#436: Public Officials Cannot use Faith to Justify Violating their Oath of Office.

   The  public memory of most people is pretty short. Too often, if it happened before you were born, it's in the history books but not in your mind. Yesterday this public amnesia led to a crisis that never should have happened.
 
    Rowan County (Kentucky) Clerk Kim Davis was jailed after U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning found her in contempt of court for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and for saying through her lawyers that she would not authorize any of her employees to issue licenses in her absence. 

    "My conscience will not allow it," Davis told Bunning. "God's moral law convicts me and conflicts with my duties."

    Of course, Davis is entitled to her beliefs--and many Catholics join her in believing that same-sex marriage is wrong (although, as I've often written, they may fail to distinguish the Sacrament of Matrimony from mere civil marriage). Same-sex marriage, though legal, remains controversial. But the conflict between faith and official duties should NOT be a matter of controversy these days, even if the likes of Ted Cruz claims that  “This is wrong. This is not America." He is a Presidential candidate, yet he too forgets the lesson of the 1960 Presidential election.

   Fifty-five years ago next week (September 12, 1960) John  F. Kennedy spoke before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers concerned that a Catholic President would impose his religious beliefs on the rest of the country. JFK took the opportunity to spell out his views on how public officials manage to balance faith and their duties. His explanation stands as the moral standard for all officials today:

    “I do not speak for my church on public matters,” Kennedy said, “and the church does not speak for me.” He said that he would always make his decisions “in accordance with what my conscience tells me." 

    Finally, Kennedy acknowledged the possibility of a circumstance where his Catholic conscience might conflict with his oath of office. “And if that time should ever come,” he said, “when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office.”

    Kim Davis, like JFK, was an elected official who had  to take an oath before assuming her office. She now says her faith "conflicts with my duties." I respect both her faith and her acknowledgment of such a conflict, which JFK also recognized.

   But JFK had it right: in case of such a conflict, if a public official cannot perform according to their oath, they must resign. We can accept that Ms. Davis cannot, in conscience, do what God forbids. But she also vowed to follow the law, and if she cannot, she also cannot claim that breaking her oath is God's will. She cannot violate her conscience--but neither can she violate her oath of office. Her moral duty, therefore, is to resign. 

    In America, public officials have a right to their personal faith, but they cannot hold the law hostage to that faith. They must follow the law, or relinquish their office.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015

#415: Was Saint Patrick Catholic?

How the recent controversy in Boston disserves Catholic identity and the Church’s public image.

Back in the 1950s, Father Leonard Feeney made headlines by proclaiming loud and long that no one could go to heaven except members of the Roman Catholic Church.  For that he was excommunicated from membership in the Roman Catholic Church.

Years later Feeney and his followers were officially reconciled with the Church, but their take on Catholic life (ostensibly “hardline” but actually just weird) has not changed substantially.

And now the Feeneyites (officially, the “Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary” out of the Saint Benedict Center in Harvard, Mass.) are back in the headlines.  The principal of their school, Brother Thomas Dalton, withdrew his student band from marching in Boston’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade on the mere prospect that the kids would be marching down the same street as Mass Equality, a gay pride group.

Brother Thomas Dalton

Defending his position in a letter to the Boston Globe, Brother Thomas explained his opposition to associating with the gay marchers:

Jesus Christ once compared the Kingdom of Heaven to a wedding feast. When the king saw a guest not properly attired, he said to his servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Matthew 22:13). All that over improper dress; what would he have done to a group parading unnatural lust?

To many readers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, this talk of “unnatural lust” probably sounds like typical Catholic teaching: backward and mean-spirited and exclusionary.  In fact, Brother Thomas’ sentiments are backward, mean-spirited, and exclusionary--but they are not Catholic teaching.

Brother Thomas is, of course, entitled to his own opinion (as well as to his dubious misinterpretation of a Biblical parable), and he even has the authority to impose his opinion on his students. In fact, when the gay marchers were finally rejected, Brother Dalton reinstated his children in the parade and led them in applauding their “victory.” All under the guise of providing a “Catholic education.”

But Brother Thomas is not entitled to his own facts--and he is not entitled to speak for the Church, let alone speak falsely.  In a time when Pope Francis is finally at long last reversing the appallingly bad (and mostly deserved) PR the Catholic Church has received over the last 20 years, the last thing we need is some loud voice distorting our Catholic identity in public view.

But I fear that many Catholics secretly (or even openly) share this man’s views, or at least believe that these are the Church’s views.  So a little plain talk about the Church’s teachings on homosexuals is timely. Here they are, drawn from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and from statements by the Vatican and the US Bishops:

1.   Homosexual orientation is most often experienced as given and discovered, not chosen--and is not in itself morally wrong or sinful.

2.   Given the inherent dignity of every human person, the Church teaches that “homosexual persons, like everyone else, should not suffer from prejudice against their basic human rights.”

3.   Violence in speech or action against homosexuals “deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs.”

4.   “Every sign of discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

5.   Nothing in the Bible or Catholic teaching can be used to justify prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes and behaviors toward homosexual persons.

Note than none of this stopped Brother Thomas Dalton from using the Bible to imply that Catholic teaching DOES justify his discriminatory attitude.

Of course, Catholic moral teaching also finds no justification for homosexual acts. But the moral objections are essentially the same as the Church’s objections to masturbation, artificial contraception, pre-marital sex, adultery, coitus interruptus, oral and anal sex, etc.—namely, that only marital procreative sex is morally legitimate. Everything else—not just gay sex—violates natural law.

In other words, official Catholic morality opposes all those acts but not the people who perform them. Such opposition therefore provides no grounds for treating those people differently from anyone else--and that goes for homosexuals as well as for all the others!

Thus gays and lesbians have the same basic rights as all other human beings, and must be protected from discrimination like anyone else.  This principle holds even if we accept official church teaching on homosexuality as a “disordered” orientation.

In short, the Church sees active homosexuals as sinners.  But to be consistent, to avoid discrimination, one must treat them as we do any others whose behavior is called immoral.

Thus a true “hardline” would insist that the Saint Patrick’s Day parade exclude anyone who engages in masturbation, premarital sex, oral or anal sex, adultery, contraception, theft, lying, slander, cheating, etc—as well as any Catholics who deliberately ate meat the previous Friday (the second Friday in Lent). 

This would result, of course, in a very short parade,  made up mostly of marching Protestants.  Throw in the exclusion of those engaging in drunkenness and natural lust, and there would be precious few onlookers left to cheer the children marching (practically alone!) for Brother Thomas Dalton’s school.

So singling out gays is wrong, not because we are not entitled to disapprove of their behavior, but because we are not entitled to judge them while ignoring everyone else.

When Pope Francis famously said “Who am I to judge?” with reference to gays, he was thinking of two things.  First, Catholic tradition dictates that only one person can judge whether someone has sinned--namely, the sinner himself!  That’s why Catholics confess their sins, rather than being denounced for them.  Sin requires that one violate one’s conscience--and no one knows my conscience but me. 

Second, the pope had already described himself as “a sinner.” His point, of course, is that Catholics believe that sin is a universal phenomenon within the human family.  We all sin.  To judge that homosexual activity is sinful merely lumps gays in with the rest of us.  Far from justifying their exclusion, it confirms their inclusion in the company of sinners.

In this sense, the Saint Patrick’s Day parade is a parade of sinners, cheered on by thousands more sinners.  And it always has been. Who are we to judge that gays have no place among us?

Certainly, any such judgment cannot claim to represent true Catholicism.  And any event in honor of a Catholic saint is hardly enhanced by the proclamations of those who distort Catholicism and confuse the public. If we believe Saint Patrick was Catholic—and he was—then our celebration should reflect Catholic tradition, not distort it.

God willing, Brother Thomas Dalton’s band will someday learn about true Catholicism—but not, I fear, at his school.

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014

#371 Manipulating the Catholic Vote

Now that Catholics represent a critical swing-voting group, some Catholics cannot resist exploiting faith to push their political agenda.

We hear a lot of complaints about “cafeteria Catholics.” But every election cycle brings another kind of Catholic into public view: the kind ready to exploit our faith for political gain.  I call them “Self-serve Catholics”.

In our time, this has mainly happened on the conservative side of the political spectrum.  The original Self-serve Catholics were Goldwater Republicans, chronically irked by the steadfast support of Catholics (80%) for John F. Kennedy.  Such Catholics were delighted when Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights leadership (1964, 1965) undermined the “Dixiecrats” (conservative southern Democrats) and turned the south over to the Republicans.  They were equally delighted when Roe v. Wade (1973) polarized the Catholic vote.  Catholics had been block Democratic voters since the days of Al Smith (1928), but by 1980 many were “Reagan Democrats” and over the last 30 years Catholics have become the largest swing vote in the nation.

The results delighted Self-servers: from 1968 to 2004, every President elected came from the south or California, far from the traditional Catholic liberal bedrocks of northeast urban centers.  And in 2004, even Catholic candidate John Kerry managed to get only 47% of the Catholic vote, largely because a caucus of conservative American bishops labeled him a bad Catholic.

But then, in 2008, Barack Obama regained the Catholic majority, and became the first northern liberal elected since John Kennedy.  This has left Self-servers doubling their efforts to regain conservative control of the Catholic vote.

I have repeatedly demonstrated that neither major party platform conforms to Catholic Social Teaching (CST), so neither party can lay claim to the Catholic vote as a right.  But Self-serve Catholics, undaunted by facts, continue trying to manipulate the Catholic vote using two main tactics.  First, they argue that only one issue should determine Catholic votes.  Second, they demonize one party (the Democrats) as immoral, anti-Catholic, even godless.

1. Single Issue Crusades.  In the 1960s, Self-serve Catholics struggled to find a Catholic litmus test for Democrats to fail: prayer in schools, sex education, birth control.  But after Roe v. Wade, the struggle shifted to attacking anyone who did not agree that legal prohibition of abortion was the best way to stop abortions.  In the last 10 years, gay rights and especially same-sex marriage have become new “single issue” options, but this year Self-serve Catholics have gone back to birth control, like this argument by columnist George Weigel:

Over the past four years, the Federal government has made unprecedented efforts to erode religious freedom.  The gravest assault was the “contraceptive mandate” issued earlier this year by the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services: an offense to conscientious Catholic employers who believe what the church believes about the morality of human love and the ethics of the right to life, and a frontal attack on the institutional integrity of the Church.  For with the HHS mandate, the Federal government seeks nothing less than to turn the Catholic Church’s charitable and medical facilities into state agencies that facilitate practices the Catholic Church believes are gravely evil.

I have already explained why “offense to conscience” is a bogus argument against the HHS mandate (see CrossCurrents #350).  In America, the issue of religious freedom is already guaranteed by the First Amendment—and enforcing it is the responsibility of our courts, not our elected officials.  In fact, the matter is already in court.  If the courts decide this mandate does infringe on the Church’s religious freedom, then the mandate will go.  If not, the mandate will remain and Self-serve Catholics will continue to fight it, but they will lose any legitimate claim that it violates our rights.  Either way, the outcome has nothing to do with elections.

But facts are no deterrent to Self-serve Catholics.

2. Demonizing Democrats. George Weigel leads the crusade with relatively moderate rhetoric that nonetheless crosses the line.  He says “The Catholic Church is under assault of the United States today.” He argues that this assault violates the principle that “the state respect the sanctuary of conscience, so that the Church’s people are not required by law to do things the Church teaches are immoral.”

I confessed this dangerous-sounding language baffles me.  I picture federal police force-feeding birth control pills to Catholics citizens.  I wonder: precisely what immoral action will the government require people to do?  Will it require anyone to use contraceptives?  No.  Will it require anyone to buy them?  No.  Will it require Catholics to prescribe them?  No.  Will it require Catholics to pay for them?  Possibly, indirectly, by subsidizing the coverage of contraceptives by insurance companies--but then, we Catholics already subsidize the pharmaceutical companies that sell contraceptives all the time.  I have already explained why participating in the marketing of contraceptives cannot reasonably be called immoral (see CrossCurrents #350).  Yet Self-servers like Weigel persist in charging their political adversaries with immoral assault.

Such talk inspires others Self-servers to more inflammatory rhetoric.  Consider these examples, taken from the “Letters to the Editor” section of the very same issue of the Catholic newspaper in which Weigel’s column appeared.

One reader wrote:

We are already witnessing an attack on our freedom of religion by government edict…As Catholics it is our responsibility to fight against this evil…We should gather…in our churches for prayers to end the assault on our morality by the present administration in Washington and replace it with people with values like our own.

The writer is perfectly justified, of course, in wanting leaders with values like his own.  But he is not justified in invoking his Catholic faith to demonize political opponents as “evil.” Once again, there was no recognition that freedom of religion is already a constitutional right, to be protected by the courts, not politicians.

Another self serving reader made his demonizing even more personal:

The Obama administration’s war on religious freedom launched another attack with help from inside the Church.  Aided by every Catholic heretic in the Massachusetts congressional delegation, the Democrats are attempting to force religious institutions, especially the Catholic Church, to provide immoral medical procedures in violation of God’s law… They’re trying to limit our practice of our faith and to exclude us from the public arena. Our love for Jesus Christ tells us that we cannot allow this. We must resist and disobey these immoral laws and regulations.

Notice two things here.  First, the reference to “Catholic heretics” is an explicit claim that Catholics with contrary opinions on policy somehow violate their faith.  Second, these heretics are “attempting to force” the Church to participate in immorality.  In other words, these are not only bad Catholics, but they commit deliberate, premeditated evil on others.  And finally, in that writer’s view, not only do they “support immoral actions” but they even “refuse to recant publicly”!

There is no attempt by any of these writers to debate the issues at stake.  To them, the moral questions are black and white, the policy implications are self evident and beyond dispute, and the deliberate malice of their opponents renders all dialogue futile.  These assumptions trump both the facts and our faith.

And there is more.  Amid these demonizing attacks there is no corresponding description of “people with values like our own.” Since the context of these attacks is the election, we can presume the writers mean Republicans.  In other words, these electoral appeals presume that Republican policies are Catholic-friendly.  This begs the question: do Republicans have “values like our own“?

To me, this means asking whether Republican values conform to Catholic Social Teaching (CST).  Posing this question exposes the hypocrisy of Self-serve Catholics. The truth is that CST teaching clashes with Republican values and policies on many issues.  Let me cite two examples: “big government” and “human rights.”

Big Government.  Clearly a major policy priority for Republicans is the promotion of smaller government, less regulation, less taxation, less public spending.  This is built on the classic belief “that which governs least governs best,” and is rooted in a narrow concept of “freedom” as personal economy.  That is, we are free to the extent the government does not intrude in our lives.

I have already explained (CrossCurrents #83) that freedom means much more in our Catholic tradition, but the simpler objection is this: CST teaching places no value on the size of government.  It focuses instead on the role government plays in promoting “the common good” - - which is the prime value of CST.  If the common good is served by a larger government, CST supports that. CST even recommends using taxation to fight inequality by redistributing wealth. Do Republicans?

Human Rights.  Politics aside, most Americans agree that securing human rights for the citizenry is the job of government.  But many Americans, even American Catholics--and especially Self-servers--embrace a list of human rights that is much shorter than the human rights recognized by CST.  This allows them to assume--wrongly--that the Republican Party is Catholic-friendly.

How often do Republicans acknowledge that “illegals” are actually exercising the human right to migrate, as Catholicism does?

How often do Republicans acknowledge that healthcare is a human right, to be guaranteed by government, as Catholicism does?

How often do Republicans call housing, education, and employment human rights, as Catholicism does?

In my view, both parties, Democratic and Republican, fail to consistently support CST.  Yet I feel no need to demonize either party, or to claim they’re attacking me or my faith.  For me, it is enough to say that CST sets a standard they both fail to reach.

But that is not enough for Self-serve Catholics.  They insist on demonizing Democrats as deliberately imposing evil, while blithely giving Republicans a pass on their own failures.  What else can I think but this: these Self-serve Catholics begin with a particular political bias, filter their Catholic faith through that bias, and then invoke that distorted version of Catholicism to attack their political opponents and advance their own political agenda?  And how can I not think that such an exploitation of our faith is self-serving?

I am open to dialogue with those who want to explain how demonizing Democrats, while absolving Republicans, is a reasonable application of our faith.  But until that happens, I will stand by this: these Catholics offend me with their Self-serving political exploitation of our faith.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012