What Catholics Want

For the past three years Fordham’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work has coordinated a Faculty Colloquia on Jesuit Values and the Law School. Faculty interested in participating set the agenda for discussion themselves – this year they chose to focus on the relationship and potential tensions between individual conscience and religious teaching.

We kicked off this year’s colloquia yesterday with a discussion about Kerry’s Catholicism (readings included John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, and Mario Cuomo’s most recent piece in the collection One Electorate Under God). We were graced by the presence of Peggy and Peter Steinfels who are now here at our Lincoln Center Campus to direct the new Fordham Center on Religion and Culture.

In our discussion of whether the church perpetuates a “single issue” approach to politics, one of the most interesting observations was that the press could pick up on any number of Bishop’s statements – both national (e.g., Faithful Citizenship) and local (numerous letters and statements published in diocesan newspapers) – not to mention the international! - which outline the breadth and depth of Catholic Social Thought’s applications to the most varied political issues and questions – but generally it does not. (I’m not sure if this is a case in point, but I have been shopping the op-ed below for a couple months with no success…).

As we look into what seems to be a mirror of our Catholic community in the press, to what extent do the distorted images we see distract us from the enormously important task of seeing how the various aspects of the life agenda fit together into a cohesive and coherent whole? (I'm not advocating that we get back into the Seamless Garment Party discussion - because I think the most profound answers to this question will emerge from a respectful exchange between the different parties).

What Catholics Want
By Amy Uelmen

Roman Catholics are among the most important swing votes in the upcoming elections. Although in decades past Catholics have supported the Democratic party, the current landscape reveals profound discomfort with both parties. Looking to the left, and then to the right, many Catholics sense that no political party and too few candidates share a consistent concern for human life and dignity. At this point, as the Bishops described in their recent statement on political participation, Faithful Citizenship, many Catholics feel “politically homeless.”

In these few weeks before the elections, what political candidate wouldn’t give his or her eye teeth to be able to read the Catholic mind for insight into what this swing vote really wants? Not that it is any easier to generalize on this than on the eternal question of what women want – but it may be possible to detect a few clues.

What do Catholics want from Democratic candidates? Talk the talk. For those who believe that an unborn fetus is a human life, as Catholics tend to believe, it is jarring when political rhetoric fails to acknowledge that abortion is a profound moral and human tragedy. Catholics want Democrats to back off from a rigid and individualistic rights rhetoric that calls no one to responsibility, inspires no sense of community or solidarity, and can ultimately leave women very much alone.

Certainly a shift in rhetoric will not resolve the central tension – Catholics want legal protection for the unborn, and the Constitution has been interpreted to require less. But it might open the door to a less polarized approach to the problem. If Democratic politicians were to acknowledge openly that abortion is not a glorious triumph for anyone, express appreciation for the ways in which many pro-life efforts are deeply attuned with classically democratic social justice goals, and express their own concrete commitments to work toward a society in which abortion is rare, Catholics might even begin to see the possibilities for something of a common project.

What do Catholics want from Republican candidates? Walk the walk. To capture fully the Catholic imagination, it is not enough to express an isolated commitment to lobby for more restrictive abortion laws. For Catholics the “life” agenda is much broader. “Each person’s life and dignity must be respected,” – the Bishops have stated – “whether that person is an innocent unborn child in a mother’s womb, whether that person worked in the World Trade Center or a market in Baghdad, or even whether that person is a convicted criminal on death row.”

Catholics want Republicans to be broader, more consistent and more concrete in their work for social justice. Whether at the lively surface or imbedded deep within their subconscious, Catholics are inspired – or haunted – by the words of Jesus, “Whatever you did to the least, you did it to me” (Mt. 25:40). As Faithful Citizenship insists, “Our faith reflects God’s special concern for the poor and vulnerable and calls us to make their needs our first priority in public life.” Of course this special concern includes unborn children. But Catholics want Republicans to appreciate that it also embraces all people who struggle to feed, house, and clothe their children in order to provide for them a dignified human existence – in the United States and in every other country.

It should be no surprise that what Catholics want does not neatly line up with any political party’s platform. And to further complicate matters, in the church of “here comes everybody,” to borrow James Joyce’s phrase, one will always find a full spectrum of political perspectives on how best to resolve social problems.

So there is no magic formula for capturing “the” Catholic vote – Catholics will never vote as a bloc. But there is still much to be gained from an effort to understand how Catholic sensibilities may enrich our current political debates. In fact, by listening to what Catholics want, political candidates may even catch the pulse of some of the deepest yearnings in the electorate as a whole.