Bishops’ threats trouble Catholics
The vast majority of U.S. Catholics want their bishops to stay out of politics, and an even larger number say political pressure from prelates will not affect their vote in November, a poll released Thursday shows.
The poll by Quinnipiac University of registered voters nationwide offers a glimpse of growing discomfort among Catholics as some bishops threaten to deny Communion to politicians who support abortion rights.
” ‘Thou shalt not pressure the politicians,’ American voters, including Catholic voters, are telling the bishops,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
The poll showed that two-thirds of Catholics disapprove of pressure from bishops, specifically threats to deny Communion to presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Catholic who supports abortion rights.
A still larger number of Catholics – 87 percent – say the bishops’ positions will not influence their vote in the election.
Slightly fewer – 80 percent – Catholics disapprove of moves by some bishops to sanction voters who support candidates like Kerry. Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs has come under heavy fire for telling Catholic voters they must go to Confession if they vote for politicians who support gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia or “illicit” stem-cell research.
Pollsters found that nearly two-thirds of Catholics were evenly split on whether abortion should be illegal in most cases, while only 17 percent said it should be “illegal in all cases.”
Voters’ resistance to political pressure was shared equally among majorities of Republican and Democratic voters, even though President Bush holds a slight lead over Kerry, 48 percent to 41 percent, among Catholics in the Quinnipiac poll.
Any politician’s religious beliefs, regardless of party or issue, should “be a private matter, not subject to public discussion,” two-thirds of Catholics and non-Catholics said.
At the same time, an increasing number of bishops are urging caution on denying Communion, including a respected Cardinal who said, “We don’t need bishops to get into the act” of sanctioning Catholics.
“We have said again and again as bishops, we are not in partisan politics,” Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler told the Baltimore Sun. “We dare not be pulled into a dispute between one party and another.”
Keeler’s comments echo those of Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl, who this week said that Catholics “react with great disfavor” when the church attempts to dictate behavior in the voting booth.
Forty-eight Catholic Democratic members of Congress also said as much in a recent letter to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington. The threats have “the effect of miring the church in partisan politics and allowing the church to be used for partisan purposes,” the lawmakers said.
Sheridan’s directive, which he insisted was nonpartisan, has already prompted a church-state group to register a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service.
An independent Catholic abortion-rights group on Friday added its support.
“If moral decency and integrity to the church’s own values of freedom of conscience will not lead the bishops away from political bullying, perhaps U.S. law will,” said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.
Quinnipiac surveyed 1,160 registered voters, including 307 Catholic voters. The margin of error for the Catholic voter sample was plus or minus 5.6 percentage points.