From this week's Commonweal.
Catholic Answers
Two books for voters who take their faith seriously
Reviewed by
Douglas W. Kmiec
Render unto Caesar
Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life
Charles J. Chaput
Doubleday, $21.95, 272 pp.
A Nation for All
How the Catholic Vision of the Common Good Can Save America from the Politics of Division
Chris Korzen and Alexia Kelley
Jossey-Bass, $24.95, 176 pp.
It is not clear whether Barack Obama passed
on Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as a running mate because her archbishop
reprimanded her for refusing to sign laws she deemed threatening to Roe
v. Wade. But it didn’t help her chances. Of course, Obama’s
vice-presidential pick-Sen. Joe Biden, a Catholic-recently took his own
lumps from bishops. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver publicly
instructed Biden not to present himself for Communion while in town for
the Democratic National Convention. Several bishops corrected Biden
again after a Meet the Press appearance in which he affirmed his belief
that life begins at conception but declared it a private matter.
Is it prudent for bishops to involve
themselves so publicly in a national election? Two recent books give
contrasting and constructive perspectives. Both are well written and
cogently argued. The more optimistic volume is Chris Korzen and Alexia
Kelley’s A Nation for All, written to help put an
“end to both the politics of division and the culture of going it
alone.” Korzen and Kelley are two of the most astute young leaders in
the effort to bring Catholic social teaching to bear on American
culture. They argue that the United States “is hungry for a new vision
of leadership and community.” Satisfying that hunger means
strengthening the country’s commitment to peace, to a more just
exercise of governmental power, to environmental protection, and to
providing essential services to those in need. While those values have
declined over the past four decades, corporate power has risen-and
church leaders have become preoccupied with abortion.
According to Korzen and Kelley, that
preoccupation has played into the hands of Republicans, who have won
several national elections promising to address abortion without
delivering on that pledge. Catholic voters are therefore free to tackle
the problem outside the Republican Party. But in order to do so they
must overcome the misinformation from Republicans who would have them
believe any antiabortion strategy that goes around Roe is ineffective
and, worse, sinful.
In a thoughtful chapter on issues of church
and state, Korzen and Kelley demonstrate how emphasizing anti-Roe
strategies alone sits uneasily with the church’s promise of religious
freedom to all in Vatican II’s Dignitatis humanae (1965). Catholic social doctrine, they write, quoting Benedict XVI’s Deus caritas est,
“has no intention of giving the church power over the state. Even less
is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of
thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith.” And quoting John Paul
II’s Evangelium vitae, Korzen and Kelley note that
“when it is impossible to overturn or repeal a law allowing abortion
which is already in force...an elected official...[may] support
proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law.” To reduce
abortion they suggest providing health care and economic assistance to
women and families, robust alternatives such as support for adoption
and appropriate and effective sex education for young people, and a
host of other policy measures that have proved capable of reducing the
abortion rate in the United States and around the world. Thanks to the
efforts of Sen. Obama, much of that language is now in the Democratic
Party platform.
In Render unto Caesar,
Archbishop Chaput argues that such efforts are insufficient. While
admitting to knowing “sincere Catholics who reason differently” (as I
do), the archbishop sees a lack of “proportionate reason” in the
Korzen-Kelley path. Chaput says that in order to justify a vote for a
prochoice candidate, Catholic voters must have a reason of such
magnitude that we could, “with an honest heart, expect unborn victims
of abortion to accept when we meet them and need to explain our
actions-as we someday will.”
That is indeed a high threshold;
unfortunately Chaput applies it only to the cultural methods of
promoting life usually favored by Democrats. Of course, voting for a
“prolife” candidate does not guarantee that he will appoint Supreme
Court justices who accept the church’s natural-law arguments against
abortion. Nor does it mean that anti-Roe appointees will be approved by
what is sure to be a Democratic Congress. Is a Catholic voter supposed
to overlook how the Republican Party has failed to deliver Roe’s
reversal in thirty-five years? Given that political reality, how could
“voting prolife” in that narrow and unsuccessful sense be a sufficient
explanation to the victims of abortion?
That criticism aside, Render unto Caesar
does offer well-constructed, thoughtful, and accessible arguments. The
archbishop displays an impressive command of church documents and
literature. Chaput writes because he is “increasingly tired of the
church and her people being told to be quiet on public issues.” And it
is clear that he has no intention of being quiet, nor, given his
insight and erudition, should he be. Still, it is puzzling that, apart
from the issue of abortion and related sexual matters, most of the
social gospel that dominates Korzen and Kelley’s book is absent from
Chaput’s. Korzen and Kelley argue that the GOP’s claim that voting for
anti-Roe candidates is the way to vote Catholic has hampered a fuller
presentation of the church’s social teaching. Does Chaput make their
point for them?
The archbishop is correct to insist that
“Christian faith is always personal but never private.” Yet he fails to
highlight the tension between that proposition and the (post-JFK)
Catholic acceptance of the religious freedom of others who may contest
church teaching. Chaput clearly desires the Catholic position on life
issues to be the law of the land, but how does that happen when the
majority resists? His answer is familiar: truth cannot be denied. But
to the unconvinced non-Catholic, that answer begs the question, or at
least elides the major difficulty. And if the wrong-headed,
truth-denying majority resists for three decades and more, why not look
for another way to reduce the number of abortions? Indeed, is not one
duty-bound to look?
More than Korzen and Kelley, Chaput blames
deficient moral formation and resistance to sexual self-control for the
wider culture’s unwillingness to protect the unborn. He stresses the
importance of struggling against personal sin. Here the book returns to
its underlying emphasis: the truth of the church’s views on
contraception and “other inconvenient teachings,” as Chaput puts it.
The contraceptive mentality, he argues, reshapes sexual morality, leads
to higher divorce and illegitimacy, creates pressures for legalized
abortion, and coarsens male-female relations. He speculates that the
Catholic Church gets bad reviews in the national media for telling that
truth.
Toward the end of the book, Chaput takes up
the tendency of politicians to dissemble, which resonates strongly with
readers confronted by presidential campaigns fighting over the “change”
mantle. But these are passing observations, and the archbishop again
returns to the injustice and sinfulness of abortion. “The law must be
changed,” he declares. Yes, of course, but why understate how Catholic
faith also requires believers to change conditions that apparently give
rise to the horrible practice? As Benedict XVI writes in his encyclical
Deus caritas est:
"[I]f in my life I fail completely to heed
others, solely out of a desire to be ’devout’ and perform ’my religious
duties,’ then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes
merely ’proper,’ but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my
neighbor and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only
if I serve my neighbor can my eyes be opened to what God does for me
and how much he loves me.... Love of God and love of neighbor are thus
inseparable, they form a single commandment."
This is common ground worthy of the scholarly
work of Archbishop Chaput and the hope-filled effort of Chris Korzen
and Alexia Kelley. Both books commend themselves to Catholics who take
their faith seriously.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Douglas W. Kmiec
Douglas W. Kmiec, Caruso Family Chair in Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University, is the author of Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama (Overlook Press).
