At this point the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is annoying the crap out of politicians on both sides of the aisle. First they went after the administration for including contraceptives in women’s health care plans. Now they’re going after the Ryan Budget, calling it immoral. Both parties like to shame the other side using the Bishops as their moral authority. I am tired of it. I don’t think the Bishops should be telling us what an appropriate health care plan is, nor should they be critiquing the budget line item by line item. They’re supposed to be saving souls, not acting as some mundane lobbying group. Plus, the Bishops are representatives of a foreign country (Vatican City). They are not representatives of the people. The people don’t elect them and can’t fire them. I may agree with them that the Ryan Plan is immoral, but that doesn’t mean that I agree that they should be issuing formal opinions and exerting pressure on American politicians.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Could somebody let me know when a Republican politician jumps up to “defend religious liberty” on this one?
I’ll just be over here in the corner, holding my breath.
Great little exchange between Martin Bashir and a Bishop who blathers on about the cult of Mormanism and then blithely says he’d rather support a member of a cult that follows Christian tennants than a Christian who doesn’t (see pro choice). Bashir laid into him.
In the end, it just gets old to see religious leaders so inartfully lean on govt not just to do the heavy lifting for them but to offer them shelter when they break their own vows.
Hmm, this has the added benefit of being a dig and being absolutely true as well… I wonder who the dig could possibly be at???
Obama: `I Wasn’t Born With A Silver Spoon In My Mouth’
To their mind, they are saving souls. I think this foray of the Bishops is to counteract the negative opinions they created with the birth control nonsense.
Just think. At least we don’t have Francis Cardinal Spellman appearing on the news to warn us every month about godless Communism.
The First Amendment has been contentious for a long time before the Federalists attacked Thomas Jefferson for being an atheist. Then it was Boston and New England that were pushing the city-on-a-hill, Christian nation, New Jerusalem stuff.
I would think they are not intervening so much as to save souls but to preserve the Church’s place in the power lineup.
And now we have Spellman stepping aside for the moment to give Bishop Jenky space to tell us that Obama is following a similar path to Hitler.
I just really disagree with you on this point you’ve been making a couple times about the bishops.
First, why should the fact that they are leaders of religious organizations — as opposed to leaders of banking organizations, or media organizations, or arms-building organizations, or agricultural organizations, or spy organizations — mean they should stay out of democratic politics?
Second, they don’t represent a foreign country at all. There is no institutional system within the nation-state framework which ties a US bishop in any way to the government of the Vatican. The Vatican has no ownership of any US church assets, nor has any employment relationship with any US bishop or priest. Bishops are not employees of the Vatican in the way, say, diplomats are employees of a foreign government. If the Pope were to say to a Bishop, you’re out, excommunicated, it would not mean that the bishop automatically loses his job, staff, apartment, etc. It would simply mean that other US Catholics who were so inclined could probably gain enough support among them to stop employing him as a bishop and giving any power to him to do so. The pope is a just moral authority, not a legal one in any sense of a bishop representing a foreign government.
And finally, news flash, NO leaders are really elected. There are institutional offices in government and private affairs for which leaders can compete to hold, but leadership is what individuals do when they want to organize others to follow them in group projects, whether informally or in formal government frameworks — when they want to build power, as Barrack Obama phrased it when he was a community organizer.
And, by that same Alinsky school of organizing where President Obama started, democracy is for leaders — people who have followers — not for unorganized masses of individuals. Bishops, as leaders of large organizations of people really always will be able to participate, not because of their religion but because they have so many followers within an actual organization — in other words, just because they have the power to do so.
I would much rather have people like the Catholic bishops with that kind of power to participate in our democracy than other leaders of similar sized organizations but without any moral basis to their leadership whatsoever, such as leaders of Goldman Sachs or large defense contractors, or spy agencies.
I may not agree with a lot of what the bishops lobby for but I think they have a right to lobby for it like any other group in the US.
Wrong. When they do so from the pulpit, they are invoking the moral authority of the religion pretence in a political cause. And there is at least one bishop, from Peoria, IL, who called Obama the equivalent of Hitler from the pulpit.
This is specifically barred by the tax exempt status, which bars them from calling for the election of specific candidates, or for voting against specific candidates.
Why is invoking the moral authority that your followers have invested in you as a religious leader to influence policy any different from invoking the moral authority of, say, the academic community as a university president, or the moral authority of environmentalists as the leader of an environmental group? Is religion really that special that it has mysterious powers that other organizations don’t have? I don’t really think you, or Booman, believe that, so why should religious leaders have any special restrictions on their participation in the polis?
yes, tax exempt status.
Academicians do not state that God himself, maker of the universe, considers Obama the par of Hitler, but a Catholic bishop did.
They should have the tax exempt status removed.
Actually that’s not exactly what he said, but if you’ve ever been to George Mason University, among others, you’ll find plenty of academics who’ve said things that are pretty close that anyway.
I didn’t complain when a bunch of priests and theologians banded together to sign a letter panning the Ryan Budget. I complained when the USCCB acted like the Chamber of Commerce, completely indistinguishable from any other group that lobbies Congress. There’s nothing wrong with religious people expressing their opinion. There’s a problem with the Bishops acting like a domestic lobbying firm when they are more like a diplomatic team from a foreign country.
You are familiar with bishops are chosen, are you not? There is local consultation, but the final authority rests with the Vatican. Bishops serve at the Pope’s pleasure and are not even protected by what stands for Canon Law. The Pope can and does sack bishops at his whim. And he also issues orders, much like Hillary Clinton does to her diplomatic corp.
Diplomatic teams from other countries DO lobby and influence American politics. The so-called “Israel Lobby,” for example. That’s how democracy works, and for an imperial power with constituencies all over the globalized world we’ve created since the end of WWII, it seems pretty normal to me that lobbies from all over that Americanized world want a say in policies that affect them.
But bishops just aren’t comparable to foreign lobbies such as the many US law firms that are hired by foreign governments to lobby Congress and the President. The Pope does not direct bishops actions or give orders like a CEO. He just invests bishops with the authority they have and provides for broad guidance in the form of philosophically dense letters.
If a Pope “sacks” a bishop, the only reason the bishop loses his job is that other Catholics choose to follow the Pope’s lead by listening to the new bishop instead of the old one. There’s no mechanism — legal, financial, or otherwise — to compel people to stop listening to one bishop and start listening to another one other than free, individual choice.
And if he Chinese ambassador is sacked but refuses to vacate the embassy, what recourse do the Chinese have? The same as the Pope. Less, actually, since they can’t excommunicate him.
You seem to think that bishops can act independently of the Pope when dealing (as a group) with the U.S. government. This is completely false. And it’s false in a way that is not true of AIPAC and J Street, both of whom represent the interests of some Israelis but not necessarily the head of state.
If the Vatican would like to influence Congress they can do it the way that other nations do it.. Go through the embassy, and hire a registered firm to lobby. Employing their top religious leaders for the job, and being maximally contentious about it is a bad idea.
And I haven’t’ said anything about making it illegal. I just find it stupid and annoying and wish it would stip.
If the Chinese ambassador is sacked, but refuses to vacate the embassy, the government can cancel his paycheck, and the Chinese police can arrest him and physically remove him from the property of the Chinese government, and the US will support the Chinese government in doing so because US law attributes ownership of the Chinese embassy to the Chinese government, not the ambassador.
But the opposite is the case regarding a bishop and the Vatican, and the Vatican neither has the police power, or the legal standing to invoke such power, to arrest or otherwise physically remove a bishop from his office or to prevent others from collaborating with such a bishop. Why? Because, unlike the Chinese embassy, the Pope does not employ the bishop or give him a paycheck (it’s the other way around, really) and the Vatican does not own any of a diocese’s assets or have any voting or other legal powers over a diocese, each of which are independently organized non-profit corporations under state and US law, like any baptist church or synagogue. So, the only authority the Vatican has is a moral one that depends on people voluntarily choosing to side with the Pope rather than the local bishop in any dispute between the two. There is no fiscal dependency between a bishop and a Pope, while there is one between an ambassador and his government.
They don’t call it the “roman catholic hierarchy” because it’s a democracy. Because it ain’t a democracy.
Neither is Planned Parenthood, for that matter. It’s a non-profit corporation, with a CEO and management hierarchy. You don’t have to be the leader of a democratic organization to participate in democratic government, do you?
The RC church is exactly the same as the military. You as a soldier have no autonomy. You may discuss ideas, but when it comes down, you follow direction from above.
Your mental models of both the military and the RC church are flawed to the point of being mere cliches. You need to get out more.
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It’s beyond tiresome.
The catholic church has a serious problem- with their child predator/abuser priests- a problem that has gone on for decades and in several nations.
Because of their inability to clean their own house morally, the catholic church has zero credibility regarding the moral quality of what our government is doing.
That said, I will give them some (small) amount of credit for criticizing what needs to be criticized.
Regarding horrible U.S. policy (terminal wars of choice in two nations with numerous civilian deaths, etc.) there’s a glaring lack of moral criticism/questioning from protestant “religious leaders” in the U.S.
I seriously doubt religious leaders here would be silent if white christians in another nation were being killed by an occupying army.
There’s a famous quote from the Spanish Civil War when one town declared it’s allegiance to the pro democracy side.
We’re for the Republic. What do we do with the priest?
It’s usually a bad thing when the Catholic Church decides to influence politics. They don’t have a good track record.
Perhaps, but do they actually have a worse track record than any other group that tries to influence politics? And if not, why should we expect them to be any better just because their religious?
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/04/theres-some-history-of-this.html
I think you’re both sorta right. Leaders of groups purporting to be Christian shouldn’t be overtly political. “My kingdom is not of this world…” But the Catholic church has a long history of being involved in politics and that’s not going to change.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
I think there is a role for religious people in politics. The civil rights movement, for example, would not have happened without the support of religious people.
What is objectionable (even on Constitutional grounds) is leaders of religious institutions using their power to deliver large numbers of people in support of politicians exerting their power as institutions to cause governments to conform to their institutional agendas.
To lecture government about what helps or hurts the poor even as they threaten to close hospitals, schools, and social services because of the ACA rules on contraception coverage (which has been re-jiggered just to accommodate them) is a little rich.
As is trying to dictate other peoples’ sexual behavior while shielding pedophile priests.
What I just don’t understand about that kind of argument is what, specifically, are the special powers that a religious leader has that other kinds of leaders, like corporate CEO’s, police chiefs, college presidents, union officials, media pundits, etc. don’t have? Or do you actually believe that bishops can conjure the gods to force people to vote against their will through some kind of supernatural force?
Comments, in no particular order:
Bishop Jenky is apparently ignorant about many things, one of which is that Pius XII found Hitler less objectionable than Stalin……. at least until the Nazis occupied Rome after the fall of Mussolini. (And he got along well enough with Benito from start to finish).
Santiago seems unaware that RC bishops serve at the pleasure of the Pope, swear obedience to him, and most certainly do lose their positions, staffs, etc. if the Pope dismisses them. It is true that they remain ‘bishops’, unless the Pope takes additional steps to degrade them or defrock them……. but although that is rarely done these days, the Pope can certainly do it if he wants to. He probably can’t have them burned at the stake anymore……….. but the way things are going, that may come back into fashion.
Bishops swear allegiance to the Pope, but there is no law or mechanism whatsoever, financial, police, or otherwise, to compel a bishop to maintain that allegiance. A bishop is legally the CEO of his own, 100 percent independent non-profit corporation in which the Pope has zero financial or legal authority of any kind — only moral authority. The Pope’s superior capacity to compel the free opinion of other Catholics to listen to him instead of a heretical bishop is the only authority a Pope has over anyone else. Basically, a Pope tends to have more mojo and street cred than anyone else, and there’s nothing more to it.
you are completely wrong. you know nothing about Roman Catholic polity. Yes, a Baptist minister can do whatever he wants. Roman Catholic priests, and all Roman Catholic bishops are also priests, are ordained into a hierarchy.
Think it through, Errol. What happens when the Pope fires a Bishop and the bishop doesn’t want to leave? (It happens more than you think.) What tools does a Pope, a foreigner, have to compel the bishop to leave his post as CEO of his diocese? Does he send in the Vatican police? Can he sue in American courts? Can he force of vote of the shareholders of the diocese? What can he do?
The answer is nothing. He can’t do anything to legally or physically force a bishop to do anything, because a Pope’s power is given to him by people who choose freely to follow the Pope as leader of the church. He has virtually no capacity to force obedience of any kind, unlike the President of a democratic country with an army and police and courts at his disposal. A Pope just depends on the fact that most Catholics will stop listening to to a dismissed bishop or quit working with him and start working with and listening to the new bishop appointed in his place. It’s just a system of moral suasion.
This issue actually comes up quite a bit, most recently in China when the Chinese government appointed its own Catholic cardinal to compete with the Pope’s pick, or in Africa when a cardinal became a Moony (!) a few years ago but still continued for a while in his church offices until enough people finally convinced him to give it up and get help.
what do you mean, think it through? you mean after the guy loses his housing, salary and place of employ he can still call himself a bishop. big f-ing deal. I actually see ppl like that every day. they’re called mentally challenged homeless ppl.
he’s babbling. And he’s forgotten about excommunication.
That must be it. Can’t figure out if he’s a troll or just totally ignorant about Roman Catholicism. Seems to think every priest/ bishop is free lance as in some forms of Protestantism.
No, I’m not babbling. Excommunication is exactly what a Pope, or another bishop, can do, but there are no legal or financial consequences attached to excommunication. For example, if a bishop was excommunicated and actually wanted to claim he was still the CEO of his archdiocese, there is no legal way a Pope could ask US authorities to remove him from his post. Rather, the moral opinion of the pope means that other people would just stop treating him as a bishop, and the boards of his 501c3 organizations could take such actions. But it is merely a moral opinion with nothing like a paycheck or a direct chain of command.
No direct “chain of command” in the RC church?!
You are unaware of “canon law”? The RC church has had its own legal system for centuries. It has had canon lawyers and its own court system for centuries.
Separation of church and state does mean that in the US our legal system does not concern itself with canon law: the Pope cannot ask US authorities to depose a rogue bishop or discipline a nun who favors birth control……….. but the church can ask for secular legal proceedings to remove someone from church property, or to maintain its possession of buildings and other property, or to punish someone who misused church funds. All of these things have happened.
Actually, no. Although an diocese can do such a thing, or a bishop as the legal CEO of the diocese, the Vatican or the Pope, cannot, because he would have no legal standing in a dispute between the parties. The buildings of each diocese are owned by the non-profit corporation that is the legal person of the diocese, and there are no shares or voting board members, or property titles or anything that ever connects the Vatican in any way to diocesan property. Bishops are paid a salary out of money they raise themselves for their corporation, much as any non-profit executive director does. The connection between the Pope and a bishop, and it is indeed a top-down hierarchy based on a vow of obedience, is a merely moral one of personal choice that cannot be enforced by the civil laws of nation state in any way. That doesn’t mean it is weak or without a lot of power, but it does mean that it is complete nonsense to make the claim that US bishops are foreign agents in any way comparable to other legal agents of foreign powers.
You are clearly totally ignorant about the Catholic church. In most places. the homily is written by the bishops and delivered verbatim at the churches. The members of the church have NO autonomy whatsoever. The higher-ups are ENTIRELY in charge.
I’m ignorant about the Catholic Church???
You appear to be a major apologist for them, and still totally ignorant about them. I cannot understand why you are kissing the Pope’s butt. Are you also defending the pedophilia, as an example of priestly discretion? Do you defend the sequestration and hiding of pedophiles? Do you support the Bishop of Kansas City who was in possession of clear examples child porn from priests, and the bishop did nothing?
In St Louis, there is a polish church, who built up over the years a fund of money that THIS CHURCH contributed to, and for which the church as a whole did nothing. Now the church is trying to take it away, claiming that catholics do not have fiscal autonomy. Do you defend the church here?
Why ANYONE defends pedophiles who have stopped reading the Bible in service of their missing perplexes me.
I’m not apologizing for the church at all here. I don’t agree with them at all on the birth control fight, as I’ve stated here before, for example. I am objecting to the claim by Booman that church leaders are so much more powerful (why? because they can actually summon gods? because people are more easily duped by religious leaders? what?) than other leaders of civil society organizations that they alone should refrain from political advocacy? It’s a patently absurd claim to make in any democracy, but especially in a modern secular one.
“They’re supposed to be saving souls, not acting as some mundane lobbying group.”
And exactly there is the rub.
They did not learn their ideas on the proper relationship between church and state from John Rawls.
They conceive the saving of souls to be everybody’s job, not just their own, and that the whole social and political life of human society must be ordered, under the direction of the church, to that supreme, supernatural end.
Secular modernity is contrary to everything they believe and live for.
The reforms of Vatican II never really made sense.
By interjecting in politics the Bishops are violating the law that allows the church to be a tax exempt organization and somehow, the media is ignoring the issue. It is time for the exemption to be revoked since the Bishops can’t seem to resist playing politics. This would be a good budget idea too!
Actually, that’s not true either. The conference of catholic bishops (UCCCB) is legally organized as a political action committee for the purpose of lobbying, as is each statewide Catholic conference that engages in legislative advocacy. Their funding is independent of the funding of the religious organizations and it is not part of the tax exempt religious status of the religious and charitable church organizations.
Just like Planned Parenthood is a tax exempt health care organization while the Planned Parenthood Action Fund is the legally organized lobbying arm that is independent of the mother organization.
Man. You are trying too hard:
link
Does that sound like the USCCB is independent of the Vatican?
It sounds like a voluntary association to me of people who pretty much believe the same things about the world. Does the Vatican pay the UCCCB’s bills? No. If the the UCCCB didn’t do that, would there be any consequences fiscal consequences from the Vatican? No.
But the foreign agent stuff is a really minor part of my objection to your objection. There are just too many examples of foreign involvement in the US polity apart from the church, such as Armenian American activists, and the whole Isreal lobby thing which is not run out or through the Israeli embassy but by voluntary American citizens who happen to like Israel a lot, to give two of many examples. And I’m not worried about the legality either, just whether it ought to be the case.
Other than just being annoying, which has been kind of the job description of religious leaders since the prophets of the Old Testament at least, why in the world would you single out religious leaders, of all people, as the ones who should stay out of politics, and for what end?
As you can see with the Vatican’s disciplining of the nuns, American organizations of Catholic church leadership are not independent and are not free to craft their own course. While American bishops are American citizens, there’s no guarantee of that. For centuries the Vatican imposed Italians on non-Italian principalities, and were often prevented from doing so against their will. Unlike Jewish advocacy groups like AIPAC and J Street the bishops literally work for a foreign government. They are appointed by a foreign government and work at that government’s pleasure.
I have no problem with some group of theologians and priests signing a letter. I have a problem with an organization of people who are subject to a foreign leaders’ dictates setting up a lobbying shop in Washington DC.
So your objection is limited to Catholics then, because the leader of the Roman Catholic Church happens to also be a foreign head of state? (I suppose Anglicans too, then.) That’s really dusting off the old Papist arguments from a century ago, don’t you think?
But apart from that, is that kind of nationalism even right or good? We don’t live in a world where nation states are above objectively superior to all other forms of polities, do we? So we should limit our democratic participation to activities organized only around nation states?
And yes, most foreign governments in the world are, in fact, actively involved in some way or other of organizing their diasporas in the US in ways to influence US policy, some better than others. Why? Because the US really is the next best thing to the world’s government for all practical purposes, and foreign governments and people ought to be able to participate in policy contests in that arena too.
the Revolutionary War was largely about telling the Anglicans to shove it. And I say that as someone raised Anglican (technically, Episcopalian).
Let me know when the Archbishop of Canterbury creates a lobbying office in DC to complain about the level of food assistance in the budget.
As for comparing this to other countries, the Vatican has formal diplomatic relations with us, with an exchange of ambassadors. They are free, if they so choose, to hire representatives to lobby on their behalf, provided that those lobbyists register as representing a foreign country.
If that is all they did, I wouldn’t say ‘peep.’
But the USCCB is something altogether different. It’s a group posing as an independent, indigenous lobbying group that is actually not independent in the slightest and is used to bully our Catholic politicians.
I do not know of any other religious group that is comparable to that. Certainly none of them have the power to excommunicate or deny communion to politicians that displease them.
And, again, I don’t think it should be illegal. I just don’t like it and I don’t think it’s right.
I don’t see where the UCCCB ever advertises itself as “independent.” It says pretty clearly that it is a fundamentally Catholic leadership and lobbying organization and as such takes its guidance from the Pope in addition to the Bible. My question still is, so what? I’d much rather listen to people taking guidance from the pope than taking guidance from any one of the 100% red-blooded American Tea Party congressmen in Congress right now. I just don’t place national allegiance above doing the right thing.
You let this by without a peep.
Certainly could open a large can of worms.
And yes, most foreign governments in the world are, in fact, actively involved in some way or other of organizing their diasporas in the US in ways to influence US policy, some better than others.
Why?
Because the US really is the next best thing to the world’s government for all practical purposes, and foreign governments and people ought to be able to participate in policy contests in that arena too.
I have seen this sentiment expressed before.
Peter Singer, I think.
Never could stand that phony bastard.
I don’t know who Peter Singer is, but which part of the quotes you cite do you disagree with, or is it just disconcerting to you to think it might be true that our country has global responsibilities as a superpower and that if we really took our democracy seriously it shouldn’t surprise us that there are transnational players in our policy contests?
You wrote,
Because the US really is the next best thing to the world’s government for all practical purposes, and foreign governments and people ought to be able to participate in policy contests in that arena too.
The part before the comma enormously exaggerates US power and betrays an ambition for America I do not share or a conception of American obligations that I do not share.
The part after the comma indicates a lack of concern with anything remotely like democracy, either in America itself or in a prospective world government, that, again, I do not share.
As for Singer, you’re better off as you are.
Fair enough. I also do not share the ambition, but given that we do live in such a world (for one small example, a world in which the US is able to spend almost as much on its global military infrastructure as the entire rest of the world combined), I advocate for accepting the obligations.
Archbishop of Canterbury has no standing (only collegial) vis a vis USA Episcopalians. You reveal tremendous ignorance when you call the Church’s authority to excommunicate a Catholic “moral” authority. It has nothing to do with “moral” authority. It has to do with membership in the Body of Christ. Did I say you are totally ignorant.? Your rambling on about CEOs is completely irrelevant to the kind of authority any kind of Bishop has for Church members.
Dude, isn’t membership in “the Body of Christ” precisely what is meant by the term “moral?”
no, it is not
Then explain what you think it is because it sounds pretty much like the definition of moral to me.
on a blog comment? you need a religion course
Just assume that I have a PhD level of education in both religion and governance and am familiar with all of the background information, and briefly explain how excommunication is not, almost by definition, an exercise in moral authority (meaning that it really only functions instrumentally through affected individuals’ moral agency) instead of an exercise in some other kind of authority (legal, state, fiscal, police, whatever, etc.) which function through other physical or institutional (or, I suppose even supernatural, if that’s where you’re going with this) instruments to affect behavior or outcomes.
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Phoenix, Arizona – Our Lady of Sorrows Academy, conservative Catholic U.S. branch of the Society of Saint Pius X.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."