Washington
tAt a symposium Jan. 29 on Catholic social teaching and the new Obama administration, Catholic University of America history professor Leslie Woodcock Tentler challenged the recent declarations of some U.S. Catholic bishops who suggested it was sinful for Catholics to vote for Barack Obama.
The effect of episcopal statements focusing on legalized abortion as the nation’s overriding issue, she said, was to reduce U.S public perception of Catholic social teaching to what the church says about sex and to sever Catholic social teaching from the wider political discourse in the nation.
She said she is a lifelong Democrat who firmly believes that “our party is wrong on abortion,” but even if the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is reversed, abortion will almost certainly remain legal in every state, as demonstrated by the successive 2006 and 2008 referendums in South Dakota, where voters twice defeated measures that would have made most abortions illegal.
Speaking as a historian, however, she drew a sharp contrast between current statements on legalized abortion by some members of the Catholic hierarchy in recent years and the approach that the U.S. Catholic bishops took for many decades on a similar public policy issue, artificial contraception.
Tentler, a specialist in American Catholic history, was one of four Catholic panelists at the symposium, held just 10 days after President Obama’s inauguration and sponsored by Catholic University’s Life Cycle Institute.
tThe panelists addressed a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues in the new administration, from global warming, nuclear disarmament and Middle East policies to abortion, employment, the massive financial economic stimulus and its implications in terms of Catholic social teachings on solidarity and subsidiarity.
But Tentler’s talk and her later responses to audience questions were particularly notable for her analysis of how the political and theological landscape has changed in recent years in the approaches of some U.S. bishops to the issue of legalized abortion.
She opened her talk by summarizing the 1919 “Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction,” the first statement issued by the then newly formed National Catholic War Council, the original organization of what is now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
She said the statement -- which later became practically a charter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” program -- called for public policies that would include:
- A “living wage” for all male workers -- defined as sufficient to support a wife and family in reasonable comfort and provide for savings to sustain him and his spouse in old age (she noted that the bishops presumed, in accord with the times, that males should be the economic providers).
- Government requirements that employers provide insurance protecting their employees from illness and disability and cover health and economic security in old age -- principles that would eventually be implemented in programs ranging from unemployment insurance to the Social Security System.
- “Publicly subsidized medical care” to those that need it, found today in Medicare and Medicaid.
- “Slum clearance and public housing.”
- “Expansion and more rigorous enforcement of workplace safety laws.”
- “An end to child labor” by extreme punitive taxing to effectively to reverse a 1918 Supreme Court decision that had declared it legal.
- “State protection of the right of unions to organize and bargain collectively.”
- “A tax code that would protect the more equitable distribution of income.”
tTentler noted that the bishops in 1919 addressed issues promoting the common good and while they were suspicious of both the market and the state, their program “reserved its harshest criticism not for the state, not for bureaucrats, but for employers who erroneously believed that profit-making was the basic justification of business enterprise.”
In terms of Republican rhetoric in the latest presidential campaign, she said, the bishops of 1919 “sounded like socialists.”
The1919 reconstruction program “was visionary in some respects and myopic in others,” she said. “The bishops mostly ignored the wealth-generating capacity of the market and policies that might support this. More to the point, they had nothing to say about race, although 1919 saw a wave a murderous anti-black violence in a number of American cities.”
She said another key issue, lurking invisibly behind many points in the bishops’ program, was birth control. “There was already a movement afoot to liberalize state and federal laws that limited access to contraception, but which was difficult for Catholic leaders to negotiate politically,” she said.
“Anti-Catholicism was still a powerful emotion in American culture,” and the bishops had decided that in any battle against contraception they needed to have non-Catholic allies and needed to frame the public argument in ways that “were not specifically religious,” she said. “Among those nonreligious arguments was the family wage, a centerpiece of the 1919 bishops’ program. A truly just society, according to the bishops, is one that pays male workers enough to support a large family in comfort and security. An unjust society pays poverty wages, forces married women into the workforce and tells the poor to avoid having children.”
She said the bishops eventually lost their fight against liberalized legal access to contraception, but her point was to highlight the difference between how that struggle was waged and how some bishops in recent years have been waging the fight against legalized abortion.
Even though Cardinal Patrick Hayes, archbishop of New York from 1919 to 1938, “once claimed, in what I trust was an over-excited moment, that (contraception) was actually a graver sin than abortion,” she said, “Catholic leaders did not talk publicly about apocalyptic presidencies or threaten to deny Communion to uncooperative Catholic politicians, even after it was clear they weren’t going to win the war.”
The U.S. bishops of the early 20th century “didn’t push a single-issue approach to politics,” but “instead linked the birth control issue to larger social welfare questions, to the living wage, social insurance. ... They always spoke a pragmatic rather than a religious or doctrinal language. Access to contraception was bad social policy, they argued, because it would facilitate adultery, promote a divorce culture and encourage promiscuity among the young,” she said.
“They consistently framed the debate in terms of values that nearly all Americans shared,” she added.
Viewed through the issues highlighted by the bishops in 1919, as well as on other social issues such as immigration on which the hierarchy more recently expressed concern, “it is clear that the Democrats in 2008 did much better than the Republicans as exponents of Catholic social teaching,” she said. “And yet some American bishops were prepared to say, both in 2004 and 2008, that a vote for the Democrats would probably or even certainly be a serious sin.”
She said the more nuanced position of the bishops’ collective “Faithful Citizenship” statement of November 2007 indicates that most bishops would not agree with that approach.
But the effect of that approach by some vocal bishops, “whether intentionally or not, has been to suggest to many Americans -- including, I fear, a great many Catholics -- that Catholic social teaching is mainly about sex,” she said.
The result has been that “abortion itself, in the heat of battle, has been more and more severed from its social justice context, as almost inevitably happens with a single-issue approach to politics,” she said.
