Cover Story:

Kerry Eucharistes
by
Andrew WalshWhile
usually not a prized assignment, American journalists have long trundled
dutifully after candidates and office holders when they attend worship
services. Public manifestations of religious observance are an unavoidable
part of the ritual of American politics,
but they are usually regarded as largely pro forma occasions where
little real news breaks.
But this spring, the cozy atmosphere of Sunday worship evaporated for
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who found himself immersed in
a largely unanticipated controversy
over his position on abortion and his standing as Roman Catholic.
The story broke when Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis made a
statement in a television interview on January 31 that Kerry was henceforth
to be banned from receiving communion in the Archdiocese of St. Louis
because of his failure to publicly support Catholic teaching against
abortion.
Within a few weeks, reporters were trailing Kerry to Mass. And, for many
news organizations, Kerry’s reception in church became newsworthy, even if
nothing happened. Julia Duin of the Washington Times, for example,
got a page one story on April 5 when she reported that “if the Roman
Catholic senator sticks to his home Boston Archdiocese, he faces the implied
threat from Archbishop Sean O’Malley of being refused communion.”
When Easter came, on April 9, reporters followed Kerry to Boston’s
Paulist Center. Afterwards, the New York Times dutifully reported
that nothing much had happened: “Kerry Attends Easter Services and Receives
Holy Communion,” the headline read. The “wafer watch,” surely one of the
stupefying developments in the recent history of American journalism, was
born.
Apparently not sure of what else to do, Glen Johnson of the Boston
Globe described the Easter Mass at the Paulist Center in careful detail,
noting that several members of Kerry’s staff and Secret Service detail also
received the eucharist, that Kerry’s wife wrote out a check when the plate
was passed, and that “young children dressed in spring colors cried
throughout the service.” On May 10, Johnson was still on the watch,
dispatching a story from Pittsburgh that ran under the headline: “Kerry Has
Usual Communion, Democrat Upbeat at Church, Critics Fail to Alter His
Ritual.”
“What next?” Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman moaned on April
15. “Will we have a political reporter to cover John Forbes Kerry at each
Sunday mass from now to November? Will there be a holy communion beat?”
Things never reached that feverish pitch, but until the “swift boat”
controversy over Kerry’s Vietnam service broke in August, the debate over
Kerry’s Catholicism and his pro-choice politics loomed large in campaign
coverage—surely something Kerry never expected or wanted. In May and June,
when the story was at its peak, it appeared to be spreading to involve a
whole series of Catholic bishops and politicians in Colorado, New Jersey,
Illinois, and other places.
In its early phases, the story was covered as an example of the
increasing impact of relatively younger and more conservative Catholic
bishops, like Burke in St. Louis and Michael Sheridan in Colorado Springs,
mounting an offensive to “shut down cafeteria Catholicism,” in the words of
one Boston Herald op-ed writer.
The ball began rolling on January 31, when Burke, just installed as
archbishop, gave a televised interview on a program produced by the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch and KMOV (Channel 4) in St. Louis. “If Sen. John
Kerry were to stand in Archbishop Raymond L. Burke’s communion line Sunday,
Burke would bless him without giving him communion,” the Post-Dispatch’s
Patricia Rice reported in a news story on the program. “I would have to
admonish him not to present himself for communion,” Burke said.
In the context of a close presidential campaign, and in a swing state
like Missouri, that seemed like big news. Rice reported then that in
November 2003 Burke had, while still bishop of La Crosse, Wisconsin, sent
“an official episcopal notification to the diocesan priests to refuse
communion to three Catholic Wisconsin lawmakers who had refused to talk with
him about their pro-abortion votes.”
This was not the first time Catholic hierarchs and politicians,
especially Democratic politicians, had tangled over abortion during
campaigns. In 1984, Cardinal John O’Connor had rebuked then Gov. Mario Cuomo
and Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate Geraldine Ferraro for their
policy of proclaiming a private Catholic identity while supporting abortion
rights as a public policy. O’Connor, however, never threatened to ban Cuomo
or Ferraro from communion.
In this election cycle, that may first have happened last year in South
Dakota, where a local bishop warned Sen. Thomas Daschle not to call himself
a Catholic, and in California, where William Wiegand, bishop of Sacramento,
publicly suggested that Gov. Gray Davis refrain from taking communion
because of his pro-abortion politics. Last summer Archbishop O’Malley of
Boston also suggested that Catholic politicians who could not support the
church’s anti-abortion position should not dare to approach the communion
chalice. These bishops were seen as reacting to a 2003 Vatican “doctrinal
note” urging bishops to act more forcefully to uphold pro-life positions in
politics, including taking action against Catholic politicians who support
or vote for abortion rights.
Burke’s real departure from American precedent for bishops was to name
names and to suggest that individuals be publicly banned from communion—a
step that few other bishops rushed to adopt. As more journalists asked more
bishops about their positions, it seemed like an increasing number were
taking a harder line against Catholic politicians.
At the end of April, a senior Vatican cardinal responded to questions
from an American journalist by saying he thought pro-choice politicians
should be banned from communion. In early May, Archbishop John J. Myers of
Newark issued a pastoral letter in which he argued that pro-choice Catholic
politicians had “abandoned the full Catholic faith,” and would be dishonest
to present themselves for “communion.” While he did not name names, he was
widely seen as targeting Gov. James E. McGreevey and other New Jersey
politicians.
But other bishops, including cardinals Theodore McCarrick of Washington,
Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles, and Francis George of Chicago made public
statements that indicated they weren’t prepared yet to support using denial
of communion as a sanction against pro-choice politicians. McCarrick wrote
in a May column in his archdiocesan newspaper that he did not want to be
involved “in a confrontation at the altar rail with the Sacred Body of
Christ the Lord Jesus in my hand. There are apparently those who would
welcome such a conflict, for good reasons I am sure, or for political ones,
but I would not.”
Pro-life organizations were pushing hard for bishops to ban Kerry, and
perhaps other politicians as well. “This is all about the bishops and how
they choose to respond and not respond,” Joe Stars, director of the American
Life League’s Crusade for the Defense of Our Catholic Church, told the
Washington Times’ Duin. “If Cardinal McCarrick and Archbishop O’Malley
don’t do something, Senator John Kerry and all these other pro-abortion
Catholic politicians will receive communion and the rest of the faithful
will think, ‘Gee, It’s OK to support abortion and euthanasia.’”
On May 9, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Bernard Kenny,
the majority leader of the New Jersey state senate, was leaving the Catholic
church after a meeting with his Jersey City pastor. “If every faith starts
trying to impose their rules on elected officials,” Kenny said, “democracy
is going to be factionalized along religious lines. I will look for other
options to express my faith and will probably join another Christian
church.”
The problem for Catholic conservatives is that public sanctions banning
political leaders from communion have been used rarely in the United States
or elsewhere. While arguing that “bishops have been denying communion to
politicians since A.D. 390,” Duin’s April 5 piece cited as its chief example
the action of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, against the Roman emperor Theodosius
I, which she admitted was a while ago. Other conservatives recalled the case
of New Orleans Archbishop Rummel, who excommunicated three Louisiana
politicians in the early 1960s for resisting his decision to desegregate
Catholic parish schools.
Liberals, however, stressed the novelty of the tactic. “The only way that
you can separate yourself from the church is by knowingly and deliberately
denying a dogma of faith,” the Rev. Richard McBrien, a liberal Catholic
theologian at Notre Dame University, told Daniel J. Wakin of the New York
Times on May 9. “Abortion is not a dogma.”
As Catholic bishops began to disagree with one another, the Kerry
campaign attempted to say as little as possible about the controversy. “My
oath is to uphold the Constitution of the United States in my public life;
my oath privately between me and God was defined in the Catholic
Church…which allows for freedom of conscience for Catholics with respect to
these choices, and that is exactly where I am,” Kerry told the Los
Angeles Times on May 2. But a shower of developments in April and May
made that hard to do.
The month opened with Kerry’s Catholic defenders noting that bishops
didn’t seem to be singling out Republican office holders who are Catholics
and pro-choice, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, Gov. George
Pataki of New York, or former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Then they
focused on Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, a vocal conservative Catholic
who was just then expending considerable personal political capital in an
effort to swing his state’s Republican voters behind U.S. Senator Arlen
Spector, a pro-choice Jew, over his Catholic, pro-life opponent who seemed a
weaker candidate in the general election.
Michael Sheridan, bishop of Colorado Springs, took the whole controversy
up several notches on May 5 by issuing a strongly worded pastoral letter to
his flock. “Any Catholic politician who advocates for abortion, for illicit
stem-cell research or for any form of euthanasia ipso facto place themselves
outside full communion with the church and so jeopardize their salvation,”
Sheridan was quoted in the Rocky Mountain News on May 15, when news
of the letter began to spread outside Colorado Springs. “Catholics who vote
for candidates who hold these views suffer the same fateful consequences,”
he continued. Sheridan also added to the list same-sex marriage, describing
it as “a deviancy.”
St. Louis archbishop Burke said in early June that he agreed with
Sheridan, and the two staked out a joint position.
These developments mobilized Catholic Democratic politicians and on May
20 the New York Times and many other news operations reported that 48
Catholic members of Congress, including about a dozen pro-life Democrats,
had sent a strong letter of protest to Cardinal McCarrick, who happened to
be chair of a National Conference of Catholic Bishops committee studying the
development of recommendations for bishops in their dealings with Catholic
politicians. “As Catholics we do not believe it is our role to legislate the
teachings of the Catholic Church,” the letter said. “Because we represent
all of our constituents, we must, at times, separate our public actions from
our personal beliefs.”
Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, stung by the public announcement of his
Springfield, Illinois home parish that he was not welcome to receive
communion, commissioned his staff to prepare an analysis of how pro-choice
and pro-life senators voted on issues on which the United States Catholic
Conference, the lobbying arm of the nation’s Catholic bishops, had taken
public positions. Of 24 senators surveyed, John Kerry voted most often with
the church’s positions, at 60.9 percent. Durbin argued that pro-life
senators, usually Republicans, voted far less often in line with church
position.
Sen. Santorum, staunchly pro-life but rated in agreement with the
Catholic position only 41 percent of the time, called Durbin’s survey
worthless. He told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that “it was a
mistake to impose a ranking system that weighted the bishops’ positions on
environment, the death penalty, and workplace issues as heavily as their
opposition to stem-cell research and abortion.
At that point, with bishops openly disagreeing, Catholic politicians in
revolt, and liberals of all sorts complaining about violation of IRS laws
against open political endorsements by tax-exempt organizations, the NCCB
announced that it would discuss the matter at its mid-June meeting in
Denver.
Religion specialists then began burrowing into the internal politics of
the American bishops. Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times noted in
a piece published on June 6 that Cardinal Joseph F. Ratzinger, the Vatican’s
chief doctrinal expert, and Pope John Paul II had begun to express concern
about division in the American church. “There’s nothing that the bishops
dislike more than the appearance of being in disarray,” Goodstein quoted the
Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America. “They need
to have a national policy because when one person denies communion and gets
headlines across the country, people wrongly assume he’s speaking for all
bishops and he’s not.”
Tim Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch strengthened that
argument in a news analysis published on June 13. “Some experts believe that
bishops like Sheridan and Burke…may be rebuked by their colleagues when the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops holds its spring meeting this week in
nearby Denver. The overwhelming majority have either remained silent or
urged caution on the issue.
“Though bishops have autonomy over their own diocese, for the sake of
unity—something experts say is extremely important to Pope John Paul
II—there is often pressure put on Catholic teachers who are seen as straying
from the mainstream.”
Townsend then reported that Ratzinger had told a delegation of American
bishops to be cautious about denying communion to politicians.
But when the bishops met, they did not emerge with a unified stance.
Their statement, adopted by a vote of 183 to 6, opened with the standard
forceful denunciation of abortion, but went on to say that individual
bishops were entitled to choose their own methods of teaching and enforcing
Catholic doctrines. “These kinds of issues are decided locally by the
bishops who know the local circumstances and who have a dialogue with the
individuals involved,” Denver archbishop Charles Chaput told Eric Gorsky of
the Denver Post on June 20. “There was really no chance there would
be a national policy because it wouldn’t take in the law of the church.”
As journalists worked church sources more intensely to find out how the
bishops would land, the common perception carried in stories began to shift.
Rather than emphasizing a trend toward asking pro-choice politicians to
abstain from communion or barring them completely, more reporters began to
emphasize how small the group of bishops acting against the pro-choice
politicians seemed to be.
In late May, phrases like “a few bishops” began to creep into stories. By
mid-June the new conventional wisdom looked pretty much like the view John
Leo expressed in his U.S. News & World Report column published on
June 14: “It looks as though more than 90 percent of Roman Catholic bishops
want no confrontation with John Kerry over his support of abortion rights—so
far, only four of the 300-odd bishops said they would deny him communion and
15 others indicated serious concern over the issue.”
In retrospect, the story began to look more and more like the creation of
a handful of pro-life organizations that have been pressing the Catholic
bishops hard. Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post was on to this
early, publishing a story on May 7 with the headline, “Ad Assails D.C.
Cardinal for Stance on Communion.”
Cooperman reported the opening of a $500,000 advertising campaign by the
Virginia-based American Life League “targeting bishops who are reluctant to
punish Catholic politicians for taking public policy positions that defy the
church.” The first ad (published in the Washington Times, Human Events,
and the Catholic weekly The Wanderer) shows Jesus in agony on the
cross and asks: “Cardinal McCarrick: Are You Comfortable Now?”
The League’s president, Judie Brown, said that her organization “believes
that all priests and lay Eucharistic ministers who hand out communion are
obligated—with or without instructions from their bishops—to refuse
communion to any federal, state, or local official who is known to disagree
with church teaching on abortion, contraception, stem cell research,
euthanasia, or in vitro fertilization.” Brown and other American Life
League leaders were often quoted through the life of the story without much
sense of their passionate commitment to drive the bishops into action.
On July 7, the Washington Times’ Duin reported that a
letter from Ratzinger “contained much stronger language than Cardinal
McCarrick used last month at a meeting of the country’s Catholic bishops.”
Quoting a document put on line by an Italian publication, Duin argued that
Ratzinger actually “supports Colorado Springs Bishop Michael Sheridan” by
arguing that Catholics who “deliberately vote for a candidate precisely
because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia”
would be “guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to present
himself for Holy Communion.”
Duin’s piece argued that McCarrick had downplayed Ratzinger’s forceful
remarks and quoted McCarrick’s comment to the bishops that the “question for
us is not simply whether denial of communion is possible, but whether it is
pastorally wise and prudent.” Almost immediately, the U.S. bishops released
a follow-up letter from Ratzinger saying the bishops’ June statement is
“very much in harmony with the general principles of ‘Worthiness to Receive
Holy Communion.’”
The point here is that many Catholic conservatives are pushing the
bishops hard to deal with the diversity of Catholic views by extruding a
large number of non-compliant Catholics—a position that most Catholic
bishops are loath to consider, but which seems a good idea to some of the
generation of Catholic bishops appointed by Pope John Paul II.
The bitter pill for conservative bishops and Catholics is that a very
large percentage of American Catholics aren’t with the maximalist program. A
Time magazine poll of Catholic voters published in May reported that
75 percent don’t approve of bishops using communion bans to discipline
pro-choice politicians. About a quarter of Catholics regularly tell
pollsters they support unrestricted abortion and a small majority support
abortion under some conditions.
That, perhaps, is what drives bishops like McCarrick and Mahoney to
emphasize teaching Catholic doctrine rather than policing the communion
line. And, on balance, since the June meeting more Catholic bishops have
said they won’t bar politicians from communion than have backed bans. (Only
the Catholic bishops of Atlanta, Ga., Charleston, S.C., and Charlotte, N.C.,
in fact, have done that.)
But the issue is already imprinted on the 2004 campaign, and the bishops,
led by McCarrick, have already committed themselves to a post-election
statement on how to balance teaching their church’s Gospel while honoring
separation of church and state. Conspicuous by its absence has been any
substantive comment by the Democratic candidate himself on what he thinks is
appropriate intervention by the leaders of his church. It seems naive in the
extreme to think that this set of interventions by conservative bishops was
not intended to influence the election.
In the meantime, the wafer watch goes on—and not only from the
journalistic side of the street. As Rick Holmes, a columnist for the
MetroWest Daily News, a suburban Boston paper, put it on May 16, “I
don’t know where Sen. John Kerry went to Mass this morning, but I’ll bet it
was a decision that required some research.”
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