A Catholic president?

Commonweal, Nov 5, 2004

This eightieth anniversary issue of Commonweal goes to press a week before Election Day. Many of our subscribers will know the result of the 2004 presidential race--if there is a clear-cut result--before they receive this special double issue in the mail. We will not be doing any prognosticating in this space; and, as a nonprofit enterprise, we cannot endorse a candidate for political office. Certainly we share the view of many Americans that the choice voters must make between George W. Bush and John Kerry is likely to be a momentous one. In that regard, perhaps it is appropriate to alert readers to the unsuspected, some might say ironic, influence this magazine has had on this year's election. As it happens, some of the ideas you have heard invoked in this campaign originally appeared in Commonweal.

As is well known, John Kerry is the first Catholic nominated for president by a major political party since John F. Kennedy. One notorious hurdle Kennedy had to overcome was the deep suspicion Protestants had that a Catholic could not be faithful to both his religion and the Constitution's strict separation of church and state. Kerry, of course, faces a very different political problem, one concerning his loyalty to the church more than his responsiveness to the electorate at large. Among the Senate's most dogmatic supporters of abortion rights, Kerry appears to be defying the church's unambiguous moral teaching. In one sense, Kerry's politics show how anomalous the old canard about the dual allegiances of Catholics has become. What is especially interesting, however, is that in defending his abortion stance Kerry relies on Kennedy's views about church-state relations, views given implicit approval by the bishops at the time.

Kerry has said that as president his first moral duty would be to uphold the Constitution, and especially the separation of church and state. He argues that he cannot impose his personal, Catholic beliefs about the evils of abortion on those who do not share his faith. On a similar, if less portentous, issue Kennedy vociferously opposed federal aid to parochial schools, hoping to burnish his credentials as someone who would not let his religion influence his political decisions.

The most complete articulation Kennedy gave of the church-state question was at the Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, where he said that if a conflict arose between his duties as president and his religion, he would resign. He went on to say that he could not imagine such a conflict ever arising. For many Catholics and others, just such a conflict has arisen with regard to abortion, because the Constitution--as interpreted by a succession of Supreme Court decisions--sanctions what the church considers to be the taking of innocent human life.

Kennedy's performance in Houston was widely judged a great success. One of the key figures coaching Kennedy for his Houston appearance was former Commonweal executive editor and longtime columnist John Cogley. In his memoir, A Canterbury Tale (1976), Cogley tells the story of his involvement with the Kennedy campaign. Kennedy had written an article in Look magazine in 1959 in which he had first enunciated the view that for an "officeholder no moral obligation transcends the duty to live up to the Constitution." A firestorm of protest erupted in the Protestant as well as the Catholic press. Didn't Kennedy know that as a Christian he had an obligation to uphold God's law before man's? Responding to this criticism in his Commonweal column, Cogley defended Kennedy, insisting that an "officeholder's" first duty was indeed to the Constitution. If a conflict arose between Catholic morality and the Constitution, a Catholic officeholder should resign, Cogley wrote.

Kennedy read Cogley's column, and asked him to join his campaign staff. "I don't think this way of putting it had ever dawned on him ... he saw a way out of the bind he had gotten himself into," Cogley later wrote. Traveling with the future president to Houston, Cogley was charged with putting him through some "instant theological training." Cogley thought that one remark Kennedy made during their time together was especially revealing: "It is hard for a Harvard man to answer questions in theology. My answers tonight will probably cause heartburn at Fordham and BC."

Kerry's answers to questions about abortion have been similarly revealing, causing plenty of heartburn among Catholics who think legalized abortion is a much more serious dilemma than the question of tax aid to religious schools. It is impossible to speculate on where John Cogley would come down in the battle over abortion. He described himself as a nonsectarian Catholic, someone who welcomed the demise of the ethnic ghetto, championed the assimilation of Catholics, and was enthusiastic about the progressive promise of Vatican II. History suggests that Cogley mistook the veneer of Kennedy's Catholicism for depth, and similarly underestimated the challenge a powerful secularizing culture would present to the coherence and vitality of a church no longer rooted in a separate Catholic subculture. Still, Cogley was right in thinking that a fundamental shift was taking place in the relationship between Catholics and America. The institutions and ecclesiastical habits that had helped Catholics triumph over Protestant prejudice, while lifting a largely immigrant population out of ignorance and poverty in the first half of the last century, could no longer command the allegiance of a highly educated, affluent, and assimilated Catholic laity.