BC topic is Catholics and the swing vote
(Clarification: A reference in the Spiritual Life column in Saturday's City & Region section to the declining number of Catholic adherents should have been more specific. The percentage of American Catholics attending Mass in any given week has dropped from 67 percent in 1965 to 45 percent in 2004, according to a Gallup poll. The number of people identifying themselves as Catholics has risen during that time, from 45.6 million in 1965 to 64.8 million in 2005, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.)
Religion and politics: They may not go together like love and marriage, but they can't seem to divorce each other.
Forty-plus years after John F. Kennedy's election supposedly cured the American allergy to a Catholic president, some people got the chills in 2004 over another Catholic candidate, Senator John F. Kerry. The twist was that these nervous voters were bishops, and they were concerned with his presence in church more than in the White House.
Just a sliver of bishops, to be sure, but this handful nonetheless argued that Kerry should be denied communion because his support for legalized abortion clashed with his church's position. That started a national discussion of whether the church-state wall had suffered another breach and what deference politicians should accord their religious faith in deciding the public business.
Boston College is to give the question an airing Monday night, when a panel of Catholics in politics and the press discuss the nexus between their faith and policy. It may seem a counterintuitive topic, given that Catholicism, like other mainline denominations, has been losing adherents. It is conservative evangelical churches that have mushroomed in numbers and, consequently, political influence.
''I think that'd be a very legitimate subject for another conference, maybe at Bob Jones University," quips NBC newsman Tim Russert. He moderates ''Meet the Press" and will handle the same duty at BC's event, scheduled for 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Jesuit-run school's Silvio O. Conte Forum. But Russert also believes that the gray-haired issue of Catholics-in-politics still has some life in it.
''The issue has evolved in our politics, certainly, from Al Smith," Russert says. Smith was the target of blatantly anti-Catholic slurs when he ran for president in 1928. Today, Russert says, Catholics are the largest religious bloc in Congress. President Bush's strategists specifically targeted Catholic voters for appeals. And after the confirmation last month of Samuel A. Alito Jr., the US Supreme Court has its first-ever Catholic majority.
But recent controversies, including federal funding of stem cell research and the Terri Schiavo end-of-life case, have put faith in politics under a microscope.
''Can a Catholic officeholder be a good Republican and Catholic, and a good Democrat and a Catholic?" asks Russert. And if some bishops would deny Kerry communion, ''Does the [Catholic] hierarchy have the same standard for a Supreme Court justice as they do for a senator or congressman? And if not, why not?"
Another question has to do with what public policies are appropriate to infer from the Bible. ''I always ask my conservative friends, just to tweak them, where in the New Testament they find Jesus talking about a cut in the capital gains tax," panelist and syndicated columnist E.J. Dionne says in e-mail. The Jesus of the gospels, he notes, spent more time preaching a -- dare we say it? -- liberal-sounding concern for the poor.
Then there's the topic of Catholics' changing voting patterns. Once solidly Democratic, the majority of Catholic voters abandoned Kerry last time out for the incumbent Methodist-in-chief. Surveys now show that regular church-going is one of the strongest indicators of a Republican-leaning voter.
Dionne offers the counterintuitive suggestion that ''there is no Catholic vote, and it's important." Catholics split roughly 40 percent Democratic, 40 percent Republican, he writes, with the remainder being swing voters. ''But that swing is very important, particularly in key Midwestern states such as Ohio. Bush's 2004 share of the Catholic vote was roughly 8 points higher than Bob Dole's in 1996. In a group as large as America's Catholics, that sort of shift matters."
His fellow panelists for ''Catholic Politicians in the US: Their Faith and Public Policy" are former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, Democratic strategist James Carville, and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, a White House speechwriter for President Reagan.
The Rev. William P. Leahy, BC's president, says the discussion, sponsored by the school's Church in the 21st Century Center, incorporates two themes at the heart of the center's mission: the role of laymen and women in the church and the best ways to hand down the Catholic faith.
''We have these Catholic politicians who should be role models, not only for the larger community but the Catholic community," Leahy said. ''A lot of people will ask . . . what moral compass do they operate from? Doesn't faith have a role?"
As for whether bishops should dish out sanctions by denying communion, Leahy prefers the approach of his and Kerry's spiritual leader. Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley of Boston has said that individuals should examine their consciences when taking the sacrament but that it isn't his place to dictate their decision.
''I think denominations should be very, very uneasy about turning somebody out of their particular faith community," argues Leahy. His own church is careful about doling out condemnations, he adds. It has never formally declared that any individual is in hell.
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