c. 2004 Religion News Service

(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.)

(UNDATED) Everybody should have an Aunt Margaret who saw things as clearly as mine did. I have cited often her letter of inquiry to the sponsors about an improbable turn in a soap opera, “What do you take us for, damn fools?”

By now, with one convention down and the campaign bearing down on us like an autumn hurricane, everybody has heard more than they want or need to about the country’s Catholic bishops’ Hamlet-like “to deny or not to deny, that is the question” about Communion and Catholic officeholders who support legal abortion.

Nothing makes the headlines like a fight or _ ask my Aunt Margaret _ somebody making a damn fool of himself by going too far, as, for example, the prelate who declared that Catholics commit sin by voting for pro-choice candidates and should not receive the Eucharist until they confess and are reconciled with the church.

When the episcopal trumpet sounds a wavering note, Catholics find themselves arguing about the trumpeter rather than the music he is trying to play. That makes it easy to say that bishops shouldn’t be sounding sour notes in a political concert, that they should stay outside the great hall of State altogether, isn’t that what the Constitution says?

Not according to Seattle Archbishop Alexander Brunett who recently wrote that, the “misunderstanding” that separation between church and state prohibits church leaders from “involving themselves in politics … turns the constitutional protection on its head. The separation … protects churches and their people from the imposition of a state religion. It is a guarantee of religious freedom, not a gag order on the ordained.”

Noting that “one of the troubling aspects of the current debate … has been the suggestion by some that they can separate their faith from their political actions. … Those who profess to be in communion with the Catholic church may in good conscience arrive at different political alternatives, but they are obliged to apply its moral principles when making their decisions.”

Many healthy Catholics, reflecting on how they follow this same process in making the greater and lesser decisions in their own lives, will agree with Archbishop Brunett’s calm grounding of the dizzying spin that political operatives put on the church/state separation argument.

The way Catholics initially react to this ongoing discussion may be determined by their political affiliation. But they are not damned fools and, as they listen to candidates, they will wonder if they apply moral principles to their positions in a consistent and meaningful manner.

Sen. John F. Kerry finds himself in a very different position than John F. Kennedy did two generations ago. Kennedy then had to prove that he could profess Catholicism without threatening the Constitution; Kerry must show that he can profess the Constitution without threatening his Catholicism.

When he declares, for example, that he believes that life begins at conception, he is affirming a Catholic principle. When, halfway across the country his running mate, John Edwards, extolls him as the solitary defender, in all circumstances, of a woman’s constitutional right to choose an abortion, Kerry is being made to appear indifferent, if not callous, to Catholic teaching. He seems, in perhaps a pressured fulfillment of his critics’ central charge, to want it both ways _ to be an approved Catholic and an acceptable constitutionalist _ on an issue on which ordinary Catholics know that they have to make up their minds and candidates do, too.

Archbishop Brunett may have caught up with average Catholics who don’t get invited to bishops’ meetings but do know how to count. They understand their own struggle with their consciences in applying their Catholic principles to their personal and professional lives and they expect the same in presidntial candidates. The political operatives in either party who think they can spin the Catholic vote easily should remember that there are many Aunt Margarets out there and they are not damn fools.

DEA/JL END KENNEDY