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Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
The Political Obligations of Catholics
A Conversation with the Archbishop of Denver
In his recent book Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life, (2008), the Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of Denver, argues that Catholics should take an active, vocal and morally consistent role in public debates, particularly on issues such as abortion, the death penalty and other matters they consider central to social justice. How should members of the Catholic Church, especially elected officials, balance their religious beliefs and obligations with their political priorities? And what should we expect from Catholic leaders with respect to the policy decisions of President Barack Obama and those of future administrations?
To discuss these issues, the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life invited Archbishop Chaput, who was appointed by Pope John Paul II in 1997 and who is the first Native American archbishop to be ordained in the U.S.
Speaker:
The Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver
Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Ellipses have been omitted from the following edited excerpt. Read the full transcript at pewforum.org.
ARCHBISHOP CHAPUT: Michael Cromartie has asked me to speak about the political obligations of Catholics. I'm happy to do that. But I hope you won't mind if I back into the subject. I don't often get a chance for real exchange with journalists, so I'll start with some thoughts on how the media cover the Catholic Church.
The reason I want to talk about this is simple. Public understanding of the Catholic role in our political process depends in large part on how the mainstream media frame church-related issues.
I don't expect journalists who track the church to agree with everything she teaches. But I do think reporters should have a working knowledge of her traditions and teachings. I do think editors should have the basic Catholic vocabulary needed to grasp what we're talking about and why we're talking about it. Too often they don't, and here's a very simple example. In 20 years as a bishop, I've never had a single reporter ask me why I so often refer to the church as "she" or "her" instead of "it," just as I'm doing today. I find that extremely odd because those pronouns go straight to the heart of Catholic theology, life and identity.
The media -- and I mean here the news media -- serve a vital role in American life. A democracy depends on the free flow of truthful and comprehensive information between the government and the governed. Public debate has little meaning when people don't have accurate, unbiased information.
Good reporting has social and moral gravity. And thankfully, many journalists are experts in their fields. But that expertise doesn't seem to extend to religion coverage always. John Allen and Eric Gorski do outstanding work. Terry Mattingly and his colleagues offer a wonderful tool for understanding the interplay of media, news and religion at getreligion.org. Sandro Magister at L'espresso and Alejandro Bermudez at ACI Prensa both offer excellent and well-informed international reporting on religious affairs.
But for many Catholics, these journalists and others like them seem to be the exception. No serious media organization would assign a reporter to cover Wall Street if that reporter lacked a background in economics, fiscal monetary policy and these days at least some expertise on Keynesian theory. But reporters who don't know their subject and haven't done their homework seem common in the world of religion reporting, at least in my life.
I wrote my book," Render Unto Caesar" to answer the question we're talking about today: What are the political obligations of Catholics? My answer is very simple: The political duty of Catholics is to be Catholic first -- to know their faith and to think and act like faithful Catholics all the time. That includes their life in the public square, which means it also includes an obligation to promote policies and candidates that reflect the natural law, the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the social and moral teachings of his church.
Put it another way -- we Catholics serve Caesar best when we serve God first, and that means living our Catholic beliefs vigorously, faithfully and without apologies at home and in the public, at work and in the voting booth. We can't ignore the sufferings of the poor or the homeless or undocumented immigrants and then claim to be good Catholics. We also can't ignore the killing of unborn children without struggling to end that daily homicide -- not just through supportive social policies, but by changing the law.
The law not only regulates, it also teaches. The current law of the United States teaches that it can be acceptable to kill an unborn child. But it isn't acceptable; it never was and never will be. And Catholics can't make peace with this kind of deeply evil law without lying to themselves, lying to the believing community and trying to fool God. It doesn't work.
When reporters talked with me last fall about my book, "Render Unto Caesar," I learned a number of things. First, many hadn't really read it, but they interviewed me. Many lacked even a basic understanding of Catholic identity that you need for useful disagreement, although they wanted to disagree. And many weren't interested in learning what they didn't know. At the same time, some did, unfortunately, know what they planned to write before they walked into my office for the interview.
"Render Unto Caesar" was never designed to encourage Catholics to be Democrats or Republicans. But I certainly want to remind American Catholics what it requires to actually be Catholic, to reason as Catholics and to act as Catholics. The church is not a political organism. But the moral witness of the church -- when people take her seriously -- will always have political consequences. If a particular party doesn't like those consequences, well, unfortunately that's the party's problem. It's the party's own fault based on its own choices; it's not the fault of the church. Nor is it the job of the church to help Catholic public officials by removing inconvenient moral dilemmas.
Where the media see Catholic politicians, Catholic bishops see a soul. For a bishop, the question of Catholics in American public life is only secondarily about electoral politics. Really it's a question of eschatology -- that's another word that should be in every religion journalist's vocabulary, but it usually isn't. Eschatology refers to last things -- heaven and hell, salvation and judgment. It reflects the teaching of Jesus, that what we do in this life has consequences for the life to come.
That's what the debate over who receives the Eucharist in 2004, 2008 and even today has finally been about. Sometimes in reading the news I get the impression that access to Holy Communion in the Catholic Church is like having bar privileges at the Elks Club. I'm reminded of the story of the Catholic novelist Flannery O'Conner. She was at a cocktail party talking with fellow writer Mary McCarthy, who had left the church. McCarthy, though no longer Catholic, said she still thought the Eucharist was a pretty good symbol of God's presence. O'Conner replied, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it."
For believing Catholics, the Eucharist is not a symbol, or rather, it's enormously more than a symbol. It's the literal, tangible body and blood of Jesus Christ. Since the earliest days of the Christian community, honest believers have never wanted to and have never been allowed to approach the Eucharist in a state of grave sin or scandal. Saint Paul said that if we do that, we profane the body and blood of Christ, and we eat and drink judgment upon ourselves.
In other words, we commit a kind of blasphemy against God and violence against our own integrity and the faith of other believers. There's nothing casual about this kind of sin, and the American notion of civil rights is useless and flatly wrong in trying to understand it. No one ever has a right to the Eucharist, and the vanity or hurt feelings of an individual Catholic governor or senator or even vice president does not take priority over the faith of the believing community.
Blasphemy and violence are unpleasant words in polite conversation. But for believers they have substance. They also have implications beyond this lifetime. That's why no Catholic, from the simplest parishioner to the most important public leader, should approach communion with grave sin on his soul. The media have no obligation to believe what the church teaches, but they certainly do have the obligation to understand, respect and accurately recount how she understands herself, and especially how she teaches and why she teaches.
I want to end with two modest suggestions. The first comes from Susan Sontag. In one of her last talks she said, "The writer's first job is not to have opinions, but to tell the truth and to refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation." That's a noble task for the journalist in the 21st century. And while I'm quoting nonbelievers who had no love for the Catholic Church, here's my second suggestion. It comes from George Orwell. He said, "Very few people, apart from Catholics themselves, seem to have grasped that the church is to be taken seriously."
Most of you came here today because you already do try to take the Catholic Church and religious issues seriously, and I thank you for that. You do try to write with depth, integrity and a sense of context. I thank you for that too. Now please tell your friends in the newsroom to do the same.
Read the complete transcript, including a lively discussion between Archbishop Chaput and the journalists in attendance, at pewforum.org.