WASHINGTON – At least you can tell Rudy Giuliani was raised a Catholic.
“I don’t get into debates with the pope,” he says.
Poor Rudy. He’s been hog-tied lately by the unfortunate intertwining of his pro-choice record on abortion, his quest for the presidential nomination of the anti-choice Republican Party, and the trip of Pope Benedict XVI to Latin America – where the pope, predictably enough, created a commotion by raising the specter of ex-communication for Catholic politicians who support legal abortion.
I am increasingly irritated with the debate over religious tolerance in American politics. I wish, in particular, that the whole matter of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith would disappear from discussion, much as I know it will not.
Notwithstanding Al Sharpton’s awkward and offensive comments about Mormons, there is one overriding reason that our politics often degenerate into a contemporary inquisition: Those who care most deeply about a politician’s religious beliefs are religious people who fervently wish to impose their own religious litmus tests on public policies that affect everyone. For at least the past two decades, they have sought to imprint their own faith on public policy – on abortion, stem cell research, condom use, civil rights for gays, sex education, even the dispensing of birth control pills to adult women who arrive at the pharmacy with a doctor’s prescription. The political apparatus they’ve used to achieve their goals is the Republican Party.
During the presidency of George W. Bush, the GOP has rarely strayed from their orthodoxy.
Romney’s task is to convince those evangelical Christians who suspect Mormonism is heresy that he is just as Christian as they.
Note that he had little trouble getting elected governor in heavily Catholic Massachusetts, where voters didn’t give a hoot about Romney’s Mormonism, any more than they do about a divorce in the Kennedy family.
Which is why Giuliani’s candidacy may be the more intriguing case study.
He is the first Catholic, pro-choice Republican to become a leading presidential contender. So here is a question: Will the right-wing Catholic laity attack him with the ferocity it’s shown toward pro-choice Democrats? Will conservative bishops seek to deny Giuliani communion, as about a dozen did in 2004 when John Kerry – who attends Mass regularly and even courted his wife by inviting her to Mass – was the Democratic presidential nominee? Or will Giuliani’s candidacy at last expose the right wing of the American Catholic Church for what it is: A minority that has captured a media megaphone and is in political league with right-wing Protestant evangelicals, philosophical descendants of those who once whipped up public animosity toward “papists”? Each frenzy over Catholic politicians, abortion and the church is cause for amazement. The argument is conducted in a fact-free zone where those braying loudest have the weakest grasp on reality.
American Catholics long ago abandoned church teaching about birth control and divorce. The bishops have learned to live with this. They had to, or the pews would be even emptier. Abortion seems to be moving into the same category. In a 2005 survey of Catholics conducted by the National Catholic Reporter, 58 percent agreed that you could be a “good Catholic” without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on abortion, up from 39 percent in 1987.
For all the drama over Kerry and communion that played out in 2004 – some bishops even said they would seek to deny the Eucharist to parishioners who voted for the Democratic standard-bearer – the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops refused to endorse an outright ban on communion for pro-choice politicians. They left it to individual bishops to decide.
Among American Catholics, it is ever more true that you can love the church and respect the pope – and ignore him just the same. For this, the right-wing lobby coined the effective epithet “cafeteria Catholic.” That it could be applied to their own selected adherence to church teaching – conservatives who favor the death penalty come first to mind – never has stopped them from depicting the majority of their fellow Catholics as sinners.
Now the thrice-married, pro-choice and pro-gay rights Giuliani tests the tolerance of Republican primary voters, a group not known for its embrace of diversity on matters of faith and morality. Those conservative Catholics who have made a cottage industry out of attacking pro-choice Catholic Democrats now face their own test of conscience. Is Giuliani a worthy target of their public outrage? Or will they keep an uncharacteristic silence, their hypocrisy a stain they do not see as sin? Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco@washpost.com.
(c) 2007, Washington Post Writers Group
