CATHOLIC AND AMERICAN -- A CONTRADICTION -
It is not possible to owe allegiance to two different political entities that have conflicting security-survival interests. One entity must prevail. Most American Catholics recognize that there are many contradictions when one attempts to be both Catholic and American. The Vatican has recognized this problem for 200 years. In his book, The Unholy Ghost: Anti-Catholicism in the American Experience (1992), Bishop Mark J. Hurley, consultor to the Congregation for Education for the Vatican, states, "...Vatican curial prelates were skeptical that a true believer in the American proposition could be a true believer in Catholicism."The Vatican has relied heavily on a principle it created called the primacy of conscience, on the loyalty to God over loyalty to the state 208 to demand and get allegiance. Since the pope is God's representative on earth and his spokesman, this principle translates to loyalty to the pope over loyalty to the state. Most American Catholics do not share this interpretation. President John F. Kennedy publicly denounced the Vatican's interpretation repeatedly, seriously weakening the Vatican's position in the U.S. (More about this later.)
Most American Catholics do not owe their allegiance to the Vatican as the pope would like to claim. It has been evident for decades that the Vatican does not control the Catholic voting population. It can create, finance and control political machines that do have successes but it does not control voting populations as it once did in cities with large Catholic immigrant populations.209
According to Bishop Hurley, "The record shows that American Catholics were held suspect both in the halls of government and in the...Vatican."210 "While progress of Catholics in the United States is unmatched in history, yet there remains the underlying suspicion that a Catholic cannot be a true believer in the American scheme of things."211 "For two centuries Catholics have striven to alleviate the apprehension and doubt of their fellow citizens....While these efforts have in the main been successful, yet a surprisingly significant part of mainstream American society continues to entertain doubts."212 Catholics are sensitive to this reality.
However, according to Hurley, the Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican have not accepted what he refers to as "the secularist interpretation of the First Amendment, "the theory that it meant absolute separation not merely of the state from the establishment of religion but of religion itself from public life."213 The Vatican has its own theory about what our First Amendment means and to the extent possible, uses its own theory to determine its behavior.
For example, Hurley recalls, "During the [Kennedy] primary campaign in Oregon on May 20, 1960, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano declared in Rome that the Catholic hierarchy had the right and duty to intervene in politics and to expect dutiful discipline from Catholics. The hierarchy alone, it said, has the right to judge whether the higher principles of religious and moral order are involved in political issues." 214 Though the Vatican had to do this story in order to maintain control, it did not endear it to American non-Catholics. Most American Catholics reject the Vatican concept of our first amendment and are well aware of non-Catholic objections to it.
More recently, the Vatican claimed (or repeated) the right to protect itself against harmful laws -- even when democratically legislated. The central difficulty here, of course, is that what the Vatican views "harmful" to itself and its authority is just what lay Catholic men and women, as well as non-Catholics, consider beneficial to themselves and their families. In a letter sent to all American bishops by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the most powerful Vatican office, Cardinal Ratzinger reminded them that "The Church has the responsibility to protect herself from the application of harmful laws." This letter was keep secret from 55 million American Catholics until a brief notice written by Peter Steinfels for The New York Times appeared July 10, 1992. The actual text remained hidden from the public until it was leaked to the press on July 15, 1992.215
This had to be a great embarrassment to American Catholics. From Cardinal Ratzinger: we resent the concept of American democracy. No doubt the pope had given his blessing. His message -- if we don't like your democratically legislated laws, we will just ignore them and follow our own dictates. Nothing like a little anarchy for "God's" benefit, perpetrated by the Vatican against the American people.
Obviously, if an institution has the "responsibility," it also claims the "right." The Vatican exercised its "right" to protect herself from the application of harmful laws, in the autocratic way it defines "harmful," when it blocked U.S. adoption of the Rockefeller Commission recommendations and implementation of the NSSM 200 policies approved by President Ford. "To protect herself," the Church moved quickly and efficiently to kill the two most important initiatives to control population growth in American history.
In its March 1995 issue, Church & State reports that the Vatican claims a unique role in world politics: "The Roman Catholic Church has the right to intervene in world politics through the United Nations by virtue of its centuries of existence and its possession of the truth, a Vatican official told a Catholic newspaper recently. In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Archbishop Renato Raffaele Martino, the Vatican's permanent observer at the UN, defended the church's participation in last year's international population conference in Cairo. Some delegates had criticized the church for delaying the conference by refusing to approve policies related to abortion and birth control...'Our diplomacy is the oldest in the world,' Martino said...Agreeing with the [National Catholic Reporter] that the church speaks `with one voice,' Martino added, `[T]he one voice is a message of salvation, found in the scriptures and lived in the tradition of the church over the centuries. It is an objective truth that remains changeless.'...Pope John Paul II echoed Martino's views during his annual New Year's address January 9..."215a
The National Catholic Register reported in its October 15, 1995 issue: "The U.S. bishops are recognized as one of the most powerful lobbyist groups on Capitol Hill."215b Many long-time observers are convinced that the bishops have no equal in this regard. But if "the Church speaks with one voice," as Archbishop Martino and the pope claim, then obviously the U.S. bishops are lobbying on behalf of the pope, not American Catholics. These clerics are necessarily protecting Vatican interests, but not those of American Catholics. Why?
The June 30, 1995 issue of the National Catholic Reporter reads: "Approximately 40 U.S. bishops have endorsed a 12-page document that challenges peers to take a less subservient, more proactive stance in relationship to the Vatican." The implication is that at present the bishops are subservient to the Vatican. The report continues: "Noting that Vatican II laid the foundation for `significant changes in our working relationship with the whole church and with the Holy Father,' the document questioned whether collegiality is a reality or an illusion: `When formulating documents in the past, we did not submit them to Rome until we had fully discussed them...and voted. Now they are frequently submitted beforehand by the committee chairperson, and upon receiving the results there is no dialogue. The response from Rome is treated as a directive...There is a widespread feeling that Roman documents of varying authority have for some years been systematically reinterpreting the Vatican II documents to present the minority positions at the council as the true meaning of the council.'"
"According to the document, the College of Cardinals has emerged as a `supracollegial body' that `weakens the role of the bishops' conferences.' But open discussion of such matters is often impeded because many bishops cling to `strict and undifferentiated application of all Roman norms and the notion of the church as a multinational corporation with headquarters in Rome and branch offices (dioceses) around the world.'"215c
No one can pretend that U.S. bishops who are lobbying the Congress represent the interests of U.S. Catholics. With their 12-page statement, these 40 bishops make it clear that it is corporate interests in Rome that are protected by Church lobbying efforts in the Congress. These are often at odds with the interests of individual American Catholics, as demonstrated on innumerable occasions by their private decisions on abortion and family planning and attitude toward illegal immigration. For example, a study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute estimated that abortion rates among American Catholic women are 29 percent higher than among Protestants and that 31 percent of women who get abortions are Catholic.215d Thus, in 1995 alone, when 1.52 million abortions were performed, Catholic women demonstrated on nearly half a million occasions they believed that their interests were best served by obtaining a safe, legal abortion.
In his article, "A Traitorous Shepherd," in the June 22, 1995 issue of The Wanderer, A.J. Matt, Jr. labels as disloyal any bishop who would represent American Catholics at the expense of the Vatican, citing the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: "Together with their head, the Supreme Pontiff, and never apart from him, they have supreme and full authority over the universal Church; but this power cannot be exercised without the agreement of the Roman Pontiff."215e This arrangement is written into the Church Constitution. According to Matt, bishops who do not conform are traitors.
China offers a concrete example. In the March 26, 1995 National Catholic Register, the article, "In China, Catholics must choose Pope or Party," reveals that Catholic bishops in China who stay loyal to the pope must pay a price. There are two kinds of Catholicism in China: the state run Catholic Patriotic Association, which requires Catholics to swear allegiance to China and its people, and other Catholics who maintain their allegiance to Rome and represent the underground Church. The Chinese Government takes this matter very seriously. For example, Roman Catholic Archbishop, Dominic Tang, once the underground bishop of Canton, spent 22 years in prison "because he refused to renounce his allegiance to the Vatican.215f The Chinese government considered Tang just as traitorous as Matt labels any bishop who exercises his power without papal consent. In the United States, we do not require Catholic bishops to swear allegiance to our country -- despite the fact that our security-survival interests are indisputably in direct conflict with those of the Vatican. Yet the U.S. bishops have emerged as the most powerful lobbying group on Capitol Hill.
Thomas C. Fox, editor of the National Catholic Reporter, in a New York Times article, "Rome's Lengthening Shadow: U.S. bishops squelched by Vatican," writes: "Pope John Paul II's pontificate, long characterized by the strict enforcement of church law, especially on sexual matters, is moving beyond authoritarianism. In dealing with his bishops, the Pope has abandoned the collegial guidelines set down by the second Vatican council in the 1960's; he treats them not as conferees but as his personal delegates. The bishops shudder at criticizing Rome lest their action be viewed as a sign of disloyalty....For Western Catholics, versed in pluralism and democracy, the way in which Rome is treating their bishops has one redeeming feature: it forces the bishops to share with their people the sense of powerlessness they have felt throughout this pontificate."215g Sadly, even if the U.S. bishops wanted to represent the interests of American Catholics in their lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill, they are powerless to do so.
In his book, The Unholy Ghost, Bishop Hurley admitted: "That non-Catholics had good reason to question their Catholic fellow citizens about their allegiance in the early days of the Republic can scarcely be disputed."216 [given the behavior of the Church in Europe]. But since the early days, popes and the hierarchy have committed one hostile act after the other, keeping these suspicions in full bloom. The Church is rabidly anti-democratic and anti-American. After 200 years, nothing has changed.
There is a continuous flow of evidence. Only a few examples can be presented here. At the October 1, 1989 annual Red Mass in Washington, which is dedicated to members of the legal profession, the archbishop of Philadelphia, Anthony J. Bevilaqua, told his audience, "The time has come to restore the vital relationship between religion and law, church and society." The Washington Times reported that Bevilaqua blasted separation of church and state during his remarks, charging that conflicts between church and state during the past 30 years have excluded religion from public life. Stated Bevilaqua, "This opposition, this impregnable wall...cannot endure much longer." In attendance were Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and associate justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and William J. Brennan, Cabinet members Louis W. Sullivan and Manuel Lujan, several congressmen and numerous judges and lawyers. Bevilaqua misses the obvious point that if the wall was impregnable, the mass when he spoke would not have taken place. 217
In a November 1991 speech to a national religious group, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago stated that in some circumstances it is necessary for religious groups to take direct action, rather than rely on persuasion. "While dialogue and persuasion must be religion's first impulse in the public sector," the cardinal said, "we cannot automatically exclude the possibility that, at certain moments, religious groups may have to move into the power mode in order to preserve certain basic moral values in a society....The escalating power of the communications media, for example, is a growing cause of concern because of its ever-increasing ability to mold the public ethos in the contemporary world, far more perhaps than either the political or legal realms."
Bernardin expressed concerns about the media's ability to set the terms of debate on political issues such as abortion. He was admitting that the Catholic Church must control the terms of the debate if it is to win on the abortion issue and other issues important to the papal agenda for America. The cardinal observed, "we may see a growing number of troubling situations relative to the media which only a well-organized...group of religious leaders can confront. Control of language is an immensely powerful force in any society."218 In other words, the cardinal and his Church are now ready to suspend the U.S. Constitution in order to protect papal security interests. Freedom of speech is now clearly a threat.
In July 1993, the National Catholic Register interviewed Msgr. George Kelley, who heads the right-wing Fellowship of Catholic Scholars; "'When I became a priest [circa 1940], we had a great Church,' he says, adding that `our system was so good I could have played golf five times a week and nobody would have missed me.' It was a time he recalls, when churches were filled and parishes operated schools which charged little or no tuition thanks to the contributions of religious order teachers. That American Church, he says, `was the eighth wonder of the world' of Catholicism. But it has largely been lost, he says, because `a lot of [U.S. Catholics] have become more like the culture. A lot of our people have been trained to be Americans and not to be Catholics.'"219
Msgr. Kelley's phraseology suggests that, in his mind, to be American (and part of the American culture), and to be Catholic, are mutually exclusive. He is also offering further evidence, with his own observations, that the Church is self-destructing as a result of exposure to American culture. Apparently, training in Catholic schools is necessary in order to become a Catholic but even then this training is often not sufficient. He also makes clear that to have a healthy Catholic Church in America, the Church must keep its followers separated from American culture (I'll touch on this further, in another context in the next Chapter).
These are but three examples of the realization by the Church that it cannot successfully coexist with the American Way. There have been hundreds of others in recent years. American Catholics, of course, witness these examples and, as a result, many have distanced themselves from the Church, preferring to be Americans instead.
Certainly not all Catholics wish to distance themselves from the Church. The Spring 1994 issue of Conscience, published by Catholics for a Free Choice, offers a superb but frightening overview of a long list of right-wing Catholic organizations which owe their allegiance to the pope. This array of organizations provide an estimated total of perhaps 200,000 activists, less than one percent of the U.S. Catholic population.220 Their purpose: implement Vatican policy in America. This formidable collection of organizations gives new meaning to the old saying, "they are among us but they are not of us." No doubt, most are products of Catholic schools
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