In 2013, Thomas Tobin, the Catholic bishop of Providence, announced that he’d registered as a Republican. It caused a minor scandal, not because a bishop declared partisan loyalties, but because his loyalties weren’t to the Democratic Party, home of people such as New York’s Gov. Al Smith and President John F. Kennedy.
In politics, America’s Catholic prelates are Democrats almost to a man. They’ve denounced President Trump’s border wall with far more vigor than they ever demonstrated when it would have mattered during the same-sex marriage debate. They spent the entire lead-up to Obamacare trying to sweeten and woo Barack Obama, leaving nuns to fight his birth control mandate by themselves.
Bishops are citizens and have the right to their views, just as you and I do. None of our shepherds will deny, however, that it becomes increasingly difficult to vote for the party of their forefathers.
At one time, Democrats stood on the docks of Ellis Island, singing, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ And I’ll get them registered to vote for Tammany.” Today, Cardinal Timothy Dolan admits to feeling “abandoned.” In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last March, the archbishop of New York recalls fond memories of his grandmother warning him, “We Catholics don’t trust those Republicans.” Alas, this is no longer the case. It’s a “cause of sadness to many Catholics,” Dolan wrote, his eminence, no doubt, included.
[Opinion: Which way for angry Catholics?]
Tobin and Dolan pose a valid question, though: Is there a future for Catholics in the Democratic Party?
There’s a swath of issues on which the Democrats tend to align more with Catholic social teaching. The Church is pretty right-on when it comes to immigration and climate change. When a senior Vatican diplomat accused Pope Francis of complicity in Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual predation on minors and seminarians last year, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago astonished critics by telling reporters that Francis wouldn’t dignify the claims with a response. “He’s gotta get on with other things,” said Cupich, such as “talking about the environment and protecting migrants.”
The church also promotes criminal justice reform and seeks gradually to abolish capital punishment. It has long supported federal mandates to produce universal healthcare coverage.
That would seem to make New York’s Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the second coming of Charlemagne, the great Catholic statesman of the new millennium. The trouble is that immigration, the environment, criminal justice reform, and healthcare are what we the Church calls matters of prudential judgment. A prudential issue is one where two Catholics can, in good faith, come to different conclusions about how to implement Catholic social teaching. In other words, the Church hierarchy support the Democrats where Church teaching does not oblige them to do so.
[Opinion: Why, as a Catholic, I am happy about the headlines]
But there are points of public policy on which the Catholic Church allows no flexibility. The issue that stands above all others is, of course, abortion. Holy Mother Church takes the view that every politician should support a total ban on the intentional termination of pregnancies, everywhere in the world, in saecula saeculorum, amen.
A Catholic may, in good faith, argue that the federal government isn’t capable of providing healthcare to everyone, and thus he or she may, whilst remaining faithful to Catholic doctrine, reject Obamacare. But Catholics have no freedom, while remaining doctrinally faithful, to defend abortion.
Because this is so, there are people who suggest that senior members of the clergy could whip Democrats politicians into shape. Thirty-five percent of congressional Democrats are Catholic. Can’t bishops pull rank and instruct those politicians to oppose abortion? The answer is yes, they can, but most of them prefer not to do so.
Church leaders differ on what the punishment should be for politicians who vote to expand access to abortion. Some, Dolan among them, don’t believe there should be any formal punishment. When Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed New York’s Reproductive Health Act into law earlier this year — the law legalized infanticide in some circumstances — many Catholics called on Dolan to declare the wayward altar boy anathema. His eminence declined, saying, “Excommunication should not be used as a weapon.”
[Related: Pope Benedict blames Catholic priests’ pedophilia on free love era]
In 2009, a decade before his spectacular disgrace, McCarrick protégé Cardinal Donald Wuerl was urged to deny Holy Communion to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, for her support of liberal abortion laws. It’s a far milder punishment than excommunication, but he still wouldn’t use it. Wuerl doesn’t believe in “communion wielded as a weapon” either.
Others, however, balked. When Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane, Wash., learned of New York’s heinous new laws, he issued a letter declaring that pro-abortion politicians in his diocese and those “who obstinately persevere in their public support for abortion, should not receive communion without first being reconciled to Christ and the Church.”
Likewise, when Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois voted against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act last year, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., ordered him not to receive Holy Communion. “This provision is intended not to punish,” Paprocki explained, “but to bring about a change of heart.”
Daly and Paprocki are exceptions, for there are a handful of Dolans and a hundred Wuerls in every diocesan bureaucracy. I’ve heard it said that if they made cardinals of fighting material, they wouldn’t be cardinals.
Another issue on which Catholics have no wiggle room is same-sex marriage. Catholic politicians are expected to defend the traditional definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman for life.
One might assume same-sex marriage is no longer a politically controversial issue. Obergefell v. Hodges made it federal law in 2015, and in 2016, President-elect Trump told 60 Minutes “it’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean, it’s done.” Neither he nor anyone associated with his administration has attempted to undermine Obergefell.
Many Democrats, however, begrudge Catholics for not abandoning the faith’s doctrinal teaching on marriage. Last December, Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, grilled Trump judicial nominee Brian Buescher for his membership in the Knights of Columbus. The Knights mostly limit their activities to selling life insurance and hosting barbecues. But Hirono said they have also “taken a number of extreme positions.” As she points out, they were “reportedly one of the top contributors to California’s Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage.” Harris piled on, saying the Knights publicly “opposed a woman’s right to choose.”
It’s true that the Knights support traditional marriage and oppose abortion, but both are teachings of the Catholic Church. How could they break ranks?
In truth, of course, Hirono and Harris didn’t care that Buescher was a member of the Knights of Columbus. They cared that is a Catholic, to which they object even though the Constitution bans religious tests for public office. Calling the Knights “extreme” is the same as saying the Catholic Church is extreme. It was California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s who sneered, “The dogma lives loudly within you,” at Catholic judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett in 2017. Harris and Hirono were doing precisely the same thing.
Pro-abortion horseflies constantly beset those few anti-abortion Democrats who remain in the party. One example is Rep. Dan Lipinski, a Catholic from Illinois. He has a 75% rating from the National Right to Life Committee and spoke at the 2019 March for Life. Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn, and EMILY’s List have all funded efforts to unseat Lipinski and accused him of “attacking women’s health.”
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, another Catholic, used to be listed frequently among anti-abortion Democrats. That’s not the case as much now. On the one hand, he calls himself anti-abortion, which is courageous in the current political climate. But on the other, he only has a 42% rating from the NRCL. When he opposed a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List spent $785,000 in ads attacking his record during his reelection bid last year.
That’s the only real choice that is left for Catholics who are Democrats: Either remain true to one’s principles and subject oneself to friendly fire or else try to ameliorate left-wing ideologues and abandon adherence to one’s faith. Sometimes it seems like Democrats don’t even want Catholics’ support. They certainly take it for granted.
But savvier politicos also realize that Democrats can’t win without a sizable chunk of the Catholic vote. Among them is Michael Wear, who led the White House’s faith-based outreach efforts during Obama’s first term. Commenting on the debate about the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, Wear suggested that his fellow Democrats were missing the point. “By focusing on abortion rights,” he wrote in the Atlantic, “Democrats ended up arguing a lot about what was not explicitly in the bill, while neglecting to make clear to the American people that they do, in fact, oppose infanticide and believe babies born alive after a botched abortion deserve medical care.”
Mull that over for a moment. Loyal Democrats who served in presidential administrations feel the need to clarify that, no, they don’t support killing newborns.
John Podesta, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, knows Democrats need to schmooze the Romans. In 2012, a colleague wrote to him complaining that there was a need for a “Catholic Spring,” in which the faithful “demand the end of a Middle Ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality” in the church. According to WikiLeaks, Podesta replied: “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this.”
Democrats will go to extraordinary lengths to win back the Catholic base — as long as it doesn’t mean renouncing infanticide.
So troubling is the Democrats’ abortion extremism that Catholic conservatives have used entryist tactics in an attempt to bring some balance to the party. George Weigel, a papal biographer, Ethics and Public Policy Center distinguished senior fellow, and champion of the Catholics and Evangelicals Together movement, regaled me with a fascinating story.
He said, “In 1994 or thereabouts, there was a move afoot, involving everyone from Robbie George, Russ Hittinger, and me, to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, to support Bob Casey Sr. to run for president in the 1996 Democratic primaries. There was little or no chance of him taking out Bill Clinton, but the point was to establish that there was room in the Democratic Party for a national pro-life candidate. That came to a cropper when Gov. Casey got very ill. The party lost a great opportunity because Clinton was weak going into 1996 and we could have made some points.”
Is there any chance of a similar insurgency occurring now? Some have speculated that predominantly Catholic Hispanic immigrants will moderate the party line on life issues. It’s called the “natural conservative” theory, and it used to have a lot of traction among business-class Republicans looking to repel populist claims that mass immigration causes social unrest. Just a few months ago, I asked a prominent Catholic intellectual about his views on border security. He glanced over his shoulder, leaned in, and whispered: “Just flood the place with Mexicans. We could have a Catholic theocracy in 10 years.”
Like Anthony Burgess, I dream of a Catholic Jacobite imperial monarch. Alas, immigration probably isn’t the way to go about it. As the Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian pointed out a few years back, “immigrant (and Hispanic) elites serve as the interlocutor with the broader society and Hispanic elites and institutions are lopsidedly left-wing.” Sure, Hispanics tend to be more traditionalist now. But give it a few generations, and they’ll be cafeteria Catholics like so many of us Irish and Italians.
That might be the key to solving this ridiculous puzzle: American Catholics don’t care what the Church teaches.
According to a 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center, 51% of Catholics think abortion is immoral, 32% say the same thing for homosexuality, and just 8% for contraception use. Those figures should all be in the neighborhood of 100% because the Catholic Church forbids all of them categorically.
Just a few days ago, Pew found that Trump’s support among evangelicals has remained steady since taking office, while his approval among white Catholics has fallen from 52% to 44%. If we were voting strictly on life issues, the numbers shouldn’t have changed, for Trump has remained consistent.
The decline makes sense if you stop assuming that Catholic voters have anything in common with each other, whether it’s ideology, class, ethnicity, or geography. But they don’t. Catholics are such a diverse group, and we’ve become so thoroughly integrated into mainstream America, that we represent the “average American voter” better than any other denomination. A 2016 Pew poll found that 37% of Catholics are Republican and 44% are Democrats. That’s precisely the mean of all U.S. adults. With apologies to Ohio, Catholics are the most accurate bellwether in presidential politics.
We’ve spent centuries dispelling myths about papal plots to overthrow the government, proving to our Protestant neighbors that we’re average, harmless Americans, and this is what it’s gotten us. There’s not even a “Catholic vote” to speak of — nothing comparable to the coveted evangelical vote, anyway. If there were, 25% of the electorate would go to a party that agrees with Ocasio-Cortez on economic and environmental policy but to former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum on social issues. Instead, at least half of Catholics will continue to vote for Democrats, even as they advance the mass murder of children with greater and greater enthusiasm, a practice equivalent to “the Nazis,” according to Pope Francis, “but with white gloves.”
Don’t get me wrong, I dream of an America where a man in a sweater vest can ride a state-run train without being oppressed by bovine flatus or the comedy stylings of Michelle Wolf. But we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for it to happen.
Michael Warren Davis is associate editor of the Catholic Herald. Find him at www.michaelwarrendavis.com.
