Catholics in Political Life Today

Last night Loyola University Chicago School of Law was proud to host a panel discussion entitled “Catholics in Political Life Today: Partisan Politics and Religious Identity.”  The event, which was co-sponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute, featured Melinda Henneberger, editor-in-chief for the online newspaper Politics Daily and the author of If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear (2007); Ross Douthat, a columnist with the New York Times and the author (with Reihan Salam) of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008); and Mark Stricherz who writes for the blog True/Slant and is the author of Why Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party (2007).

 

Melinda Henneberger suggested that the place of Catholics in American politics may be to have no one true home, to instead be a “pebble in the shoe” of secular political movements on both the right and the left.  She also argued that if the Democratic Party wants to govern effectively, it will need pro-life Democrats now more than ever.  This may infuriate pro-choice operatives and party leaders, but it is a necessity that gives rise to greater flexibility within the party on the issue of life.  There is, she believes, no similar flexibility in Republican circles that would urge that party to move closer to a Catholic way of thinking on other issues.  She concluded with a reflection on her own work as a journalist as kind of vocation and on the need for more Catholics to be involved in politics and the media – people who see themselves first as Catholics rather than as party loyalists.  Answering this call will be no simple matter since the lure of partisanship can be incredibly strong as evidenced by the many pro-life Democrats who became pro-choice in order to advance their careers within the party.

 

Ross Douthat argued that many Catholic voters today are nostalgic for a time when their religious identity and their political beliefs largely overlapped as they did at the time of FDR’s New Deal coalition with its strong emphasis on the importance of the two parent family in raising children and its stress on the dignity of work informed by principles of Catholic social teaching.  This overlap between Catholic identity and Democratic politics came apart in the 1960s and 1970s when the party embraced the radical changes in lifestyle and family then taking place.  Since then, Ross argued that there have been three attempts at a new synthesis of Catholic identity and politics, two of them liberal in nature and one of them conservative.  One liberal response has been to wholly embrace the changes wrought by the cultural upheaval of the ‘60s and ‘70s and to insist that there is no disjunction between the new lifestyles and practices and the Christian faith properly understood.  The other more common liberal response, typified by Mario Cuomo’s famous speech at Notre Dame, has been to bracket the cultural issues where Church teaching and Democratic Party orthodoxy do not align.  Under this approach abortion and other issues are characterized as matters of personal, religious morality that Catholics should set to one side freeing them to stress the liberal policy preferences that are deemed consonant with church teaching.  The first of these liberal attempts at synthesis, Ross said, is untenable while the second is not in any sense distinctively Catholic.  It is merely liberal, and so not a true synthesis.

 

Ross also argued that the conservative attempt at a new Catholic synthesis embraced the Church’s traditional teaching on abortion and other social issues but attempted to make conservatism less libertarian.  This synthesis can be seen in the work of Richard John Neuhaus and Deal Hudson.  In the Bush administration this synthesis proved to be a colossal failure with a domestic agenda that sputtered along and a foreign policy idealism that led to the debacle of Iraq.  As such, Ross said that Catholics should not expect to find a political home that perfectly coincides with their religious beliefs but that there should be a willingness on the part of Catholics in both parties to explore new and innovative ways to apply the principles of Catholic social thought to the problems of the day – ways that are not merely abstractly philosophical but practical and rigorous from a policy standpoint.

 

Mark Stricherz argued that what is lacking in politics today is any leader in the mold of the late Robert Casey, Sr., a principled champion of the rights of unborn children who was also a staunch supporter of other Democratic policies in keeping with Catholic social teaching.  But the time is ripe for Casey’s mantel to be taken up again.  Mark noted that many outside the Democratic Party dismiss pro-life Democrats as paper tigers who hold no real power and who provide cover for a party that is wholly committed to the abortion license. On the other hand many inside the Democratic Party hold pro-life Democrats in contempt as single-issue moralists who often get in the way of progressive reform.  There are also some, Mark noted, like E.J. Dionne, who pretend that serious pro-life Democrats like Dan Lipinski don’t even exist, and that pro-life efforts to alter the health reform bill were a covert right-wing attempt to derail the bill rather than principled opposition based on Catholic social teaching.  Mark further argued that although the prospects of pro-life Democrats being a force on the national level are virtually non-existent, pro-life Democrats could become a strong regional bloc in what he termed “The Big-10 States” of Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Pennsylvania.  Many Congressional districts in these states have constituencies that are open to Democratic policies but where being pro-life is a definite asset.  A real effort is needed to encourage pro-life Catholic candidates of strong character to follow in the footsteps of Bob Casey, Sr.

 

The panel discussion and the question and answer session that followed made for a stimulating evening of thought-provoking conversation and a list of additional questions well worth pondering.  For those unable to attend, I am happy to say that the event was recorded and that I plan to post a video pod-cast of the panel discussion on both Loyola’s website and Lumen Christi’s website in the near future.