Catholics and Politics

Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, in his article Vatican II and American Politics (10/13), evokes a most interesting interlude in American history involving the candidacy of Al Smith. If many Americans wondered whether Catholics would impose an official religion if they became a majority, Catholics themselves had no need to speculate concerning their Protestant neighbors in that regard, since they already knew the answer. As Martin Marty, Robert Handy, Philip Hamburger and others have shown so well, Americans for more than a century had imposed a de facto establishment of nondenominational Protestantism that denied true religious liberty to Catholics and other outsiders.

What James Madison feared actually came to pass. He knew that a Bill of Rights represented only parchment barriers against majority oppression. However, the advent of Catholics in great numbers brought what he saw as the necessary pluralism of opposite and rival interests that would inevitably supply the checks and balances necessary to preserve true liberty. By their fidelity, opposition and persistence, Catholics contributed immensely to the creation of modern religious liberty, and in doing so they transformed this country. In 1960 the United States, by a hair’s breadth, acknowledged that transformationthat Catholics could be and were truly Americans.

Catholic scholars appreciate the development of doctrine and the fact that Catholicism is a historically conditioned religion. But they have not yet been able to apply the same thinking to American religious liberty, which they tend to see as springing full blown from the First Amendment. In the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty (1965), the church declared that it would not impose an official religion if Catholics became the majority. But with the election of John F. Kennedy, America had already affirmed that it would not and could not continue to maintain the official religion it had established when the majority of Americans were Protestant.

Historians can see how the United States influenced Catholicism, but they can perceive much less clearly how Catholicism transformed the United States. When American Catholic historians are able to grasp the interrelationindeed interdependenceof these two developments, they will be far better able to find a significant place for Catholicism in the history of the United States than is currently the case.

(Most Rev.) Thomas J. Curry

Friendship is the instinctive and defiant alliance we form against death. When that bond dies, then, the loss is at once cosmic and profoundly personal. Over the course of the past decade I’ve been losing my best friend. I have been watching him die a slow death, and he has taken part of me with him. Physically he is as fit as he was when we first met 23 years ago on a fall afternoon, tossing a football on the Washington Mall and nursing beers late into the night, trading stories of Jesuit high school, sharing our faith and doubt, and sculpting our vision of the perfect woman we hoped to marry someday. What I have seen fade in him is not his idealism but an emotional and psychological hold on reality. At every step along the way, despite being separated for most of the time by continents and oceans, we have stood together and stayed inside each other’s mind and heart, supporting and listening and telling the hard truths that no one else could know or would utter. Then came the day when the very honesty that cemented our uncommon bond drove a wedge between us.

When it turned out that the choices he was makingspecifically, staying in a physically and emotionally damaging relationshipwere harmful to him, I said so. Ever since that day 10 years ago, our friendship has been a frustrating dance of truth-telling and recognition and resolution and denial; it has become a threadbare string of incomplete conversations around the relationship I think is destroying him. The honesty that had always been the hallmark of our unconditional love for each other became a thorn in his side, another burden he had to bear in a life that had spun out of control.

While I was relentless in my assessment of his situation, he wavered between resolve to save himself from further harm and resignation to make the best of it. Faced with a Hobson’s choice between no relationship at all and a deeply painful one, in which I either broached the unresolved subject uppermost in both our minds or else assiduously avoided it, I did not abandon him. Or maybe I did. Years of walking the line between honesty and compassion, between nurturing our intimate bond and confronting an excruciating inability to see my friend through a crisis, left me dispirited and depleted. While his insight into the reality he lived may have been clouded, he never lost his keen insight into my character and feelings, so he knew at every point exactly what I would be thinking and how difficult it was for me. Finally, at some point last summer my sadness became overwhelming, and I walked away.

Knowing that friendship without honesty is unworthy of the name assuages all too little my feeling of having lost a friendship when I could have kept it. If the past is any guide, soldiering on would have been a painful and confounding roller coaster. Arguably such is the test of a friendship, to be solid and steady ground when the other has lost his moorings. Tough love wore me down, though, and I became incapable of trudging along any farther under the crushing sorrow and disappointment his choices brought me. On some levelperhaps on every levelI sacrificed friendship for principle. There was a time when the concept of being true to myself seemed pellucid and obvious and meant everything, when being true to my friend and true to principle were identical. Not any more.

The choices we make, however inelegantly executed, demonstrate our demons as much as our values. A loss of innocence and a death, a lost friendship is a rite of passage. But to what? However measured and inescapable the decision may be, turning away from a friend is a choice fraught with guilt and self-doubt. Unless one sets out to be either friendless or without principle, being unable to reconcile the unambiguous exigencies of principle with the untidy realities of friendship is a failure, no matter how manifestly inevitable it may seem. And while keeping a friendship in spite of one’s principles may be a poor friendship indeed, there may come a moment when standing alone with one’s principles makes one wonder if the price is too high. For, right or wrong, when we turn away from a soul mate in dire straits, we forsake part of ourselves and are thus torn apart.

While certain that speaking and hearing hard truths is divisive but necessary, nevertheless as I survey the ruins of a once noble and beautiful temple, I ruminate: Am I the friend I think I am?

The secret

Right Here

One of my duties as a newly ordained religious priest working in another diocese was that of offering the Eucharist and hearing confessions every Saturday morning in a state-run institution for about 1,300 troublesome girls, age 13 to about 25. I was reminded of those years, 1950 to 1954, as I read the review of The Magdalene Sisters by Richard A. Blake, S.J., and recalled that right here in the United States the girls in those state-run institutions had their heads shaved for major infractions of the rules, as in Ireland. For lesser violations, and far worse in my eyes, they were forced to take a pill that would make them sick to their stomachs for three or four days. Moreover, if the state officials decided that the girls were unfit to bear children, they would mutilate the girls’ bodies to that end. If someone wants to make a movie about the misuse of authority in such institutions, is it really necessary to go to Ireland and pick on Catholic sisters who, by and large, gave their lives for the well-being of young girls?

Edward V. Griffin, O.S.A.