From bystander to middle of the fray

National Catholic Reporter, August 8, 2008

Dr. Patrick Whelan, a Boston physician who is on the staff at Massachusetts General Hospital and "takes care of children with arthritis," may not fit the mold of political activist. But certain elements of the 2004 presidential campaign caught his attention and moved him from bystander to the middle of the fray.

He had been teaching a course in medical ethics at Harvard when then-St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke issued his edict that Catholic Sen. John Kerry should be denied Communion because of his positions on abortion and stem-cell research. Whelan said he realized then that "all the issues that interfaced between Catholicism and politics were medical ethics issues and I was curious that there were no doctors involved in the conversation."

He said he contacted the Kerry campaign to ask how he could get involved in Catholic outreach, only to be told the campaign had no such outreach effort.

So he started a Web site that resulted in Catholics for Kerry. What he discovered, he said, was that throughout the country "there were groups of dedicated people" aware that "Catholic issues had been misappropriated to serve the Republican agenda."

After the election, Whelan investigated the national Democratic scene and discovered that "there was not a single Catholic caucus within the Democratic Party at the state level."

So he decided to broaden the effort, and it became Catholic Democrats.

At the moment, he said, the group is funded primarily by the individuals involved. In some ways, the group seeks to imitate the success of conservative Catholics in influencing the political agenda. To that end, Whelan points to the fact that the Democratic National Committee now has a person devoted to Catholic outreach, as does the Obama campaign, which also has an elaborate Catholic advisory group.