What If

A recent blogpost at CatholicCulture.org (formerly Catholic World News) by Diogenes, the anonymous blogger who loves to name names but never reveals his/her true identity (classy), blames all the controversy in the past 50 years about Catholic politicians who do not march lock-step in accordance with the remnant-church wishes of…well, of anonymous bloggers, on John F. Kennedy’s famous speech in Houston in 1960 in which Kennedy told an audience of Baptist ministers that while he was a faithful Catholic, his actions as President would not simply be a matter of parroting the political opinions of the Roman Pontiff.

Of course, the issue was more illusory than real–no pope in the past half-century has ever even attempted to deliver political marching orders to the President of the United States (and the closest one came to doing so–when Pope John Paul II (and later Pope Benedict) made it clear to George W. Bush that the Catholic Church would in no wise see the invasion and occupation of Iraq as anything but a moral travesty–the President simply ignored them), so it became less a matter of reality than of perception–could a Catholic president be trusted to protect the interests of the United States when Rome disagreed?

Kennedy confirmed that his first priority as President would be to defend the interests of the United States, and that to be Catholic hardly meant one must exclude oneself from the messy business of secular politics (a position Pope Benedict has affirmed several times  as perfectly in keeping with the practice of one’s faith).  Many political scientists credit that speech as the turning point in Kennedy’s battle to win the election over Richard Nixon.

Let’s do a simple thought-experiment on what would have happened if Kennedy had not given that speech, or believed what he believed.

1.  Nixon would have been elected.  Catholic politicians would still find themselves in the position all of us do–of faithfully seeking to practice one’s faith in a secular realm.  Except Nixon would be president.

2.  Nixon would have overseen the Cuban Missile Crisis.

3.  The Civil Rights Act would have come before a Congress and a government apparatus controlled by Richard Nixon and his political machine, not Lyndon Johnson (and his political machine).

4.  The Catholic politicians (even priests!) who called Nixon to account for Watergate and other assorted violations of the integrity of his office would almost certainly not be political players at the time.

5.  Every election–local, statewide, national– in which a Catholic was pitted against a non-Catholic opponent would result in a rehashing of the same argument–“how can you as a Catholic participate in a secular process that includes the weighing of moral goods through a foreign tradition?”  The implication would be the same as it was in the case of Kennedy: you cannot.

6.  Catholics would be, by and large, excluded from the American political process.

7.  Almost every other democratic political society in the world would enjoy and benefit from the influence and actions of large numbers of faithful Catholic politicians–except the United States.

8.  The moral theology tradition of Thomas Aquinas and the entire Catholic church would be marginalized as a resource for American politicians, unless enlightened non-Catholic politicians recognized the beauty and strength of that tradition and borrowed it from their politically non-participating Catholic brethren.

9. How would American legislative history be different in the case of abortion, euthanasia, health care, just war, and countless other issues on which the teachings of the Church have influenced politicians?

Playing “what if” is always a dangerous game, and it would be easy to play it with a much more positive list of possible results; but at the same time, there is value in recognizing the consequences of turning our Church and our faith into a political ghetto which serves only its constituents, refusing to participate in a larger world that desperately needs the wisdom of informed, educated, zealous Catholics.