When former Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor was being considered for a position on the 11th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked him what he would do if a conflict developed between his personal religious commitments and the law of the land.
While phrased in general terms, the issue was abortion. Some people feared that Pryor, an outspoken opponent of abortion, might be swayed in his rulings by his religious commitments rather than by the established law of the land, which allows abortion.
Even Prior’s unequivocal declaration that he would follow the law did not satisfy some of his pro-choice critics. Now it seems his answer may get him and other Roman Catholic politicians in trouble with the Roman Catholic Church.
Most of the media attention has focused on John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, who is a Roman Catholic and who supports abortion. However, statements by Roman Catholic officials in the United States go far beyond the poster boy of dissent. They impact Pryor and all other Roman Catholic office holders.
New Jersey Archbishop John Myers recently wrote, “Public officials cannot hold themselves excused from their duties, especially if they claim to be Catholic. Every faithful Catholic must be not only ‘personally opposed’ to abortion, but also must live that opposition in his or her actions.”
Myers added that Catholics whose actions openly oppose church positions “should recognize that they have freely chosen by their own actions to separate themselves from what the church believes and teaches.”
Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs applied that position more broadly. He wrote that any Catholic who does not reflect church teaching in the voting booth “makes a mockery of that faith and belies his identity as a Catholic.” Sheridan said “real Catholics” will vote only for Catholic politicians who “act Catholic in their public service and political choices.”
He added that “Catholics who vote for a political candidate [who does not act in accordance with Catholic teaching] place themselves outside the full communion of the church and may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled by the Sacrament of Penance.”
Vatican officials and other U.S. Catholic leaders have said Holy Communion should be denied to any politician who opposes Catholic teaching on pro-life issues. Some of these Catholic leaders have added that voting for someone who does not act in accordance with church teaching is “a sin.”
For a Roman Catholic, being barred from Holy Communion is a serious issue. Partaking of communion is an avenue of salvation in Catholic theology. That means that one’s ultimate relationship to God is at stake when denied participation.
Comments like those above seem to say that if one obeys Catholic teaching, no barrier to one’s relationship with God will be raised by the church. Disobey Catholic teaching in one’s personal or public life, however, and the church will raise barriers to one’s eternal destiny. Even vote for one who questions church teaching and there is a price to pay. Does that sound like something out of the Middle Ages?
Some may argue that what Roman Catholic officials are doing is only a form of church discipline. Certainly church discipline is a legitimate activity. Baptists would do well to recover the concern for righteousness expressed in the days when discipline was more a part of our church tradition.
But church discipline faded from practice when it became more punitive than restorative. Admittedly, there is a quantitative difference between acting to restore a wanderer to fellowship and acting to publicly punish one for wrongful acts. One speaks of love, the other of vengeance.
In Baptist life, church discipline never threatened one’s relationship to God through faith in Christ. Our understanding of salvation does not allow such things. Church discipline was always about fellowship. Dealing with one’s eternal destiny by withholding a church sacrament is a far more serious issue for Catholics.
Some may point out that most of the comments cited pro-life positions of the church. Certainly, pro-life positions are important. This writer has campaigned against abortion-on-demand policies for more than 30 years. But all the statements are not limited to abortion. And what will be the next issue to which the Roman hierarchy says adherents must conform or have barriers to God put in their way?
This is a dangerous road that the Roman Catholic Church seems to be traveling. It is not the Roman Catholic Church in America for the past 30 years. Rather it is a U-turn back toward the sectarian days of the past.
One cannot read the bishop’s statements without recalling the famous meeting between then-Democratic candidate John Kennedy and the Houston Baptist Pastors Conference. The pastors had one primary question. They asked Kennedy, if a conflict arose between his duties as president to uphold the U.S. Constitution and the teachings of his church (the Roman Catholic Church), which would he follow?
Kennedy assured the Baptist pastors he would follow the law of the land, the U.S. Constitution. They were satisfied.
Public officials must be able to follow the law of the land or resign from their public positions of trust. For a church to force its moral teachings into public policy decisions on threat to one’s relationship to God seems beyond the bounds to this writer.
Our nation desperately needs the influence of Christian men and women who will articulate their moral positions in the public square where ideas and values are debated. Our nation does not need the authoritarian hand of a religious body — no matter what denomination — that attempts to force its understandings on threat of raising barriers to one’s eternal destiny.
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