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Overview
Originally published in 1991.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691630670 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1223 |
| Pages: | 188 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Catholic Bishops in American Politics
By Timothy A. Byrnes
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07876-2
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Religious leaders have played a very prominent role in American politics over the last fifteen years. They have articulated positions on various public policies, formed coalitions with other leaders and groups, and lent support, both implicitly and explicitly, to particular candidates and parties. As a result of their political activities, these religious leaders have encountered considerable criticism. They have been accused of breaching the wall of separation between church and state, and of imposing their own sectarian values and convictions on American politics. These accusations, however, have been based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that religion and politics actually mix in the United States. Critics of these church leaders have failed to take into account the role that political developments and factors have played in establishing the dynamic contemporary relationship between religion and politics in the United States. Religious leaders have not imposed themselves on American politics in recent years. Rather, they have been actively sought out and drawn into the political process by politicians and party leaders anxious to emphasize new issues and build new electoral coalitions.
In political terms, the key to the modern role of American religion has been a shift in the partisan alignment of the national party system. According to V. O. Key, a critical election is a "type of election in which there occurs a sharp and durable electoral realignment between the parties." No election since the 1930s has completely satisfied this definition, and so no true critical realignment has taken place since then. Nevertheless, the stable alignment that characterized American politics from the New Deal to the 1960s has given way to a more fluid and volatile competition between the parties. The once-dominant Democratic coalition, first brought together by Franklin Roosevelt, has decayed and splintered. And both major parties have sought policies and strategies that would allow them to replace that coalition with a new and equally durable electoral majority.
A byproduct of this new uncertainty has been the parties' discovery of religion as a tool of political mobilization and coalition building. Candidates for national office, seeking to shift a tenuous partisan alignment in their favor, have appealed to voters on religious grounds, focused the media's and the public's attention on religious issues, and debated among themselves the proper role that religion should play in American politics and public policy. Along the way, these political leaders have also expanded and deepened the role religious leaders play in the national political process.
This book is an examination of the relationship between political change and the activities of the American Catholic hierarchy. In recent years, of course, the Catholic bishops have been deeply involved in American politics. They have been leaders of the antiabortion movement; they have published highly detailed pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and the U.S. economy; and they have participated, both individually and collectively, in the national electoral process. In one sense, these activities have been shaped by internal Catholic developments like the enhanced social status of American Catholicism and the reformed organizational structure of the hierarchy itself. Freed from the responsibility to defend a persecuted, immigrant church, the bishops have strengthened their national conference and addressed a number of important items on the agenda of national politics. These internal matters, however, do not, on their own, satisfactorily explain the bishops' role in the contemporary political process. As I will illustrate in this book, that role has also been shaped by political change, by an expansion of the federal government's authority and initiative, and by rumblings in the party system that have led politicians to associate themselves with the bishops or with segments of the bishops' moral agenda.
The uncertain nature of the partisan alignment, for example, has attached renewed political significance to the hierarchy's relationship with Catholic voters. Catholics, an important component of the Democratic party's New Deal coalition, have emerged as volatile swing voters at the presidential level. As a result, they have been coveted and actively sought by both Democratic and Republican candidates. The bishops cannot deliver these Catholic voters to either party; they do not have that kind of authority. But what they do have is access to these voters, access that is highly prized by politicians. In fact, I have discovered in conversations with leaders from both political parties that politicians tend to believe that the bishops' access to Catholic voters is tantamount to influence over Catholic votes.
At one level, I suppose, this perception is based on solid tactical considerations. Politicians, after all, cannot afford to dismiss the leadership of America's largest church. At another level, however, this belief is based on simple ignorance of the way that the modern Catholic Church conducts its business. As I will document in later chapters, American political leaders, as a rule, have not had a particularly sophisticated understanding of either Catholics or Catholicism. Regardless of what it is based on, however, a perception that the bishops can influence votes has been enough to make candidates sensitive to the bishops and anxious to identify areas of agreement with them.
The bishops have more than just access to Catholic voters, of course. They also have virtually unparalleled institutional resources at their disposal. "If you are a bishop," Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager said to me, "you've got some pretty substantial organizational capabilities.... You've got a lot of people, you've got money, places to meet.... You've got a lot of things that any good politician would like to have at his disposal." You also have the ability, if you are the Catholic hierarchy collectively, to create or fortify social movements in support of your preferred policy positions.
The clearest example of the bishops' use of their resources for political purposes has been their role in the right-to-life movement. They gave the movement a great deal of money and other forms of institutional support that were indispensable to its initial formation and early development. And the bishops are still important guarantors of the right-to-life movement's financial and organizational viability. But the Catholic Church's resources can be applied to issues other than abortion. One of the reasons that politicians took seriously the bishops' pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, for example, was that the bishops had the wherewithal to offer substantial support to the nuclear freeze movement and its political allies.
Candidates and party leaders prefer to maintain cordial relations with anyone who can marshall these kinds of national resources. But candidates and party leaders are especially solicitous of resourceful community leaders who are also identified with religion, one of the most powerful forces in American life. The United States of America is quite simply one of the most religious nations in the world. In 1985, fully 95 percent of Americans believed in God, 68 percent belonged to an organized religious body, and 40 percent claimed that they attended church services on a weekly basis. In addition, the significance of religion in American life goes well beyond individual conviction and practice. According to The Gallup Report, Americans placed a higher degree of confidence in their churches than in any other institution, and 61 percent of them believed that religion could solve all or most of the problems facing the United States.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Catholic bishops came to be seen as responsible and effective spokesmen for these religious values and sensibilities that are so pervasive among the American public. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) demonstrated an ability to articulate morally grounded positions on a wide range of national issues. And a number of individual bishops exhibited a willingness to lend their moral authority, and that of their church, to politically sensitive issues and movements. Unlike their predecessors, these bishops have not been branded un-American or dismissed as antidemocratic threats to constitutional government. To the contrary, the bishops' visible religious identity and unapologetic moral assertiveness have made them attractive potential allies to a wide range of political forces. Anxious to attract Catholic voters, exploit Catholic resources, and apply a religious gloss to their own partisan programs, candidates and party leaders have sought the bishops out, engaged the bishops in political discussion, and highlighted the bishops' moral agenda. In short, the Catholic hierarchy has been enthusiastically welcomed into a political process in which the axis of political debate has shifted toward greater emphasis on religious issues and moral discourse.
This is not to suggest that the bishops have been entirely passive in regard to their role in the political process. To be sure, the bishops have established their own policy agenda and decided to pursue that agenda through concerted political action. In fact, I will closely examine the formulation of the bishops' policy positions, and I will point to several developments, particularly within the church, that have led the bishops to substantially alter their approach to the national political process.
Nevertheless, I will argue throughout the chapters that follow that the bishops' specific political activities, particularly in terms of their participation in the electoral process, cannot be understood without reference to the instability and renewed competitiveness that have characterized the American party system over the last twenty years. The bishops' political role, over that period of time, has been shaped by a series of particular intersections of their own policy agenda with the platforms and strategies of the major American political parties. In fact, even the content of the moral and political debate within the American hierarchy, a debate that has led to many of the bishops' most celebrated activities, has itself been determined by political developments.
There are essentially two camps within the National Conference of Catholic Bishops when it comes to public policy and political priorities. The first camp is made up of bishops who emphasize a whole series of modern threats to human life. These bishops approach issues such as abortion, nuclear weapons, poverty, and capital punishment in a more or less even-handed way. They argue that paying too much attention to abortion unnecessarily narrows the church's prolife concerns and blunts the potential political effectiveness of what they call the consistent ethic of life or seamless garment of human dignity. This group also points out that an exclusive emphasis on abortion inappropriately places the NCCB in political alliance with right-to-life forces whose views conflict with the church's official position on virtually every other issue.
Opposed to this camp is a group of bishops who believe that abortion should be the American church's first political priority. These bishops do not necessarily deny the validity of other prolife concerns, or even the need to respond to them. But they believe it is fatuous and dangerous to equate merely potential threats to human life, such as nuclear war, with the actual destruction of millions of fetuses every year. They argue that a diffuse, so-called consistent, approach dilutes the bishops' commitment to the protection of the unborn and undercuts the potential effectiveness of the bishops' antiabortion activities. In response to the concerns expressed by supporters of the consistent ethic, these bishops minimize the costs of an alliance with political forces who disagree with the bishops on other issues. They point out that these disagreements tend to be over the most appropriate means to agreed upon ends. Very few people, for example, actually advocate nuclear war or increased poverty, but millions of people, many of whom agree with the NCCB on other issues, do indeed strongly support legal abortion.
This debate should not be construed as a dispute over the substance of the Catholic hierarchy's policy positions. On the whole, there is a remarkable degree of consensus among the bishops over the content of their agenda. All of the bishops support their church's condemnation of abortion, and the pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and the U.S. economy, although the product of compromise, nevertheless were endorsed by overwhelming majorities of the bishops' conference. What the bishops do disagree about is the way their agenda should be pursued in circumstances where its major components (proarms control, prosocial spending, and antiabortion) cut across the prevailing cleavage of American national politics.
This crucial debate within the Catholic hierarchy over its political priorities has been influenced by politics in two fundamental ways. First of all, the debate is not merely over two different formulations of the Catholic Church's moral teachings. It is also over the way those teachings will intersect with the platforms and strategies of various political forces. To a great extent, in other words, the debate is quite straightforwardly a political one. Formulations and public presentations of the church's teachings that emphasize abortion over and above all other issues lend support to candidates and parties who agree with the bishops on that one issue. The consistent ethic of life, to say the least, does not.
Moreover, the bishops' debate itself has been framed and set in motion by developments that have taken place in the political process rather than in the bishops' conference. The two sides of the debate are two conflicting reactions to the fact that candidates have sought to identify themselves with limited segments of the bishops' moral agenda. The choice between the seamless garment and a more abortion-centered approach is really a political choice concerning the bishops' reaction to the use of their moral authority and policy agenda for partisan purposes.
An appreciation for the part that political developments and factors have played in shaping the bishops' activities in recent years affords us a much clearer and fuller understanding of those activities.
The bishops' opposition to legal abortion, for example, was not, at first, a partisan position. It became one, however, once the Republican party, seeking to effect a realignment and build what it called a "new majority," adopted the prolife banner and began to present itself as the party of religious and moral values.
The bishops' pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and the U.S. economy were politically significant not because they influenced public policy (they did not), but rather because they distanced the bishops from a Republican coalition and a conservative political agenda that had been linked to religion and religious values during the presidential campaign of 1980.
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's seamless garment or consistent ethic of life was in part a political strategy designed to emphasize the fact that the bishops' agenda cut across the major cleavages of contemporary American politics. It was an attempt, in other words, to prevent candidates from identifying themselves with bits and pieces of the bishops' prolife agenda.
Cardinal O'Connor's criticism of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, on the other hand, was an effort to redirect the media's and the public's attention away from the pastoral letters and Bernardin's consistent ethic and back onto the bishops' opposition to legal abortion. It was an invitation of sorts for antiabortion candidates to claim that the church supported their policy platforms.
In subsequent chapters I will examine this relationship between the American Catholic hierarchy and the American political process in much greater detail. I will dissect several of the bishops' policy positions, and analyze the roles that these positions played in the mobilization strategies of various political forces. I will also examine the bishops' involvement in several national election campaigns. We will see that in each and every instance the specific nature of that involvement was as much a function of the strategic maneuvering of politicians and party leaders as it was of the actions and statements of the bishops themselves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Catholic Bishops in American Politics by Timothy A. Byrnes. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- Chapter One. Introduction, pg. 1
- Chapter Two. A Political History, pg. 11
- Chapter Three. Into the Modern Era, pg. 35
- Chapter Four. The Bishops, Abortion, and a “New Majority”, pg. 54
- Chapter Five. The Bishops and Electoral Politics: 1976, pg. 68
- Chapter Six. The Bishops and Electoral Politics: 1980, pg. 82
- Chapter Seven. The Bishops and Nuclear Weapons, pg. 92
- Chapter Eight. The Bishops and Electoral Politics: 1984, pg. 108
- Chapter Nine. Economics, 1988, and the Future, pg. 127
- Notes, pg. 147
- Bibliography, pg. 165
- Index, pg. 173