It's rare that I disagree with Jody Bottum when he's writing about Catholicism in the U.S., but in the case of this article on Catholicism and the courts that the Catholic blogosphere was chattering about last week , I think he's noted an interesting phenomenon, but his analysis is all wrong. The phenomenon: the rise of Catholic rhetorical influence (Alito will be the 5th Catholic on the Supreme Court) at what Bottum says is just the moment Catholic bishops have beaten a retreat from public view.
He's certainly right about the rise of Catholic thought, but where his analysis is, at Bottum (sorry) gloomy, I think the change he's noticing is a good sign.
- I deny the bishops have beaten a retreat from the public square. On the contrary, I think the bishops feel a strange compulsion to weigh in on every conceivable issue, and therefore dilute the impact of their teaching on what we might call foundational matters. The USCCB has position papers on everything: land mines, health care, education vouchers, the environment, defense spending. The Maryland Catholic Conference sends me an action item just about every week--mostly wanting me to support measures that are dubiously connected in any way to Catholic teaching. If the bishops wanted to find their voice in the public square, they could do worse than to leave policy-making to the laity and save their voices for urgent matters. As maddening as cafeteria Catholicism is, it must be admitted that when the bishops' lobbyists are visiting every week, it practically invites Catholic politicians (and voters) to pick and choose.
- I'm not convinced that the "good old days" for which Catholics of a certain age feel nostalgia were necessarily healthy. Read the Pope's new encyclical, read the documents of Vatican II, and you'll see that it's the role of clergy (including bishops) to preach the basics of the faith and administer the sacraments. The public square is to be filled by lay persons, and I would argue that to the extent Bishops are in the public square, they actually discourage laypeople from being there. So, yes, we pew-sitters need authoritative teaching and bold leadership --but we need it in the pulpits, not on Meet the Press. The "Catholic vote" that Bottum mourns may have been a juggernaut, but I'm not convinced it was an informed juggernaut. My husband's older relatives to this day won't vote Republican --and mostly because in their time, Catholics didn't. That does not represent a healthy moral formation; it's a sign of clericalism. (Two words: President Kennedy).
- Nevertheless, and at the risk of contradicting my second point, one of the big stories of the past year was the re-emergence of the "values" voters, many of whom were Catholic. The public debate among the US bishops over whether they should deny communion to John Kerry and other abortion-supporting politicians made people confront the issue. Hubby's 80-yr-old uncle, for example, who is devoutly Catholic, but an old-line NJ union man, cast the first Republican vote of his life because of that debate. At the time, I remember reading stories about voters who said a vote for Bush would hurt them economically, but they felt they had to think about what was right, and Kerry was too pro-abort. To me that's an indication of the power of the teaching office of the bishops --they made their point simply by raising it as an issue --they didn't even have to agree about how to handle it! Which means the bishops --contra Bottum--still have tremendous moral authority, if they choose to focus it where it matters.
- Finally, I don't think the rise of Catholic (really natural law) rhetoric has anything to do with Protestants reluctantly ceding power as the mainline churches fail. Rather, the rise has come because of Roe v. Wade. Efforts to overcome Roe have brought religious (and non-religious) believers of all stripes together into the trenches. As Mark Knoll noted in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, "sola fide, sola scriptura," whatever its merits as a creed, has seriously limited rhetorical power in the public square. "Jesus says so" may be true, but it's hardly clear why anyone who doesn't believe in Christ should care what he says. Evangelical lobbyists, at first deeply skeptical of Catholics, gradually learned from them how to craft arguments that could appeal to the public at large, drawing on logic, philosophy, history & law in addition to the tenets of faith, as the Catholic tradition has always done. (See B16's encyclical about Catholicism as a defender of Reason.)
