Deafening Silence

Archbishop Henry Mansell of the Diocese of Hartford, Connecticut has taken a bold stand on capital punishment. He has launched an all-out drive to organize Connecticut’s Catholics in support of Pope John Paul II’s teaching on capital punishment: that the death penalty is permissible only in “extremely rare” circumstances.



The pope maintains that such circumstances are “virtually non-existent” in the modern world. So the archbishop called upon local pastors to give sermons and circulate petitions to abolish the death penalty in the state. (The impending execution of a serial killer, which would be Connecticut’s first execution in 45 years, brought the issue to a head. As I write, the execution is on hold.)

Mansell had to know that there would be grumbling in the pews as this issue was brought to center stage. According to a Quinnipac University telephone poll, 66 percent of Connecticut’s Catholics support the death penalty. Local pastors know those numbers. In my parish, there was a short perfunctory notification from the pulpit of the archbishop’s wish that Catholics in the state apply political pressure on their politicians to end the death penalty — and a two-paragraph notice in a not-prominent spot in the parish bulletin about a petition to that end being organized by the parish.

Here is what was said in the bulletin, the whole kit and caboodle:

Archbishop Mansell has requested that each parish in the archdiocese circulate a petition requesting that the Connecticut General Assembly abolish the death penalty in the state. The Church’s opposition to the death penalty is based on respect for the dignity of each human person, and, in particular, on the teaching of Pope John Paul II on that subject.

Copies of the resolution to be submitted to the legislature have been posted in the narthex of the church this weekend and the petition will be available for your signatures on the weekend of January 14–15.

Thank you for your support for this important issue.

That was it. Not a word more.

Not exactly a call to arms, is it? The parishioners responded in a comparably lukewarm manner. There were no lines of people waiting to affix their signatures to the petition after the Mass I attended. I was among those not in line. I do not interpret “extremely rare” and “virtually non-existent” to mean “never.” I have heard reports that the reaction to the petitions was the same in the rest of the state: indifferent.

Why were local pastors reluctant to go to the barricades with Mansell? My guess is for the same reason they do not talk much about the Church’s teaching on divorce, birth control and extra-marital sex these days. The pastors want to keep the flock happy and attending Mass on a regular basis. The pastors read the newspapers; they know the polls. Probably a good number of them also do not interpret “extremely rare” and “virtually non-existent” to mean “never.” No doubt older pastors can recall times when they preached the morality of the death penalty. That was the Church’s teaching, after all, up until about ten years ago.

Inside the Passion of the ChristAll very interesting, this hint of dissent from rank and file Catholics who usually acquiesce to anyone in a Roman collar. But not half as interesting as the expressions of dissent that were not heard. I have in mind the non-existent confrontation between the archbishop and the ACLU and the editors of Connecticut’s major newspapers and the professors at colleges throughout Connecticut and columnists such as Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of the New York Times and the “personally opposed but” Catholic politicians such as Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy, as well as Chris Dodd from Connecticut. Where did everybody go?

Where was the uproar over Mansell’s violation of the separation of church and state? The angry denunciations of his use of church property to circulate petitions on a partisan political issue? Why is he not getting heat for his attempt to “legislate morality” in a pluralistic society? Why isn’t he being scolded for not respecting the freedom of conscience of his parishioners on a matter of public policy? Why isn’t he being instructed on the need to respect the “nuances” of complex moral issues?

It is obvious. No matter what they say, and whether or not they realize it fully themselves, the secular left in the United States does not believe in the separation of church and state. They are not opposed to legislating morality. They are comfortable with what Archbishop Mansell has done in regard to capital punishment because they agree with him. If he had mounted a crusade to organize Catholics to vote out of office Catholics politicians who support legal abortion or against homosexual marriage, things would be different.

Different? I’ll say. His face would be appearing in ugly caricatures in newspapers all over the United States. Liberal Catholic theologians would be providing people like Mario Cuomo talking points to knock him down, the same kind of talking points they gave Cuomo to argue the case for why the Church had no right to demand conformity on the abortion question. And Cuomo would be all over the nightly talk shows expressing a mixture of indignation and exasperation over leaders of the Church who never learned the lesson of John F. Kennedy’s speech before the Baptist ministers in 1960. You know the drill.

I am going to keep my eyes on the newspapers and the talk shows over the coming weeks, to see if the secular liberals who have denounced the Church for years for “playing politics” with abortion and homosexual marriage, will experience an epiphany over what is happening in Connecticut. There has to be someone on the Left who will be jolted into a recognition of the double-standard that they employ in this area, and who will then ‘fess up; someone who will see that there is no clamor over Archbishop Mansell’s “mixing” of religion and politics for the same reason there was no clamor over members of the clergy marching with Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez to “ban the bomb” or cut off funding for the Army’s School of the Americas; someone honest enough to admit that the separation of church and state becomes an issue only when priests and nuns and archbishops get uppity and leave the liberal reservation.

James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.

(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)

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