Philosophy? I’m a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all!—Franklin D. Roosevelt
I’m pretty sure most of you have caught the news that John
Carr, Executive Director of the Department of Justice,
Peace and Human Development for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops,
has retired. WaPo has a story on Carr’s
influence and legacy in Washington politics that’s fairly laudatory … at
least until reporter Michelle Boorstein turns to consider his as-yet-unnamed
replacement.
Boorstein writes:
At a time when Catholics are watching their community become increasingly polarized along political lines, Carr is considered a dying breed: a Catholic moderate with a foot firmly in both camps. He worked for the White House Conference on Families under President Jimmy Carter and was a Democratic candidate. He has also zealously slammed the Obama White House for its mandate that employers provide contraception coverage to employees. At a good-bye event this week at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops headquarters, Carr’s voice sounded angriest when he bemoaned the Bush-led Iraq War.Catholics are becoming more divided over whether they focus on church teachings against war and poverty or the ones against abortion and gay marriage. Catholic progressives are particularly worried about Carr leaving as Church officialdom in recent years has put greater and greater emphasis on defending the unborn [like Carr did anything to prevent or minimize it? Carr is a pro-life Democrat!].
Okay, here’s the million-dollar question: Why
is there a division? What makes anyone
think that to be against abortion and
gay marriage is to be for war and
rampant poverty, or vice versa?
Let’s grant right away that the political dialogue of today
— so far as it can be called a dialogue rather than competing monologues — is
being shaped mostly by people whose religious formation was nebulous. They may or may not be churchgoers, but you
can pretty much bet that, for the most part, their religious education ended
with the last CCD class, Sunday School or Vacation Bible School they
attended. How else could Rep. Paul Ryan
even try to make peace between Ayn Rand and St. Thomas Aquinas?
By contrast, most church leaders and theologians are
marginal figures. Hans Küng, for
example, is a divisive, controversial figure among the Western Catholic
intelligentsia, but outside that goldfish bowl he’s almost completely unknown
and irrelevant. George Weigel gets
plenty of distribution, but Ann Coulter has a higher profile (God help us!). And, as Dick Daley might have said were he
alive, how many votes can the LCWR deliver?
No, the secularization of American politics hasn’t succeeded
in cutting religion out of the public square so much as it’s succeeded in
cutting religious authorities out of the discussion. This is as much bad as it is good; priests,
ministers, imams and rabbis may not always make the best political analysts,
but they certainly ought to know the difference between good and evil. I’m not certain lawyers and media talking
heads do.
More to the point, though, is that much of Catholic
social doctrine comes without a clear delineation of “best practices” or
“ideal solutions”. Two equally
well-educated Catholics with equally good intentions and morals may still
differ on the best way to approach unemployment, or on federal social support
initiatives such as Medicare. Many
Catholics who applaud the bishops’ stand against the HHS mandate also criticize
them for having supported PPACA (the “Obamacare Act”) in the first place.
The Church is neither Democrat nor Republican, neither
“liberal” nor “conservative” so far as either label is defined by American
politics. She has her own agenda, one
that was set 2,000 years ago, which can’t be subordinated to the platforms of
either party. This hasn’t stopped
Catholic Republicans from treating affiliation with the Democrats as tantamount
to apostasy, or Catholic Democrats from considering capitalism a denial of
Christ. Consider:
“John has been responsible for some of the most prophetic writings that came out of the bishops conference” years ago, said James Salt, executive director of Catholics United. “But at a time when millions of people are unemployed [or struggling with faulty mortgages][*] the bishops’ voice on those issues is near silence. They’re more focused on issues of sexuality. That’s a huge betrayal from my point of view. And some of that blame lies at John Carr’s feet.”
Salt is being disingenuous.
The fact is, the bishops speak just as much on the topics of war and
poverty as they ever did … which is why it isn’t news, and why the media passes
over those comments to get to the opposition to same-sex marriage and
abortion. The USCCB supported Obamacare
precisely because of the problems poor people have in accessing healthcare,
which makes the Obamination’s HHS mandate not only oppressive but ungrateful. If Salt feels betrayed because poverty is not
the USCCB’s only concern, that’s his own fault — his expectations and
priorities aren’t binding on anyone else, especially not the bishops.
The fact is that the same principle of human dignity roots
both the fight against war and the fight against same-sex marriage, that the Church’s commitment to the rights of
the underprivileged is exactly its
commitment to the right to life of the unborn. There is no choice, no “either-or”, but
rather “both-and”. The Church’s
commitment to building families is what keeps it from celebrating
(intentionally) sterile sex as a “right”; the right to equal access to
healthcare presumes a prior right to life from which no one can be disqualified
by age or circumstance.
John Carr is a moderate precisely because he “gets” the
Church. I wonder if either Rep. Ryan or
VP Joe Biden would have had such successful political careers if they had
“gotten” the Church, too.
[*]
Not sure whether this is an editorial insert on Boorstein’s part or if she was
transcribing from a written document, although if the latter then the brackets
should have been parentheses. This is
why punctuation matters, folks!
