c. 2004 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ When 1,000 “faithful” Catholics packed a hotel ballroom for the first-ever National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on Wednesday (April 28), noticeably absent was the man who could be the first Catholic president in 44 years.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., probably would have found few kindred souls at the Mayflower Hotel, where organizers promised to uphold church teaching against abortion in a tumultuous election year.
“There never was a finer time to be a faithful Catholic,” said Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a United Nations watchdog group, who helped organize the breakfast.
“Though politicians are with us today, this is not a day for politics, but for prayer,” he said.
Although the nonpartisan menu featured bacon, eggs and coffee, the speakers served up red-meat rhetoric on opposing so-called “partial-birth” abortion and confronting “vacuous” morality that fired up the crowd.
At times, it seemed the only thing missing was a Republican elephant. Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie attended, while Terry McAuliffe of the Democratic National Committee, also a Catholic, did not. GOP Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania received a standing ovation, while Ted Kennedy, the other Democratic Catholic senator from Massachusetts, was nowhere to be seen.
Ruse said both McAuliffe and Kennedy are “unfaithful Catholics” for their support of abortion rights. While they might be invited, they would “never be given the microphone.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, a Catholic, stood in for President Bush. “We should live our faith, ladies and gentlemen, in all that we do,” Thompson said.
Organizers said they invited all “pro-life Democratic” members of Congress, but of the half-dozen lawmakers who attended, only one, Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, was a Democrat.
“I’ve been asked a lot lately, which comes first _ being a Catholic Democrat, or a Democrat who is Catholic,” Stupak said. “Depending on how you look at it, it can be both a blessing or a curse.”
Kerry’s support of abortion rights has prompted threats of denied Communion from some bishops. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, who is heading a task force on dissenting politicians, has said he is hesitant to use the Eucharist as a “sanction.”
The sold-out breakfast was organized by luminaries from the Catholic right, including Deal Hudson of Crisis magazine, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus of the journal First Things, papal biographer George Weigel, and the Rev. William Stetson, director of the Catholic Information Center run by the Opus Dei movement.
The breakfast did not have an official endorsement from the American church hierarchy at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, although McCarrick sent his blessings in a letter.
The event raised $75,000 for the Sisters of Life order, founded by the late Cardinal John O’Connor, and Peter’s Pence, an international charity overseen by the pope. An additional $11,000 was raised on the spot to help the Sisters of Life replace their roof in New York.
Catholic leaders, who have been a minority at the annual National Prayer Breakfast organized by evangelicals, bemoaned “attacks on our church, from within and from without,” as Ruse put it.
Joe Cella, who runs the Ave Maria List to support anti-abortion politicians, said church teachings must never be compromised. “We’re here to plant a flag for the unambiguous truths that they are _ under daily attack and ridicule,” he said.
Ruse, who served as vice president for the breakfast, said the focus was on the church, not politics. Allegiance to the church’s prohibition on abortion was paramount in determining who is a “faithful Catholic,” he said.
“We worked very hard to get pro-life Catholic Democrats there, but they’re in such short number,” he said after the breakfast. “This is not a political event, this is a Catholic event. But the sorry state of affairs is that there are a lot of unfaithful Catholics out there in politics.”
DEA/PH END ECKSTROM
