Editor's Note: We welcome Kathleen Reeves, another youth voice on our Real Time blog, today! Kathleen will blog weekly with three other young bloggers.
As someone who attended Mass every week growing up, I was attuned to the liberalism in the readings and the Gospels - I remembered Jesus's compassion for the prostitute, his inclusion of women, and the constant reminders to love the sick and the maimed - people we'd now call disabled. But to many of my peers, the idea of Catholicism as a liberal institution was incomprehensible. And why wouldn't it be? My generation does not remember when Catholics bolstered the Democratic party, when the children of Irish and Italian immigrants voted with the party of labor unions rather than the party of factory owners.
As Catholics became more prosperous,
the battle between workers and owners became less central. And something
else happened, of course: the rise of the Evangelical movement and the
increased politicization of abortion and contraception. To the extent
that, in at least the past two presidential elections, American bishops
declared it a sin to vote for the Democratic candidate. And there was
the very public, appalling refusal of Communion to John Kerry.
What happened? A New Yorker article by Peter Boyer that appeared in September points to Karl Rove's instrumental role in the delivery of Catholics to the Republican party in the 2000 election, with the help of Deal Hudson, a conservative Catholic editor. The piece suggests, though, that things might be changing. Douglas Kmiec, a Catholic legal scholar who worked for Reagan, endorsed Obama after some soul-searching on Obama's stand on abortion. And recently, Leslie Woodcock Tentler, a professor of history at Catholic University chided the church's "single-issue approach to politics," which threatens to overshadow the traditional Catholic interest in social justice.
An article in the National Catholic Reporter recounts Tentler's January 29th talk, in which she recalled a statement issued by a council of Catholic bishops in 1919:
She said the statement -- which later became practically a charter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" program -- called for public policies that would include:
- A "living wage" for all male workers -- defined as sufficient to support a wife and family in reasonable comfort and provide for savings to sustain him and his spouse in old age (she noted that the bishops presumed, in accord with the times, that males should be the economic providers).
- Government requirements that employers provide insurance protecting their employees from illness and disability and cover health and economic security in old age -- principles that would eventually be implemented in programs ranging from unemployment insurance to the Social Security System.
- "Publicly subsidized medical care" to those that need it, found today in Medicare and Medicaid.
- "Slum clearance and public housing."
- "Expansion and more rigorous enforcement of workplace safety laws."
- "An end to child labor" by extreme punitive taxing to effectively to reverse a 1918 Supreme Court decision that had declared it legal.
- "State protection of the right of unions to organize and bargain collectively."
- "A tax code that would protect the more equitable distribution of income."
American Catholics - many of
them much more comfortable than they used to be - are sorely in need
of a reminder of some of the church's most basic tenets: tolerance,
compassion for the poor, mindfulness of those who are easily forgotten.
But perhaps the most vital idea in Tentler's talk was how the Catholic
Church addressed family planning in the past. At the time of the 1919
"Bishops' Program for Social Reconstruction," the hot-button issue
was not abortion, but contraception. Part of the reason the bishops
pushed for a living wage was to make large families feasible for low-income
Catholics. In other words, "They always spoke a pragmatic rather than
a religious or doctrinal language," says Tentler.
If the climate of the Catholic Church today were what it was in the early 20th century, might we see bishops taking steps - indeed, recommending legislation-not to limit access to abortion but rather to make their teaching on abortion more feasible for Catholics? Would they, in the spirit of pragmatism and compassion, allow at least a dialogue about contraception? Could we even imagine them embodying Catholic social justice by empowering the poor-making sex education widespread and contraception free and available?
As Boyer's piece in the New Yorker pointed out, Obama drew the attention of a few on the religious right with his faith-friendly approach. Perhaps the President, with his remarkable capacity for calm consideration, can help moderate a discussion between those on opposite sides of the reproductive rights argument. And perhaps the Catholic Church can bring to this discussion a renewed, pragmatic dedication to the welfare of all people.
