COMMENTARY: Questions for a Judge Raise Questions for Catholics

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) A year ago, in a summer set sizzling more than this one by presidential politics, America’s Catholic bishops were heavily criticized for questioning Catholic John Kerry about how he squared his profession of Catholic faith with his profession of support for “a woman’s right to choose,” aka abortion rights. […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) A year ago, in a summer set sizzling more than this one by presidential politics, America’s Catholic bishops were heavily criticized for questioning Catholic John Kerry about how he squared his profession of Catholic faith with his profession of support for “a woman’s right to choose,” aka abortion rights.

The bishops, with their gift for finding specks in the eyes of others while missing the lumber in their own (think sex abuse crisis), quickly found their own credibility questioned. They didn’t help themselves by blurring their own question in a long debate over whether pro-choice Catholic officeholders should be denied the Eucharist.


That made senators seem more sympathetic and the bishops more like harsh bankers foreclosing on the homestead of faith. Commentators found it easy to characterize the prelates as immigrants illegally trying to cross the river dividing church from state.

The bishops scrambled onto the shore, their question drifted away on the current, and they spent the rest of the campaign trying to explain themselves.

A year later, however, there is a good reason to revisit the bishops, Catholic officeholders and that original question.

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter has written in The New York Times that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, will be at the center of the deliberations on the qualifications of Judge John Roberts to take a seat on that court. This reintroduces an issue with undeniable moral elements into the public discourse in which Catholic bishops have every right to participate.

The bishops’ question about Catholic politicians, their consciences and their public stands on such matters has new currency because the Judiciary Committee members who have been most vocal in defending abortion rights are Roman Catholics. These include Edward Kennedy (Mass.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Joseph Biden (Del.) and Richard Durbin (Ill.), all Democrats.

Each one, in a variety of ways, has emphasized what he sees as the quasi-sacred “woman’s right to privacy,” that is, the right to an abortion. This right is not explicit but was identified as an “emanation” from the Constitution by the late Justice William O. Douglas. Kennedy, implying that the majority of women favor abortion, claims that they want to know where Roberts stands on this issue.

The issue of a Catholic’s conscience, and his ability to carry out the duties of public office or appointment, has now been raised not by bishops but by those who argue that Roberts’ Catholicism may influence his opinions on Roe v. Wade if it is ever reviewed by the Supreme Court.


And, perhaps for the first time, the religious convictions of a Supreme Court candidate have been called into question by those who are suspicious of Roberts’ wife, a distinguished lawyer who is active in pro-life activities. Kennedy has ruled this out as irrelevant to the process of examining Judge Roberts, but it hangs acridly in the air nonetheless.

Here’s the question: Since Catholicism has been brought into the discussion as a possible negative influence, is it a violation of the boundary between church and state for the bishops to enter the public forum on an issue that not only challenges Catholic legislators to justify their support of abortion rights but is also critical for our understanding of human personality and the nature of human existence?

Do the bishops seem so far out of line in questioning Catholic politicians who have lined up so formidably in support of what they seemingly regard as a political rather than a moral issue? Are these officeholders willing to explore this question without shrugging off the bishops as if religious leaders had no business examining the moral dimensions of life?

Who would emerge as more Catholic from a public relations-free debate on this matter _ the senators who think it irrelevant, or the bishops who think it the central issue of our time?

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/PH END KENNEDY

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