c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Let us consider four cases:

1. You are a Dutch teenager during World War II. One morning as you’re walking down the street, the Gestapo appears in their Mercedes roadsters and their long black coats. They demand to know if Anne Frank lives in that house. You know she does. What do you tell them?

2. You’re an 8-year-old kid on the school playground. A 14-year-old bully is hunting for your 10-year-old brother. The bully descends on you. Where is your brother, he demands. You know your brother is in the playground on the other side of the school. What do you tell him?

3. A woman asks you what you think of her new hairdo (dress, shoes, whatever). You think it looks terrible. If you tell her the truth, you may lose her friendship. What do you say?

4. You are having a secret love affair with another partner in your law firm. The two of you will marry as soon as the other person’s annulment comes through. A nosey senior partner corners you and demands to know whether you’re sleeping with that person. If you tell that partner the truth, the story will spread through the whole firm, causing trouble for you and your lover. What do you say?

Are there times when you do not have to tell the truth, when indeed you should not tell the truth? Are there times when an obsession with truth could become immoral and even evil? Are there times when you have to lie?

In the moral theology I learned in the seminary a lie was defined as telling an untruth to SOMEONE WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO THE TRUTH.

This definition is one way of dealing with the dilemma one faces in cases like those above or similar ones. There are other ways of dealing with the problem, but this one seems to be the simplest.

Thus one would commit a grave sin by telling the Gestapo the truth. One is certainly under no obligation to tell the bully where one’s brother is; it would be a sin to expose the brother to a savage beating. The woman who asks about her hairdo wants a compliment (which is fair enough), but she has thereby forfeited her right to a true answer. The senior partner has no right to pry into your sexual life. You may therefore hide the truth from him.

By these criteria, I would argue President Clinton may well have told untruths in the Paul Jones deposition and in his initial public denials of the games with Monica Lewinsky, but he did not lie.

Whatever the legalities of the matter, no one has the right to demand of you an admission of adultery in a deposition for a civil suit. Moreover, the American people have no right to pry into the sex life of anyone, from a president on down. He may have told an untruth in the Jones deposition. He may have told an untruth to the American people. But, in this moral theological perspective, he did not lie.

David Schippers, the majority counsel of the current witch-hunt, indulged in patent hypocrisy when he quoted Thomas More on the subject of presidential perjury. One may well ask Schippers how many perjury indictments were returned against those who may have told untruths in civil depositions. One may also demand of him whether he knows of a single case in which a person was indicted for denying adultery under oath.

Like a lot of other folks involved in the current attempt to undo the last two presidential elections, Schippers has fallen in love with his own face on television.

Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, one of the few columnists to understand what is really happening in the present attacks on the president, calls it an attempted coup d’etat by fundamentalist Christians against the Constitution. They hope to seize the Presidency in 2000 and then impose their stern moral code on the rest of us. They are in fact a kind of native American version of the Afghanistan Taliban.

And, while they may unseat the president, I don’t think they’ll win the next presidential election. There is, however, a chance they will _ a better chance now than there was before Ken Starr began his inquisition. Make no mistake: it is for those voters that House Speaker Newt Gingrich and admitted”youthful”(at the age of 41) adulterer Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee are producing the present show.

DEA END GREELEY