Reply #19: Frankly, I wish there weren't [View All]

[Jack Rabbit]

Unfortunately, the ascension of Pope Benedict raises fears that the Church will be more active in politics and attempt to influence more specifically how parishioners vote.

When I was very young, I knew that some people simply would not vote for any Roman Catholic for anything, even dog catcher, because, they said, the Catholic Church doesn't believe in the separation of church and state. That was nonsense, of course. For the most part, it still is. I hope it remains so.

It is one thing for a religious institution to define morality and even suggest to its parishioners that they keep these things in mind when deciding for whom to vote. It is quite a different thing to threaten to withhold communion from a parishioner for voting for any particular candidate or from a parishioner who is running for public office on a platform the church fathers find at odds with what they believe church teachings ought to be.

There is some discussion that Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, crossed that line last year. It really doesn't matter whether he influenced Catholics to vote for Bush or whether he intervened on behalf of a candidate whom I happen to support. If he crossed that line, he was wrong to do so.

It is a discussion that makes me very uncomfortable. I am not Catholic and what the Catholic Church teaches is not my business.

However, separation of church and state ought to mean that the state doesn't tell its citizens how to worship and the church doesn't tell its parishioners how to vote or tell those parishioners who hold public office what public policy ought to be.

A Roman Catholic running for public office ought to be able to support legalized abortion as a matter of public policy. It doesn't mean she would get an abortion herself or would assist in getting an abortion for his or her daughter for any reason; it simply means that the office seeker or office holder believes it is better state policy to permit abortion than to spend the energy prosecuting it as a crime. In a pluralistic society, that should be a defensible position even for someone who personally finds abortion abhorrent. We could also put the shoe on the other foot and say that a certain Supreme Court Justice who happens to be Roman Catholic ought to have every right to uphold capital punishment if he thinks that is a proper interpretation of law; this, too, seems to run afoul of the Catholic Church's "Culture of Life" teaching.