Catholic Judges and Politicians

A couple recent articles/interviews on the intersection of public official and their Catholic Faith.

The Moral and Legal Obligations of Catholic Judges, Frank-Paul Sampino an assistant editor at Dappled Things and currently working as an intern at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

Generally speaking, a Catholic judge’s moral obligation is no more, and no less, than to apply the civil law as he understands it, regardless of the outcome of particular cases. I maintain that a Catholic judge need not recuse himself, or resign, or stretch the law to achieve a morally acceptable outcome. With rare exceptions, he may simply decide the case as he believes the appropriate civil laws require.

Conscience and Catholic Politicians (Part I, Part II), Interview with Jesuit Father Joseph Koterski, professor of philosophy at Fordham University.

Clearly, acting in good conscience does mean fidelity to moral principles. But in the Catholic understanding of conscience, we are not simply permitted to choose some set of moral principles to which we want to be faithful. God chooses the moral principles we must use in our moral deliberations for us.

God has revealed them to us, and we can find them in the Scriptures. Likewise, we can find them in the natural moral law that God has implanted in human nature.

It is one of the duties of the Church to make clear just what those moral principles are where there is any doubt about them.

In the situation that you describe, it seems that some politicians hold that they may choose other principles than those that God has chosen for us as their basis for making moral decisions.

Sometimes they articulate their reasoning in terms of what their constituents accept as moral values. But in doing so, they risk doing precisely what one may not do as a Catholic, namely, acting as if one were permitted to choose which moral principles one will use for one's moral deliberation.

How Abortion Dies

Jimmy Akin tells us how.

Contraception does not reduce Abortion

For those who think contraception reduces abortion, Robert Novak points out that the claim does not ring true:

The widely publicized claim by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that state-funded contraception aid cuts down abortion as prevention of unwanted pregnancies is contradicted by figures from the same abortion think tank the senators relied on for an April 18 op-ed in the Albany, N.Y., Times Union.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that California spends more than three times as much on contraception as South Dakota for each woman who requests such services. However, California's rate of abortion per one thousand women is 31.2 percent, nearly six times as high as South Dakota's 5.5 percent.

Reid and Clinton chided South Dakota for passing an anti-abortion law while being "one of the most difficult states" for low-income women to get contraceptive devices, which the senators claim drives up abortion.

I would be interested in seeing other similiar correlations. I would guess they are there.

UPDATE: The USCCB comments on this:

The authors also claim that widespread access to contraception clearly leads to lower abortion rates,” Ms. McQuade noted. “Yet Guttmacher’s own data show there is no correlation between the two. States ranking highest for access to contraceptive services, including California and New York, also rank highest in abortion rates. Others that Guttmacher considers weak in contraceptive services, such as Kansas and the Dakotas, have among the lowest abortion rates in the country.”

“Those states have reduced their abortion rates, in part, by choosing not to subsidize abortion, and ensuring informed consent for women and parental involvement for minors seeking abortions – policies which the Guttmacher report demands be rescinded,” she explained.

Time Magazine: 10 Questions for William J. Levada

[Time] You raised the issue in the synod about whether politicians should be granted communion if they support policies counter to Church teachings.

[Levada:] There are certain teachings that as Catholics we have to accept as part of Jesus' Gospel. When you see Catholic politicians who favor abortion rights ... you have to ask yourself how this person squares this with his personal faith. Catholic politicians need to take this seriously. Maybe they need to say I'm not able to practice my faith and be a public representative.

Read the rest.

GOP resonance with Catholics could well be slip-sliding away

From a piece at Fredericksburg.com:

As Catholics abandoned their Democratic Party loyalties, the fortunes of the GOP have soared. But the recent heated debates on two issues potentially threaten the relationship between Catholics and the GOP: immigration and, surprisingly, abortion.

That's right folks, Catholics are upset because South Dakota is going to far in protecting innocent life and the Republicans in Congress want to make it a crime to assist illegal immigrants. Well, given the teachings of our Church on abortion if a Catholic is upset with South Dakota I would suggest they read up on the Catechism as well as Humanae Vitae and Evangelium Vitae. As for the immigration reform bill passed by the Congress, there is alot more to the it than the one issue the author points out.

Jeffrey Hart, the Republican Party and the Pro-Life Movement

I gave up blogging (mostly) for Lent, so hopefully my readers will understand if, out of curiousity and interest, I resume blogging on topics others have long since discussed. =)

In "The Jeffrey Hart Debate - American Conservatism at a Crossroads?" (Religion and Liberty April 22, 2006), I revisit a somewhat heated intramural debate among American conservatives sparked by Jeffrey Hart's essay "The Burke Habit: Prudence, skepticism and 'unbought grace'" (Wall Street Journal Dec. 25, 2005), with responses by Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review, Roger Kimball of The New Criterion; Fr. Gerry Murray (St. Vincent de Paul, NYC), and Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus and Jody Bottum of First Things, touching on (among other things) the Republican Party's relationship to the pro-life movement.

America's Best Senators?

From Time magazine. The list includes two Catholics, Senators Edward Kennedy and Richard Durbin:

On Kennedy:

Over 43 years in the senate, Democrat Ted Kennedy has fought serial battles on behalf of the working class—from defending overtime pay and workplace-safety regulations to expanding health-care availability and penalizing discrimination. But the key to his legacy is not that he is determined to stick up for his principles. It's that he is willing to compromise on them.

Late in 1990, for example, Kennedy sat red-faced as House Democrat Pat Schroeder berated him for supporting something he didn't believe in: caps on damages for workplace discrimination. But by agreeing to limits, Kennedy won over the handful of Republican and Southern Democratic Senators he needed to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, strengthening laws that banned job discrimination. The result was a law that protects women from sexual harassment at work and has yielded a surge in lawsuits and tens of millions of dollars in damages to aggrieved plaintiffs.

Kennedy was a bit of a joke when he first arrived in Washington in 1962. When John F. Kennedy ran for President, he kept his Massachusetts Senate seat warm for his youngest sibling, placing a college buddy in it for two years until Teddy reached the constitutionally required age of 30. But starting with a 1965 bill that did away with country-by-country quotas for immigrants, and especially in the quarter-century since his failed 1980 campaign for President, Kennedy, 74, has amassed a titanic record of legislation affecting the lives of virtually every man, woman and child in the country. With a succession of Republicans, he helped create COBRA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, portable health care, the Family and Medical Leave Act and more than 15 key education programs, including the landmark 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. He also pushed through the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries and the reduction of the voting age to 18. By the late '90s, the liberal icon had become such a prodigious cross-aisle dealer that Republican leaders began pressuring party colleagues not to sponsor bills with him.

Some bipartisan efforts have backfired on Kennedy. He has complained that he was taken in by Bush on the No Child Left Behind law because it was inadequately funded, and Democrats are distressed that he has collaborated with Republicans on immigration reform. Worse than that, critics say, Kennedy's inability to stop the confirmation of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito show he's losing his swat. But Kennedy still finds a way to deliver the goods for the less advantaged. Over the next five years, more than 100,000 severely disabled children will become beneficiaries of a new $872 million program that continues government health-care payments to them even as they move out of poverty. Kennedy and Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley managed to slip the program into last year's budget.

On Durbin:

Even though the senate is occasionally dubbed the World's Greatest Deliberative Body, actual debate on the Senate floor rarely happens: members just read prepared speeches written by aides and then return to their offices. Then there's Dick Durbin. On issues from immigration reform to judicial nominees, the Illinois Democrat frequently engages in public back and forth with his Senate colleagues in hearings and before votes—and rarely uses notes to do it. "I can't do it any other way," says Durbin of his off-the-cuff style. "That's me."

And while the debates don't often change the votes of other members, Durbin's tough questioning of his colleagues and his willingness to defend his own proposals clarify and distill complicated issues for the C-SPAN-viewing public. Occasionally, Durbin's arguments even carry the day, as when he won support on the Senate Judiciary Committee for a provision in an immigration bill that would protect church groups and others from prosecution if they aided illegal immigrants.

Of course, speaking extemporaneously has its risks, which Durbin learned last fall after he was forced to apologize for comparing alleged abuse of prisoners by American troops at Guantanamo Bay to techniques used by the Nazis, the Soviets and the Khmer Rouge. And some Republicans complain Durbin is too strident in his role as assistant leader of Senate Democrats, constantly on the attack against Republicans and President Bush. But Durbin, 61, has a bipartisan side. He has joined with Senator Rick Santorum, a staunch Republican from Pennsylvania, to push the U.S. government to give $866 million in additional funds for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Early this year, he helped broker a compromise between Democrats and Republicans to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, working on a provision that will keep libraries from having to hand over information about users without an order from a judge.

And if he can't reach a compromise behind the scenes, Durbin is happy to return to the open well of the Senate. "I really enjoy debate," he says. "The battle of ideas is what it should be about."

Blah, blah, blah. I know this is a liberal magazine, but still...their records on abortion and protecting marriage, just to name two issues are horrible.

Catholic Republicans King, Hyde Release Open Letter to U.S. Catholic Bishops on Immigration

Catholic Congressmen Peter King and Henry Hyde, have joined Congressman Sensenbrenner on writing a letter to the USCCB concerning immigration reform. Here is the money paragraph:

Lastly, we know many of you are concerned about the House bill's provision making illegal presence a felony. We share that concern. As you should know, during the House debate, Chairman Sensenbrenner offered an amendment to reduce the bill's penalty for illegal presence from a felony to a misdemeanor. Unfortunately, this amendment was unsuccessful, primarily because all but eight of our Democratic colleagues decided to play political games by voting to make all illegal immigrants felons. A felony penalty is neither appropriate nor workable. We remain committed to reducing this penalty and working with you to this end.

Democrats are the Anti-Immigration Party

Here is a link to a fine article by Ruben Navarrette of the San Diego Union-Tribune posted at RealClearPolitics.com. The article is entitled "The Democrats Sell Out Latinos." The bottom-line is this: Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid of Nevada killed the compromise bill on immigration that had bipartisan support. Why? According to the article, the head of the AFL-CIO rejected any provision for a guest worker program. Hypocrisy of hypocrisies, the Washington Post later reported that the same labor leader addressed a D.C. rally seeking legislation to aid immigrants. Catholics, especially Catholic social activists, need to take note: old Labor and its Democratic political hacks killed a guest worker program. Catholic social activists have no reason at all to look to the Democratic Party for aid to the poor: the Democrats reject both school vouchers and immigration reform, two proposals that can directly expand opportunity for the poor who want to get ahead through work and self-improvement. The Democratic Party stands again exposed for what it really is: an arm of overprivileged unions that simply wants to keep the competition out. That's not a credible political party. That's just a special interest lobby that is anti-poor. In my view, the Church's "preferential option for the poor" requires rejection of the Democratic Party.

Look, the Democratic Party is already the committed party of abortion and the gay agenda. That's more than enough reason why no Catholic should ever support the national Democratic Party or local Democrats who themselves support the infrastructure of the national Democratic Party. Now, you get another reason that even the self-anointed "peace and justice" activists can't ignore: the Democratic Party does not want immigration reform or a guest worker program. As in the school vouchers issue, the Democratic Party is more than willing to kill opportunity for the poor by kow-towing to the dictates of union bosses. President Bush was right when in a recent address he put the blame on killing immigration reform on the Democratic Senate leadership. Even the hyperpartisan Sen. Kennedy of Massachusetts refused to defend what the Democratic Senate leader did.

The Democrats want to fool immigrants, especially Latinos, as they have done for so long with African-Americans. The Democrats are not the party of opportunity for anyone, much less for immigrants or minorities. The Democrats are the party of entrenched privilege for the elite whose power is founded on the addiction to union and government dependency. Republicans have to expose the truth of what happened in the Senate. I predict that eventually the good guys will win, and we will get sane immigration reform, including a guest worker program that will work for all interested parties and bring order out of the current chaos on the border--in spite of the Democratic special interests.

Fr. Frank Pavone joins the Blogosphere . . .

Priests for Life now has a blog. I'm sure I can speak on behalf of my colleagues at CPS in extending a hearty welcome to Fr. Frank Pavone.

Welcome, father! =)

A Methodist at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast?

Read more here.

"Notre Dame's President Allows 'Monologues' and Gay Films"

That's the N.Y. Times headline. So, Fr. Jenkins, the university president, the much-touted great "Catholic hope" for the prestigious South Bend citadel, crumbles. But, let's backtrack a moment: isn't it already a major, major problem when a supposedly Catholic university needs to hope against all hope, in the first place, for a president to be the great "Catholic hope" for reform? In my opinion, this collapse in leadership means that this particular institution has no crediblity within the Catholic Church. We should give no more credibility to whatever emanates from this institution than we would give to any secular university--maybe less, since there is a strong dose of hypocrisy involved! Catholic parents, take note: there are many better places to send your tuition money.

Update: Here is the link to the statement of the Bishop of the diocese where South Bend is located. The Bishop rejects the decision of the university president and gives links to his previous statements explaining his problems with the university president's latest decision.

Rumblings in the Global South

Dr. Philip Jenkins of Penn State is the well-known author of the book The Next Christendom (Oxford, 2002), who has researched deeply and widely in the world-wide growth of Christianity in what is called the Global South--the continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (which includes a big chunk of the continent of North America in the form of Mexico, the Caribbean, and large sections of the United States itself, plus South America proper). Here are some eye-opening statistics shared by Dr. Jenkins in a recent talk:

1. By 2050, Christianity will be primarily the religion of the African.

2. By 2050, one-third of Americans will have Latino and Asian roots.

3. By 2050, 80% of the Roman Catholic Church will be in the Global South.

And to counter the one-sided image of Islamic growth, Dr. Jenkins pointed out that in Nigeria Christian growth is so strong that the Moslems are "terrified" that their children will become Christian. That's why Nigeria no longer publishes information on the religious affiliation of its citizens-- it helps to keep an already tense and violent situation from getting worse. From Prof. Jenkins' talk, it was also clear that the Global South has come to us. As recent demonstrations over immigration reform show, the Global South is already here within our cities and towns. The U.S. itself is already, in many ways, part of the Global South.

Also of interest from the talk is the fact that in most of the world the most prominent brand of Christianity is Pentecostal in form--both Catholic and Protestant. Jenkins pointed to the great reach of Filipino Catholic Pentecostal "religious orders" throughout the world, wherever Filipinos migrate; and, apparently, they migrate far and wide. I also recall Fr. Richard Neuhaus describing, in his recent book Catholic Matters, how the many Filipinos in his own New York parish church are "preternaturally devout." So the charismatic prayer group in your parish is not so odd or rare in the rest of the Christian world, but in fact appears to be the engine of global Christian growth.

But of greatest interest to me personally is Jenkins' references to the particular Scripture texts that seem to be most popular in the Global South:

1. John 10:10b: " I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (ESV). Jenkins noted that for the poor of the Global South that abundant life means abundance in both spiritual and material aspects and includes a great emphasis on physical healing.

2. Luke 4:18-19, where Jesus reads from Isaiah 61 when he inaugurates his ministry at his own synagogue in Nazareth:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to proclaim the good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Jenkins noted that for Global South Christians, there is no contradiction between spiritual deliverance and liberation: they are one and the same. We are seeing a very different form of liberation theology here, freed from its Marxist captivity.

3. The Magnificat of Luke 1:46-55, where Mary proclaims under the power of the Holy Spirit that God "has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away." It certainly looks like many rich Western countries are emptier of what really matters in life. The same is true in many of our more affluent suburbs here in the United States and, unfortunately, in some of the Catholic parishes and schools in those same affluent enclaves.

4. The Epistle of James (so disparaged by Martin Luther!) which echoes the rhetoric and teaching of the Magnificat. Here is a sample: "Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you" (James 5:1). Here's more from James: "Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?" (James 2:5).

As we look around the world today, God is apparently making the same choice for the poor again.

Why Is Michael Steele a Republican Candidate?

Read why over at Catholics for Steele.

Clinton Makes a Pitch For Catholic Voters

Yep, that's right. Teaming with Brownback and Santorum on the non-negotiable issue "to push for a bill authorizing research into the supposedly pernicious effects of electronic media on children." The GOP is in trouble!

Pontiff Lists 3 Principles for Christians in Politics

Defense of Life; Recognition of the Family; Freedom of Education

VATICAN CITY, MARCH 30, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI insists on three non-negotiable principles for the Church and Christians in public life: protection of life, recognition of the family and freedom of education.

The Pope highlighted these principles in an address today to some 500 parliamentarians of the European Popular Party, who are holding a congress in Rome.

In his address, in response to the greetings of Hans Gert Pöttering, president of the parliamentary group, the Holy Father began by pointing out the right of religious parliamentarians to express their principles in a democratic society.

"When Churches or ecclesial communities intervene in public debate, expressing reservations or recalling various principles," he said, "this does not constitute a form of intolerance or an interference, since such interventions are aimed solely at enlightening consciences, enabling them to act freely and responsibly, according to the true demands of justice, even when this should conflict with situations of power and personal interest."

Benedict XVI said that the focus of public interventions by the Catholic Church "is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable."

The Pope spelled out these principles thus:

-- "protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception to natural death";

-- "recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family -- as a union between a man and a woman based on marriage -- and its defense from attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different forms of union which in reality harm it and contribute to its de-stabilization, obscuring its particular character and its irreplaceable social role";

-- and "the protection of the right of parents to educate their children."

Common to all

Benedict XVI clarified: "These principles are not truths of faith, even though they receive further light and confirmation from faith; they are inscribed in human nature itself and therefore they are common to all humanity."

"The Church's action in promoting them is therefore not confessional in character, but is addressed to all people, prescinding from any religious affiliation they may have," he said.

This task to defend the fundamental aspect of human dignity, should not only be carried out by the Church, the Holy Father continued.

In fact, he said, it "is all the more necessary the more these principles are denied or misunderstood, because this constitutes an offense against the truth of the human person, a grave wound inflicted onto justice itself."

Gotta Love Scalia!

Mark Shea has the scoop on this picture, as does Dominic Bettinelli. And here is an explanation of the gesture from Confirm Them.