A telling loss for the church
The Catholic Church in Boston is one of the big political losers this morning.
Senator Marian Walsh is going back to Beacon Hill, the voters in one of the most conservative Catholic districts in Massachusetts having ignored the counsel of their bishop and cast their ballots for a whole person instead of a single issue.
It had been bad enough that Walsh was the only legislator to call in 2002 for the prosecution as well as for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law in response to the clergy sex-abuse scandal. The West Roxbury Democrat and lifelong Catholic then rejected the urgent appeals of Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley last spring and voted against a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
This modest lawmaker, a state senator since 1993, all but painted a target on her back.
The Massachusetts Catholic Conference, the church's lobbying arm, put Walsh at the top of its list of incumbents who needed to ''feel the backlash in November," in the words of an editorial in The Pilot, the house organ of the Archdiocese of Boston.
Instead, Walsh defeated handily Robert Joyce of Roslindale, a lawyer running as an independent who made his commitment to ''defend traditional marriage" the centerpiece of his campaign in a district that encompasses West Roxbury, Hyde Park, Roslindale, Dedham, Westwood, and Norwood.
There were nasty anti-Walsh pamphlets on windshields in church parking lots after Sunday Mass. There were whispers about her sexuality, about her alleged animosity toward Catholicism, stemming from her marriage to a divorced man.
''It was ugly and it was sad," said Walsh, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School who also attended Ursuline Academy and Newton College of the Sacred Heart.
Her victory, she said last night, ''is an affirmation that all people are created equal, that all people deserve to have their constitutional rights protected, and that however much people may disagree, most people are good and want very much to be fair to each other."
There is irony in the transformation of Marian Walsh from predictable ally to pariah in the eyes of the Catholic Church. A tireless advocate for the poor, for public education, for affordable housing, for substance-abuse treatment, she also has stood with the church against the death penalty and abortion. That last stance put her at odds with a liberal establishment that otherwise found much to celebrate in her record of support for human services and expanded access to health care.
It is not easy in politics, Walsh long ago learned, to defy neat categorization. Social workers, for instance, withheld their endorsement of this natural ally in this crucial election because of Walsh's opposition to reproductive choice. Her antiabortion position has kept her from firm alliances with some female colleagues on male-dominated Beacon Hill, as well, but she accepts the consequences of her votes with equanimity.
''I don't apologize for voting my conscience," she said. ''People who agree with my position on abortion were willing to listen to me on gay marriage. Maybe they didn't agree, but they came to see that I voted the way I did because I saw it as a civil rights issue. I could not deny some of my constituents their constitutional right to marry."
The real irony is that it was the Catholic Church that gave Marian Walsh the strength to cast that vote. ''It was the church that taught me to believe in an informed conscience and to act on it. It was the church that taught me to question authority, to do what I believe is right," she said. ''The sadness I feel is to see the church stray so far from the heart of its mission, to really wander off the path. It has been very dispiriting for me personally."
Politically, yesterday's election returns were far more dispiriting for the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Boston.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
