnet in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Despite its insistence that the United States was at war, the administration refused to treat the inmates at Guantanamo as prisoners of war.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his address to the Catholic bishops of the United States last spring, articulated a challenge to contemporary liberalism, saying, "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted.... To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." The pope was not advocating a union of church and state. He was, instead, insisting that religion makes claims upon a believer's entire life-public views as well as private feelings-and that arguments to the contrary are evidence of a kind of intellectual sloth or a superficial faith.

Everyone's talking about the collapsing economy, the probability that the recession will deepen and that next year will be even harder. People fear that McCain and Palin will continue the wars, worsen the economy, and bring further suffering to the world's poor. Many hope Obama will be elected, end the wars, restore the economy and begin healing the world's poor. But I keep pointing to those deeper Gospel lessons, the long-term journey of personal and global disarmament that Christ commands of us. We're so used to violence. We easily believe the myth of redemptive violence, the lie of war, the false spirituality of violence, the misguided notion that might makes right, that war is justified, that our weapons protect us, that violence works. I suspect we don't trust God, don't think God can protect us, don't take Jesus seriously. In the end, such questions reveal our lack of faith. Do we believe in the God of peace or not?

Mahmoudiya, a town south of Baghdad, was part of the area long known as the "Triangle of Death" because of the extraordinary number of Sunni insurgent attacks against coalition forces and Iraqi civilians it suffered - often half a dozen daily in 2006. Today, with violence down to only a few ineffective attacks in any given week, it has earned the moniker "Triangle of Love." The progress there is due in part to the new US strategy. It involved living among the local population to break the hold of the insurgents and now focuses more on partnering and empowering local Iraqi forces than depending on US troops to target and capture enemies. This switch in Mahmoudiya has spurred economic growth in the area and sheds light on how to manage a drawdown of US forces without sacrificing the hard-won security gains of the past 18 months.

For some time now, there has been a great deal of discussion over whether younger white evangelicals differed from older white evangelicals in their political attitudes and priorities. Now comes a fascinating and important pre-election survey suggesting that younger evangelicals are indeed somewhat more inclined to vote for Obama and to hold more moderate views on gay marriage -- though they are still, on the whole, pro-McCain. The survey, conducted for PBS's Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, found that overall, McCain led Obama by 71 percent to 23 percent among white evangelicals. McCain's lead was even larger, 73 percent to 22 percent, among white evangelicals over 30 years old. But among those under 30, McCain led by only 62 percent to 30 percent.

Immigration raids on workplaces and their destructive fallout were the focus of a press conference sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Sept 10. The bishops and other immigrant advocates have felt increasing concern at the rising number of raids since the failure of comprehensive immigration reform in the summer of 2007, a reform that President Bush once favored. The conference also underscored the fact that the bishops have been trying to work with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to curtail the raids because of the humanitarian damage they cause.

The presidential campaign is a little more than three weeks old and the indications are that health care has fallen off the radar screen. One measure is each candidates' acceptance speech at the convention. The speeches give a clear indication of their priorities and their sense of where they think the campaign and country are focused. As a Democrat and the "agent of change," the expectations that Barack Obama is committed to do something important on health care are fairly high. Furthermore, in a speech devoted to distinguishing his and John McCain's philosophies and priorities, health care would seem to be, well if not Exhibit A, then at least B or C. Thus, it was hard for a health policy wonk not to be disappointed. Mr. Obama spent less than a minute on health care, about 100 words out of 4,900. The expectations for Mr. McCain were much lower. He is not running as a leader on domestic policy, and his proposals on health care have been anemic. His proposals do not even aspire to actually fix the broken system. He spoke all of two sentences, less than 50 words of a 4,000 word speech, on health care.

Whatever happened to the death penalty as a moral priority for Catholics in the US presidential election? Why don't they challenge their candidates on the issue? It's not as if the Church is ambiguous any more. There goes the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Renato Martino, in Rome today, looking to the day in which the death penalty is "definitively eliminated" from the earth. He was speaking at a conference in Rome organised by the Catholic community of Sant'Egidio, which has spearheaded the international campaign to abolish the death penalty. Cardinal Martino left American Catholics no wiggle room in his description of the death penalty as "contrary to the great Christian values which sustain the universal rights of man." It may not be as absolutely definitive as abortion and euthanasia, but the Church's opposition to capital punishment (except when faced with the breakdown of civil order) remains one of the core elements of its pro-life teaching.