c. 1999 Religion News Service

BOSTON – Rosary beads from Rome swung gently from the rear-view mirror of Ray Flynn’s Jeep Cherokee as the former mayor weaved through the streets of South Boston. His eyes were on the road, but his thoughts were on Catholic voters in the United States.”Catholics have a great potential to be an effective voice in the political elections in 2000,”he said.”We are the strongest, most important swing vote in America today. But we’re not solidified, we’re not unified.” After a decade running Boston’s City Hall and four years as Bill Clinton’s envoy to the Vatican, Flynn, 60, has a new mission: trying to mold Roman Catholics _ the country’s largest religious body and a quarter of all U.S. voters _ into a cohesive and formidable voting bloc.

What’s more, Flynn says it’s time Catholics got a little respect from the country’s two main political parties.”Catholics have been betrayed by both parties,”he said.”One party has taken advantage of them, and the other has ignored them.” Those are tough words coming from one of the Democratic Party’s most popular public officials. But Flynn has never been one to mince words. He made it clear years ago that his love for his Catholic faith came before his love for politics.”I am a Catholic before I’m a Democrat,”he says.

In April he found a way to blend his personal faith and his public politicking when he became president of the Catholic Alliance, a lay-run political advocacy group that was an off-shoot of the much larger Christian Coalition. The non-profit organization severed ties with the Christian Coalition in 1997.

Flynn’s main goal is to re-establish Catholics as a body of voters that politicians listen to, much as they listen to blacks, Jews or Hispanics. The Washington-based group currently claims 125,000 members; Flynn hopes to raise that number to around 400,000.

Flynn said Catholics need to field and support candidates who are pro-life, pro-family, pro-needy and pro-immigrant.”Finding a candidate who embodies all the social teachings of the Catholic Church is challenging, Flynn admits, but not impossible.

But perhaps the hardest part of Flynn’s mission will be trying to mobilize 43 million Catholics of voting age that are as diverse as they are numerous. American Catholics are fiercely independent in matters of faith.

Many see the pope as a worthy example but would never follow him into a voting booth.

U.S. Catholics were the backbone of New Deal liberalism until the 1980s when the abortion issue pushed large numbers to the Republican party.

Bishop Anthony J. O’Connell of the Palm Beach Diocese said the abortion issue permanently altered the allegiances of Catholic voters. “Certainly there was a time when a majority of Catholics who put the social teaching of the church up high … coincided with the agenda of the Democratic party,”O’Connell said.”But enter the question of abortion, and this drove a tremendous cleavage in the Catholic community … because it depended on whether you came down heavily on the social teaching of the church excluding the life issues or you came down heavily on the life issues and cared less about the social teaching.” Despite the rise of the anti-abortion”Reagan Democrat”in the 1980s, Catholics are still heavily Democratic and gave Bill Clinton 54 percent of their votes in 1996, compared to 33 percent for Bob Dole, according to a Gallup poll.

Catholics are now roughly evenly divided on party registration, although a critical 34 percent of Catholics who say they belong to neither party frequently vote for the Democratic ticket, according to a 1996 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Leaders in the church and experts who have studied Catholic voting patterns say unifying the Catholic vote-whatever that means-may be almost impossible.”Not all Catholics vote on the basis of social issues,”said Mark Rozell, a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.”Many Catholics have other salient issues that drive their voting decisions. “I think it’s very naive to think that such a large segment of the U.S. population can be mobilized as a coherent unit to vote on the basis of one issue.” Neither party embodies the entire catalogue of Catholic social teaching Flynn and the Alliance are promoting, a fact that Flynn readily admits.”The Democratic party is pro-poor but is certainly not pro-life. And the Republican party is pro-life but is certainly not pro-poor,”he concedes.

There are Catholic-friendly candidates out there _ Republican or Democrat, Catholic, Protestant or none of the above _ Catholics could support, Flynn said. The problem is whether or not they could win.

Flynn said a massive wealth of untapped leadership in church pews is hesitant to enter the political arena because they feel they have neither”the money nor the media”needed to win, much less the support of the”party elite”if they are against abortion.

Much of Flynn’s political life after Boston has been defined by the abortion issue. While serving as U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican from 1993-1997, he chided the Clinton administration over the president’s veto of a bill that would ban so-called”partial birth”abortions.

Last year he lost a race for Congress, in part because of his anti-abortion stance in an overwhelming liberal Boston congressional district.

The Rev. Francis Maniscalco, director of communications for the U.S. Catholic Conference, the bishops’ social action arm, said leadership by groups like the Catholic Alliance have helped keep the Catholic agenda alive even though the courts and the Democratic party platform run counter to church teachings.

Maniscalco, however, was doubtful all Catholic voters would ever vote in lockstep with each other or the church, and the church would never tell them how to vote.”It’s hard to define it as a bloc because it’s so large,”Maniscalco said.”That’s 62 million people who come from a variety of backgrounds and have different issues.” Flynn, however, has a strategy he says worked for him as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. He is inviting each presidential candidate from each party to meet with the Catholic Alliance and present their views on social issues. He said candidates are already itching to get time on his daily radio show in Boston.

Flynn also wants each party to devote a prime time slot at next summer’s conventions to a pro-life speaker, something Democrats have been hesitant to do in the past. Finally, Flynn is urging Catholic voters to withhold their support _ not their votes _ from candidates until they address Catholic social issues.

The Catholic Alliance will not endorse any candidates of either party, nor would Flynn offer his assessment on anyone in the current crop of candidates, even Catholic candidates like commentator Pat Buchanan.”It’s not about electing a Catholic,”he said.”It’s about electing a person who can identify with Catholic values.”

DEA END ECKSTROM