Miscommunicants
Setting the Record Straight on Episcopal Duties Regarding Pro-Abortion Politicians
by Kenneth D. Whitehead
The seemingly never-resolved question of whether Catholic bishops should deny the sacrament of the Eucharist to pro-abortion Catholic politicians got another lease on life late last year. In December 2009 it was revealed that Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island, had written to Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy (D–RI) telling him that he should no longer present himself for Holy Communion because of his public support for abortion as a legislator.
Joseph A. Califano, Jr., who had been Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) under President Jimmy Carter and the principal domestic advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, entered the lists with an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he strongly criticized the action of Bishop Tobin (“Private Conscience, Public Morality,” December 5, 2009). Secretary Califano deplored the actions of bishops like Tobin, who have seen fit to announce that the Eucharist should be denied to pro-abortion Catholic politicians.
According to Califano,
where we cannot find unanimous answers, there is at least one point on which Catholic bishops and Catholic politicians can find common ground: insistence that those who search for the right answers are doing so with integrity and sincere conviction. That was what the church leaders I dealt with in the 1960s and ’70s recognized, as their successors should today.
Those earlier church leaders, he writes, “were willing to sit down and discuss alternatives.” Is this true?
Two Dubious Examples
Califano cites two instances where he himself, as both a Catholic and a high-ranking public official, had had to deal with church leaders on controversial issues that involved Catholic moral teaching. The first, in the 1960s, had to do with government support of family planning. The Johnson administration was the first to subsidize and promote the distribution of contraceptives on a large scale. Califano recalls that this policy met with “a stinging attack from Catholic bishops,” who charged that the poor were being “coerced” by the government into practicing birth control.
Directed by President Johnson to “work something out,” Califano met with Father Francis T. Hurley (later archbishop of Anchorage, Alaska) and Archbishop (later Cardinal) John Dearden of Detroit. He says he explained to them that the Johnson administration was “offering an option to the poor, not coercing acceptance. We ultimately agreed,” he continues, “that if the president phrased his policy in terms of ‘population control’ (which allowed for the church-approved rhythm method of family planning as well as contraception), the bishops would cool their rhetoric.”
It is impossible to make an informed judgment on the true nature of this “agreement” from the bare terms in which Califano describes it. But it is true that, once government support of family planning got underway, the Catholic bishops never did mount the kind of public opposition they had been expected to mount. Earlier, both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had dearly wished to fund family planning but had held back because of fear of the Catholic bishops. As subsequent events showed, their fears proved largely groundless.
Kenneth D. Whitehead is the 2004 recipient of the Blessed Frederic Ozanam Award for Catholic Social Action of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists (SCSS). He writes frequently on Catholic social and moral issues.
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