[Readers of this blog may be interested in the following item, which appeared in this morning's New York Times. Note the part about capital punishment, which is relevant to an earlier series of exchanges on this blog.]
October 24, 2004
Officially, at Least, Vatican Is Staying Above Election Fray
By IAN FISHER
ATICAN CITY, Oct. 22 - While many American Catholics oppose Senator John Kerry because he supports abortion rights, church officials and observers here say that if the people who run the Vatican could vote, they would be as divided as Americans are - and might even tilt toward Mr. Kerry.
Officially, the Vatican never takes positions on elections, and it has maintained a public silence about an issue deeply dividing American Catholics this year: the assertion by some American bishops that voting for Mr. Kerry amounts to a sin.
But interviews with Vatican officials, many who did not want to be named, and experts who watch the church closely turn up a bottom line in which many Vatican officials seem to differ with hard-line American Catholics: while opposition to abortion is nonnegotiable for the church, that does not necessarily translate into uniform hope here that President Bush wins re-election. There are other issues - especially the war in Iraq, which Pope John Paul II has spoken out against - that weigh heavily.
"At the end of the day the Vatican is a European institution," said John L. Allen Jr., an influential reporter for the National Catholic Reporter who recently wrote a column estimating that the Vatican would slightly favor Mr. Kerry. He noted that at least half the Vatican staff is European, "drawn from the same background as people working in foreign ministries of Germany or Italy.''
"In that circle Bush is overwhelmingly an unpopular figure," he added. "They start from a great deal of skepticism about Bush. You add to that a year and a half of the unrelenting criticism of Bush's war, and the sense among some of them that subsequent events have proven them right."
In interviews, Vatican officials and other experts noted that the Vatican was not monolithic, and that as a huge bureaucracy with competing interests there was no unified view other than a deep interest in how the most powerful nation in the world exercised its power.
Vatican departments dealing with theology and the family, several experts said, appear to favor Mr. Bush because of his opposition to abortion. Other departments, dealing with diplomacy and poverty, tend to lean toward Mr. Kerry because of the Iraq war and the view that Mr. Bush has generally sidelined diplomacy.
Several Vatican officials said, however, that any such talk has little meaning because the church does not take sides in elections. But the statements by several American bishops that Catholics who vote for Mr. Kerry would have to go to confession have raised the question in many corners about whether this is an official church position.
The church has not addressed this question publicly and, in fact, seems reluctant to be dragged into the fight: this week, one top Vatican official, Msgr. Pietro Parolin, the Vatican's undersecretary of state, reminded reporters here that the "concrete aspects" of the American election are "not our business."
At the same time, Monsignor Parolin and other officials noted that American Catholics should vote according to church doctrine - a statement that neither endorses nor rejects the conservative American bishops' position. While the church's social doctrine spells out opposition to abortion, it also discusses obligations like defending the poor.
One senior Vatican official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, "It is up to the American bishops to announce, or to provide, the moral and social doctrine of the church which offers the ethical principles to make a coherent choice."
In recent weeks several conservative bishops in the United States have done just that, particularly over the issues of abortion and the use of embryonic stem cells for research. In public statements and published articles they have told parishioners that no other issues are as important in the election and that they should support the candidate who opposes abortion and stem-cell research.
But other American bishops are less strident, urging parishioners simply to "vote your conscience.''
One Vatican official did offer theological guidance: that it is not necessarily a sin to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights. The official said in an interview that it would be a sin to vote for such a candidate with the express intention of expanding abortion rights. But if the voter is acting on his conscience taking into consideration all moral questions, it would not be a sin, he said.
"It's not a question that we don't think abortion has the moral weight that is ascribed to it," the official said. "Absolutely, but it is difficult to say that a person commits a sin if they vote for a pro-choice politician.''
While Mr. Kerry's abortion stand puts him at odds with church doctrine, several Vatican officials said they were unclear whether Mr. Bush would be in strict accordance, despite his opposition to abortion. Experts with close ties to the Vatican cited not only the war in Iraq but Mr. Bush's strong support for capital punishment, also opposed by the church.
The experts note that, in church doctrine, abortion is a particular sin: that because abortion robs the innocent of life, it differs from capital punishment or war. At the same time, several experts said, this does not imply endorsement by the Vatican of the American bishops' warnings against voting for Mr. Kerry.
"It's a myth that the Vatican is pushing this agenda on the U.S. bishops," said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest who edits the Catholic magazine America. Father Reese said, moreover, that the Vatican seemed worried about the divisions this bitter election has caused in the American church."When you have different bishops teaching different things, it confuses the faithful," he said. "And they don't like that.''
First, my thanks. I am very grateful, Greg, for your posting yesterday. I have great respect for your heartfelt decision--and the heartfelt decision of many other Catholics--to vote for President Bush. As I suggested in an earlier posting, it would be ridiculous to claim that a faithful Catholic could not in good conscience vote for Bush. Your impassioned plea makes it clear beyond any reasonable doubt that a faithful Catholic can indeed vote in good conscience for President Bush. (Not that there was any room for reasonable doubt!)
Now, my clarification. In your posting yesterday, in response to an earlier posting of mine, you wrote that you could not "judge a fellow Catholic who proclaims fealty to the cause of life and yet casts a vote for Kerry as, on the basis of that act alone, having committed grave sin or removed him or herself from communion with the Church. Would I see such a vote as imprudent and foolish? Yes. Mendacious? Presumably no (as only God can read the heart)." My fundamental point, however, had nothing to do with whether one was committing a grave sin. My point was not about sin, but about charity.
Assume that a Catholic, like Father Langan, or Dean Roche, or Ms. Steinfels, or Professor Kaveny, explains in some detail why, after deliberation, she has decided to vote for Senator Kerry. It is one thing to try to persuade her not to do so--to explain to her why, in one's judgment, neither she nor any other faithful Catholic should do so. But it is another thing altogether to insist to her that neither she nor any other faithful Catholic can in good conscience vote for Kerry, that her decision to do so is, for a faithful Catholic, beyond the pale of reason. As I read their National Review Online piece, this is the gravamen of what Gerry Bradley and Robbie George have argued. As I said in an earlier posting, I find this position breathtakingly arrogant.
So arrogant, in fact, that I am left to wonder: Are they who press such an argument unwittingly blinded by their passion into inculpable ignorance of the daunting complexity of the "for whom do I vote" question? Or have they permitted themselves to be goaded by their passion into forsaking the charity we owe one another in favor of rhetorical overkill--the kind of overkill that, as Cathy Kaveny has pointed out, can destroy relationships and alliances?
