On church and state — and their separation
Guest Columnist
By Father Leonard Peterson
“Podium” sounds like a medicine for foot disease, or some
kind of psychological malady, or maybe a small town in Tennessee with
a little-used zip code. But when it means a piece of furniture used by
speakers, and then one decorated with the seal of the president of the
United States, you have specified it significantly beyond its mere sound.
Whoever stands behind the presidential podium next January to take the
oath of office will definitely have lived through the longest presidential
campaign in memory. I frankly hope we don’t see the next campaign
race start two years out from 2012. What a surprise I had to learn that
the whole election process that put former Prime Minister Tony Blair in
office for his second term in June 2001 lasted only four weeks. That looks
like one very good idea. Time and money would be saved. The need to spin
the multiple “misspeakings” (read “lies” or “convenient
amnesia”) we have observed in the current campaign would be eliminated.
Of course, there would also be an absence of fun for political junkies.
Perhaps a month would be too short for politics here “across the
pond” after all.
What has been percolating in my mind, however, is a strange omission in
the current campaign. It comes in the aftermath of our learning about
the vitriolic content of Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor’s
sermons (read “diatribes”).
How is it that such blatant political talk can take place in a house of
worship with no consequences from the IRS? Or from the champions of the
separation of church and state?
Furthermore, I wonder how can there be quadrennial endorsements for one
candidate or another from certain pulpits with apparently no outcry about
the tax-exempt status of such churches? How can candidates sometimes speak
directly from those pulpits and nobody minds?
We have all seen the video clips of candidates touting their worthiness
for office from non-Catholic pulpits. Pundits and other opinion-makers
apparently don’t notice any problem, or they choose to be uncharacteristically
quiet. It’s as if church and state are not only “engaged,”
so to speak, but actually “married,” at least for a Sunday
morning. Nobody protests the arrangement.
By contrast, we Catholic pastors are forbidden to endorse anybody from
the pulpit. Nor can we lend our facilities to a political campaigner.
I, for one, would not be remotely interested in wasting my seven-to-10
minutes of homily time extolling a candidate for political office. If
I ever did, the telephone would likely ring off the hook, and the e-mails
would come flying in by the ton. I remember being harangued at the back
of church (often a challenging place for priests to be on any given Sunday)
just because I made a generic reference in my homily to the evils of war.
Being “politically correct” is one translation of “PC.”
“Pastorally challenged” is another.
Mind you, I am not blaming our bishops for their restrictions. They follow
their lights, and in a society that is all but hostile to organized religion,
in particular ours, I understand where they are coming from. Intelligent
voters with informed consciences will know how to vote.
My parents often talked about a certain Father Coughlin who stepped into
the political fray and also stepped over the invisible line when he went
on radio. He raised a furor in both the secular and church world before
being silenced. Who was he? Father Charles Coughlin (d. 1979) was a Canadian-born
Roman Catholic priest at Royal Oak, Michigan’s national Shrine of
the Little Flower Church. He was one of the first political leaders to
use the radio to reach a mass audience, as more than 40 million tuned
to his weekly broadcasts during the 1930s.
The radio program included commentary about Jews that was widely regarded
as anti-Semitic, as well as rationalizations of some of the policies of
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. His was a kind of “talk show”
without phone calls. His chief topics were political and economic rather
than religious. But as far as I know, his radio rhetoric never emanated
from a pulpit amidst a Mass or other religious service. I admire from
afar his priestly obedience to his bishop.
Granted these are different days and changed times.
But the whole matter of outright political messages allowed to flow unchecked
from some tax-exempt pulpits and not others remains one of life’s
persistent questions. I wonder what the answer is, and who has it?
I cannot be swayed from the view that somewhere in the mix is a certain
“odium” directed our way. I note that rarely used word is
just one letter shy of the word with which I began.
Father Peterson is pastor of St. Maria Goretti Parish in Hatfield.