Catholics, the Presidential Election, and the Bradley/George Jeremiad

In a posting on October 12, Rick Garnett provided a link to a piece that Gerry Bradley (Notre Dame) and Robby George (Princeton) published in National Review Online earlier this week. (If you haven't read the Bradley/George piece, please do so.) Cathy Kaveny has written a Op-Ed piece in response. I asked Cathy for permission to share her piece with the readers of this blog, and she agreed. For those of you who aren't familiar with Cathy, who holds a joint appointment at Notre Dame--law and theology--here are some relevant facts:

Professor M. Cathleen Kaveny, a scholar who focuses on the relationship of law and morality, was named the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law in 2001. She earned her A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1984, and holds four graduate degrees from Yale University including her M.A. (1986), M.Phil (1990), J.D. (1990) and Ph.D. (1991). A member of the Massachusetts Bar since 1993, Professor Kaveny clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Professor Kaveny has published over forty articles and essays, in journals and books specializing in law, ethics, and medical ethics. She has served on a number of editorial boards including The American Journal of Jurisprudence, The Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of Law and Religion, and The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. She has been a Senior Fellow at the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago (2002-2003) and the Royden B. Davis Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University (1998). Professor Kaveny is a member of the Steering Committee of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, which was founded by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to help overcome polarization within the Catholic Church. She also serves on the advisory board of the University’s Erasmus Institute, created in 1997 to focus on reinvigorating the role of religiously-based intellectual traditions in contemporary scholarship.

Now, here is Cathy Kaveny's Op-Ed:

Rambo Catholics and John Kerry

A few members of the American hierarchy and a number of influential and aggressive conservative lay Catholics are trying to bully their fellow American Catholics into voting for George Bush. See, e.g., Robert P. George and Gerard Bradley, "Not in Good Conscience," http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/george_bradley200410120849. From the perspective of these "Rambo" Catholics, it's not enough to be convinced that abortion is intrinsically wrong: One has to believe that the only acceptable remedy for the social evil of legalized abortion is a second Bush term no matter what its cost in other matters of the common good, and no matter what its likely effectiveness in reducing the incidence of abortion. No Catholic, according to this group, could possibly cast a vote in good conscience for Kerry; it's akin to a vote for slaveholders or Nazis.

The inflammatory rhetoric demonstrates that this is a high stakes poker game: everything is on the line here for the political fortunes of the Rambo Catholics, that is. To see why, ask yourself what their rhetoric commits them to doing if Kerry wins.

Will Rambo Catholics turn against the American government? In a notorious article in First Things (1996), Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University (and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics), argued that the very legitimacy of the American government is hanging by a thread because of Roe v. Wade. While we can buy some time by arguing that Roe is bad constitutional law, he tells us that ultimately we have to face the fact that it is the province of the judiciary to interpret the Constitution. It seems to me that George would have to consider the election of Kerry, who could appoint as many as four Supreme Court Justices, to be the last straw: He writes, "If the Constitution really did abandon the vulnerable to private acts of lethal violence, and, indeed, positively disempowered citizens from working through the democratic process to correct these injustices, then it would utterly lack the capacity to bind the consciences of citizens. Our duty would not be to accept a common mandate, but to resist."

What form would that "resistance" take? Surely not just normal political protest. Would Rambo Catholics pressure the US Bishops to bless an armed revolution against the American government? Would their call now be for faithful Catholics to secede from the United States, to form another Holy Roman Empire? Are they really ready to lead us into another Civil War? Or if they are not ready, would the only reason be the prudential consideration that they are not likely to win? If they don't advocate full scale revolution, what forms of guerilla tactics will they allow to disrupt the workings of the government? Taken at face value, it is hard to see where else this logic and their rhetoric could lead.

As long as Bush remains president, the full force of their position is blunted: no need to engage in resistance, because the hope of overturning Roe by changing the composition of the Supreme Court remains alive. If Kerry is elected however, the radical--and potentially violent--implications of their rhetoric will be unmasked for what it is: an outrageous verbal bluff. They ought to be reduced to silence, because they have given themselves no verbal space for working within the system for incremental change, and because the revolutionary alternative they have left for themselves is preposterous. Silence does seem to be a fitting consequence for making an outrageous verbal bluff, and a fitting penalty for ecclesiastical bullies (particularly, in my view, if combined with withdrawal to a life of monastic prayer).

Will Rambo Catholics pressure the Vatican to cut off diplomatic relationships with the United States if Kerry wins? Will they demand that the Pope refuse to accept the credentials of a Kerry ambassador to the Holy See? What will they say if the Vatican decides to cultivate, as best it can, a candid and open relationship with the only remaining superpower in the world, led by a practicing Catholic? If challenged, the Vatican would likely say that it is maintaining diplomatic relations with Kerry, not because it supports his position on abortion, but because it believes that doing so is necessary for the common good, to advance the interests of the weakest and most vulnerable around the world (including the unborn). In technical terms, any appearance of legitimacy they unintentionally lend to Kerry's abortion policies is called permissible material cooperation with evil. But the Vatican's reasons for maintaining diplomatic relations with Kerry wouldn't be different in kind from the reasons that faithful Catholics might vote for him instead of Bush. Indeed, Cardinal Ratzinger has recently clarified that it is not always wrong for a Catholic to vote for a politician who supports legalized abortion, provided that she does so not in order to support abortion, but in order to achieve other essential aspects of the common good.

So will the Rambo Catholics apply the same bullying tactics to the Vatican that they have applied to their fellow Catholics in the United States? Will they accuse Rome of giving scandal by cooperating with a leader they have lumped in with the Nazis? Will they set themselves firmly against Vatican policy, bemoaning the Church's lack of fidelity to the purity of divine moral teaching? Will they go into schism, like Archbishop Marcel Lefevre, who rejected the Second Vatican Council as inconsistent with the true Catholic faith? Not very likely in my view. But how, then, can they escape the charge of a cynical and abrupt about-face in their position?

Never bet against the "house"--especially in a high stakes poker game. And in the Catholic Church, the "house" does not belong to the Rambo party. It belongs to the party of the "poor banished children of Eve." I have taken the name from a prayer addressed to Mary, the mother of Jesus (said after Mass in the old days for the conversion of Russia): "Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and out hope! To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears." The "poor banished children of Eve" are trying to make their way the best they can in the shadows of a world still marred by sin.

What are the "house rules" of the Church belonging to the "poor banished children of Eve"? One was set long ago by St. Augustine. The faithful, the members of the City of God, cannot expect to set up a political government on this earth that is free from injustice, even gross injustice. Augustine argues that political life East of Eden will inevitably entail an admixture of good and evil, by divine design. God suffers the wheat and tares to grow alongside one another in the City of Man until the end of time; to attempt to uproot the tares, particularly by violence, may well inflict untold harm upon the wheat. If Kerry is elected, it will become abundantly clear that the articulated strategy of the Rambo Catholics involves burning down the entire field. Such blatant violators of house rules should turn in their chips.

What happens if Bush wins? As they consider how to vote, Catholics counting themselves among the "poor banished children of Eve" should ask themselves this question. Would the most vulnerable members of our society really be better off if the world's only superpower were governed by Bush and his allies, or by John Kerry and his? In my view, the answer to that question is becoming clearer with every inflammatory thing the Rambo Catholics say and write.