Kerry: Bad Catholic, According to Whom?

Everyone knows that John Kerry isn’t a good Catholic.  At least, that’s what our official hierarchy would have us believe, as more and more bishops come forward and ban Kerry from taking the Eucharist in their dioceses.  The American bishops have made it clear that Kerry is such a bad Catholic—and such a bad person—that Protestant Bush is a better choice for president.  What has Kerry done to cause his own religious tradition to abandon him in this way?  Why do the bishops express no interest in electing what would only be the second Catholic president of the United States?  Has Kerry robbed widows and orphans by cutting social programs?  Sent American soldiers to fight a useless war, perhaps?

We all know that, in fact, the issue is abortion.  As faithful Catholics and concerned Americans, we are obligated to try and make sense of the hierarchy’s choice of abortion as the litmus test for determining who is and who is not a good Catholic politician.  Clearly, the bishops’ actions are motivated by more than concern for the unborn.  In fact, their actions are intended to demonstrate the hierarchy’s moral authority as an institution.  The bishops, backed by the Vatican, are censoring Kerry to remind us that when it comes to the rules about sex, the hierarchy still has the final word.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have chosen to use the bodies of women as pawns in this struggle for political relevance.

Catholics find that when it comes to war and the economy, the bishops are content to send moral “suggestions” to the (usually male) decision-makers involved.  But when it comes to abortion, we find that the bishops have been using all their political muscle since Roe v. Wade to try to criminalize abortion.  Based on their investments in these causes, it seems that the hierarchy sees women with legal access to abortion as a far greater threat to the common good than men capable of destroying entire countries and civilizations with nuclear weapons.  Such political myopia severely undermines the church’s credibility as a teaching institution, and in fact it is clear that many Catholics—in good conscience—are departing from Catholic teaching precisely on sexual issues.

Since Vatican II, official teaching has relaxed a bit on non-sexual moral questions, realizing the complexities of moral decision-making and the importance of the individual conscience.  As an admirable and important example of this more nuanced approach to normative reflection, the American bishops published letters in the 1980s about nuclear weapons and the economy, which candidly address the moral agency of the decision-makers involved.  In the letters, the decision-makers are urged and trusted to do the right thing when facing economic and military decisions of incalculable importance.

By contrast, when the question involves sex—such as homosexual acts, birth control, pre-marital sex, or abortion—the hierarchy overrides the moral agency of the person making the decision and determines for itself what is right and wrong.  Furthermore, despite the fact that abortion is about women’s bodies, the hierarchy determines its sexual teachings through a process which systematically excludes women from the discussion.  Women do not even appear in the teachings as moral agents.  They are not urged and trusted to do the right thing, they are simply told what to do.  The rules are determined for them.

In this and countless other ways, pro-life discourse callously assumes that without laws to regulate them, women will make the wrong choices regarding the unborn children they carry.  Yet when it comes to the decisions men make, such as whether or not to wage war, the church recognizes that it must respect the moral autonomy of the decision-makers involved.  And so, despite the many lives that hang in the balance, the church sends weak moral “suggestions” to the men who wage war and spend billions of dollars on weapons capable of destroying all the life on the earth.  To pregnant women, there are no mere suggestions, there are moral and potentially legal prohibitions; to Catholic politicians who support women’s right to choose, there are various ecclesiastical threats.  The imbalance is striking.

The authoritarian and misogynistic trends revealed by the church’s current political identity crisis are deeply disturbing.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, many American Catholics seem to have intuitively discerned that the church no longer teaches in a consistent, integrated, or respectful manner on sexual questions, and as such they dissent from the hierarchy in good conscience.  The facts that nearly all Catholics ignore the hierarchy’s ban of birth control, and that fully sixty-six percent of Catholics feel that abortion should remain legal, make this dramatically clear.  (For these statistics, see the Pew Study by Mary E. Bendyna and Paul M. Perl, Political Preferences at the Time of Election 2000, available at http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/rel_catholics.pdf.)  Catholics diverge from official teachings in good conscience, feeling that they do so without being unfaithful to the church.  Some might even claim precedence for their dissent within Catholicism itself.  Deep in the tradition is the view that morality ought to “make sense”; that moral norms ought to incorporate the wisdom of experience with divine revelation, and furthermore that moral norms should be worked out in dialogue of a loving community, ideally the church itself. 

Let us pray and hope that one day, the church will once again be that loving community in which we discern sexual ethics that truly respond to the signs of our times and respect the integrity of all women and men.  Furthermore, let us work for a church which evaluates political candidates based on their commitments to peace and justice for all women and men, not just the unborn.

- Sarah Byrnes, former intern for the Citizens Budget Campaign