Monday, November 10, 2003
Mr. President, My brother bishops,
My
assigned task this morning is to report on
the initial work of a Task Force of our Conference addressing
relations of Catholic bishops and Catholic politicians in light of
the Doctrinal Note from the Holy See on "Catholics in Public Life."
This Task Force is a result of a varium offered by
Cardinal McCarrick. In September, our Administrative Committee voted to
refer this matter to a task force made up of the chairmen of the major
public policy committees and the Doctrine Committee of our Conference.
The task force has been established and met by conference call on
October 27. The Task Force includes Cardinal McCarrick, Domestic Policy
Committee; Archbishop Chaput, Pro-Life Activities; Bishop Galante,
Communications; Bishop Wenski, Migration; Bishop Trautman, Doctrine
Committee and myself from the International Policy. Bishop Harrington
from Education was unable to participate in this first session.
In our first meeting, we decided to ask for this
limited time to discuss this important matter in open session. We also
seek your help and advice and will consult with the Holy See and other
episcopal conferences on how this guidance of the Universal Church can
best be applied. We reached an initial consensus that the best way
forward may be to develop, based on the policies and advice of the
bishops and the efforts of other conferences, a set of guidelines to
assist bishops in this challenging matter. We also agreed that such
guidelines should probably be linked to a prefatory statement which
would outline the foundations of Catholic teaching on faith and
political responsibility.
These guidelines could help us carry forward
together our demanding and interrelated responsibilities as moral
teachers, caring pastors and religious leaders. It was felt the
guidelines needed to be carefully developed, drawn from the best of
existing policies and practices, making necessary distinctions and
permitting bishops to exercise their own prudential judgments on how
best to apply them. Among the distinctions discussed were the difference
between honors for politicians and appropriate dialogue and advocacy of
our positions with political leaders. We also need to distinguish
between respect for the office and approval of the officeholder. Of
course we need to distinguish between fundamental moral principles and
prudential judgments on the application of those principles, between
essential substance and tactics. The important role of the laity was
highlighted as was the need to not limit our concern to one issue no
matter how fundamental that issue is.
The Doctrinal Note teaches us many things. Two of
the most important are: First, and I quote "a well-formed Christian
conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an
individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and
morals." And second, it goes on to insist, "The Christian faith is an
integral unity, and thus it is incoherent to isolate some particular
element to the detriment of the whole of Catholic doctrine. A political
commitment to a single isolated aspect of the Church's social doctrine
does not exhaust one's responsibility towards the common good."
In this light, we face a serious pastoral challenge. Some Catholic
politicians defy Church teaching in their policy advocacy and
legislative votes, first and most fundamentally on the defense of unborn
life, but also on the use of the death penalty, questions of war and
peace, the role of marriage and family, the rights of parents to choose
the best education for their children, the priority for the poor, and
welcome for immigrants. Some Catholic legislators choose their party
over their faith, their ideology over Catholic teaching, the demands of
their contributors over the search for the common good. While all these
matters are clearly not of equal moral weight, there is a too common
pattern of ignoring the values of our faith and pursuing a political
agenda divorced from fundamental moral principles.
