Yesterday afternoon Sen. John Kerry took a break from his usual campaign duties and slotted 45-minutes to meet with Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, who heads a panel investigating what penalties, if any, should be levied against Catholic politicians who vote out of sync with church doctrine.
The meeting comes amidst a week of increased attention to Kerry’s Catholic roots, spurred by Kerry’s decision to receive communion this past Easter Sunday in Boston in the face of suggestions that he stay away. Recently the archbishop of Boston, Sean P. O’Malley, declared that politicians who vote against church teachings, “shouldn’t dare come to communion.”
As this debate simmers among the archbishops and cardinals of the church hierarchy, and seeps it way into the tail-end of campaign articles as it did in today’s New York Times and Washington Post, we were left wondering: Do Kerry’s heretical stances (on civil unions, on stem cell research, on capital punishment, and, most controversially, on abortion) even matter to the approximately 25 million Catholic voters set to cast ballots this November?
The short answer is not really, according to Nancy Benac, who mollifies our curiosity today with an Associated Press report. Benac cites a recent poll showing that a majority of Catholics support abortion rights, which is consistent with Kerry’s position.
Turning to religious expert Alan Wolfe, who she describes as “a Boston College political scientist and author of several books tracking social and religious trends,” Benac reports:
American Catholics, for example, disagree with their church on birth control and a number of other issues “and they’re not going to punish Catholic politicians for sharing their views,” said Alan Wolfe.
“American Catholic politicians pay very little attention to the idea that their votes as public servants should be guided by their religion, and most American Catholics completely support that,” Wolfe said
The latter part of that statement was affirmed in a Washington Post article published this last Sunday. In a 1999 poll administered by the National Catholic Reporter, more than two-thirds of the 45 percent of Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week said they did not feel the Church Leaders should have the final say on abortion.
In the same article, Philip Lawler, editor of Catholic World Report, a conservative Catholic magazine, told the Post, “People just don’t like the idea of bishops telling them how to vote.”
Apparently, politics isn’t the only game around in which the big-wigs are out of touch with the voting public.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.