For that reason, I don’t like to jump to conclusions about anyone’s loyalty to the Church or devotion to our Lord. When I find myself in the company of Catholic Worker and Pax Christi types, I am often struck by their political naiveté and “blame America first” attitude, but seldom doubt their religious convictions.
That said, it is hard to give the benefit of the doubt to Fr. Richard McBrien, the syndicated columnist and Crowley-O’Brien professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. It should be easy to tell the difference between a Catholic theologian and a shill for the Democratic Party. With McBrien you often can’t. In the world of partisan politics, it is not surprising that there are individuals such as James Carville and Mary Matalin, tub-thumpers whose job it is to make excuses for their party and tear down the opposition. Hearing them is much like listening to an attorney for the accused as he manipulates the language to make his client look good, regardless of the facts.
But that is not what we should expect from a Catholic priest who writes a column called “Essays in Theology.” Consider McBrien’s recent defense of John Kerry. McBrien should know better. Either he is consciously seeking to pull the wool over his Catholic readers’ eyes, or he is blinded by his political enthusiasms to a stunning degree. McBrien is up in arms over the pressure being applied on Kerry by Archbishop Fabian Bruskewitz and Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis over Kerry’s position on abortion. Burke and Bruskewitz have warned that they would not give Communion to “pro-choice” politicians such as Kerry.
McBrien refers to these archbishops as “zealous, but theologically unsophisticated prelates” who have not learned “the distinction that the late Jesuit theologian, John Courtney Murray, and others had made between the moral and the civil law.” He worries that pressuring politicians such as Kerry on the abortion question “will in the end make it practically impossible for any Catholic to serve in public office.” Why does McBrien think that will happen? “Because,” he says, “it is a relatively rare Catholic politician who fully adheres to every official teaching of the Church.”
You guessed right. McBrien is using the “Seamless Garment” proposition, just as many predicted would happen when the American bishops made that case back in the 1980s. Watch McBrien maneuver: “Those on the religious and political right have no problem with the Church’s teachings on sexual morality: contraception, homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, fetal research, and so forth. But such Catholics employ the same kind of theological spin that their counterparts in the center and on the left do when it comes to the Church’s social teachings: on social justice, human rights, peace, immigration, capital punishment, government aid to the poor, and so forth.” McBrien gets specific. With a cheap shot. “If objectivity and fairness were to prevail, Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, strongly conservative Republican, should have no less a problem with the hierarchy than does Kerry.”
Shame on you, Fr. McBrien. Sophistry of that sort is what we would expect from a mob lawyer trying to fool a jury. It is inexcusable in a priest and theologian instructing the laity on matters of faith and morals.
Come on: Santorum is not defying the Church’s teachings on peace and social justice. He is applying them. Maybe in a way McBrien considers wrongheaded, but applying them nonetheless. Time and time again, the social encyclicals have emphasized that the Church does not endorse any particular political ideology or economic theory. As Catholics we are obliged to seek social justice and to attend to the needs of the poor. But the nuts and bolts of how we go about achieving those goals is left to our prudential judgment. Rick Santorum is free to conclude that his application of free-market theory will do more to help the poor than Ted Kennedy’s vision of centralized planning. I would bet my last dollar that the pope would underscore that point, if asked. And that Fr. McBrien would agree with the pope, if we could inject him with some sodium pentothal.
It is the same on the war with Iraq. Santorum does not disagree with the Church’s just-war teaching. He accepts that war is permissible only as a last resort, and that it must be waged proportionally and with care to avoid civilian casualties. He would argue that our country is doing precisely that in Iraq. Fr. McBrien disagrees. Fine. He and Santorum have a difference of opinion about the facts; not the Church’s teachings. I defy Fr. McBrien to make the case that the pope would define orthodox Catholics — noted papal scholar George Wiegel, for example — as immoral for defending America’s military intervention in Iraq. He knows the pope would not do that.
But John Kerry and the other Catholic politicians who support abortion rights are a different matter. They challenge the Church’s teaching. They proudly disregard them. If Kerry and the others took the position that they sincerely wish they could do something to end legal abortion in the country but cannot see a way to do so at the present time, and that they believe that it makes sense for them to back the Democratic Party platform for all the other good they believe it will do, in spite of its “pro-choice” plank, perhaps they could be defended. Perhaps.
But that is not what Kerry, Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi say. They all make passionate speeches defending a “woman’s right to choose” as a positive step forward in our societal development. They vilify those who seek to deny women this “right.” They do not exempt the Church from that criticism. John Kerry recently informed us that “Vatican II” gives him the right to disagree with pope on abortion rights. Either he is lying or he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Take your choice.
What of Fr. McBrien’s point that we must respect the difference between “the moral law and the civil law”? It is true: the Church does not demand that Catholics work to ensure that every civil law corresponds with Catholic moral law. Not every sin must be made illegal. For example, a Catholic politician is not obliged to push for laws to end divorce and the sale of birth control devices. But the Church does teach that the law must prohibit grave evils. It is obvious. There is a difference between permitting divorce and permitting the killing of unborn infants. Fr. McBrien knows how to draw these lines. All we would have to do to make that point is to ask him if Catholics should have looked the other way when civil laws were passed permitting slavery in this country or when the Nuremberg laws legalized the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Ask him if Catholics facing those evils should not have pressed to make the civil laws correspond to the moral law.
You say what? That slavery and the Holocaust were different? Different from killing millions of unborn children? How?
I’m waiting….
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.)
