Kerry as President (cont'd)

I’m certain that I don’t have the answers to Greg’s insightful questions regarding the prospect of John Kerry as President, but his comments do raise a more fundamental question for me: Is there any Catholic politician who could get elected President without defying the Church’s teaching in certain areas?

Imagine for a moment that George W. Bush were Catholic (after all, from some of his speeches, an outsider might assume he is). On issues like taxes, labor, war, the death penalty, and the environment, don’t his administration’s policies stand in some tension with the teachings of the Church? (I have previously taken Bush the candidate to task for what I see as his one-dimensional invocation of subsidiarity. See Robert K. Vischer, Subsidiarity as a Principle of Governance: Beyond Devolution, 35 Ind. L. Rev. 103 (2001).) Granted, abortion is an area on which there’s much less wiggle room than some of the issues on which Bush comes up short, but my point is that any leader who is elevated to national prominence by either party is going to have built their candidacy on positions that defy at least some of the anthropological presumptions of Catholic social thought. Perhaps Republicans won’t have to be as overtly hostile to those presumptions in order to reassure their non-Catholic base as Democrats like Kerry are – maybe because Republicans' defiance arises on issues that are less widely identified with the Church in the popular media – but wouldn’t their defiance still have the same capacity to serve as a model that might corrode the laity’s deference toward the teaching? (For the sake of argument, I'm leaving to the side Kerry's suggestion that the pope lacks standing even to speak on these issues in the political sphere, a suggestion which I concede is beyond the pale.)

I guess my core question is this: can anyone imagine a Catholic President who would present an affirmative vision of obedience to the Church’s teaching?

Rob