A Catholic Wind in the White House
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:51:13 -0700 (PDT)
A Catholic Wind in the White House
By Daniel Burke
Sunday, April 13, 2008; B02
Shortly after Pope Benedict XVI's election in 2005, President Bush met
with a small circle of advisers in the Oval Office. As some mentioned
their own religious backgrounds, the president remarked that he had
read one of the new pontiff's books about faith and culture in Western
Europe.
Save for one other soul, Bush was the only non-Catholic in the room.
But his interest in the pope's writings was no surprise to those
around him. As the White House prepares to welcome Benedict on
Tuesday, many in Bush's inner circle expect the pontiff to find a
kindred spirit in the president. Because if Bill Clinton can be called
America's first black president, some say, then George W. Bush could
well be the nation's first Catholic president.
This isn't as strange a notion as it sounds. Yes, there was John F.
Kennedy. But where Kennedy sought to divorce his religion from his
office, Bush has welcomed Roman Catholic doctrine and teachings into
the White House and based many important domestic policy decisions on
them.
"I don't think there's any question about it," says Rick Santorum,
former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and a devout Catholic, who was
the first to give Bush the "Catholic president" label. "He's certainly
much more Catholic than Kennedy."
Bush attends an Episcopal church in Washington and belongs to a
Methodist church in Texas, and his political base is solidly
evangelical. Yet this Protestant president has surrounded himself with
Roman Catholic intellectuals, speechwriters, professors, priests,
bishops and politicians. These Catholics -- and thus Catholic social
teaching -- have for the past eight years been shaping Bush's
speeches, policies and legacy to a degree perhaps unprecedented in
U.S. history.
"I used to say that there are more Catholics on President Bush's
speechwriting team than on any Notre Dame starting lineup in the past
half-century," said former Bush scribe -- and Catholic -- William
McGurn.
Bush has also placed Catholics in prominent roles in the federal
government and relied on Catholic tradition to make a public case for
everything from his faith-based initiative to antiabortion
legislation. He has wedded Catholic intellectualism with evangelical
political savvy to forge a powerful electoral coalition.
"There is an awareness in the White House that the rich Catholic
intellectual tradition is a resource for making the links between
Christian faith, religiously grounded moral judgments and public
policy," says Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and editor of
the journal First Things who has tutored Bush in the church's social
doctrines for nearly a decade.
In the late 1950s, Kennedy's Catholicism was a political albatross,
and he labored to distance himself from his church. Accepting the
Democratic nomination in 1960, he declared his religion "not
relevant."
Bush and his administration, by contrast, have had no such qualms
about their Catholic connections. At times, they've even seemed to
brandish them for political purposes. Even before he got to the White
House, Bush and his political guru Karl Rove invited Catholic
intellectuals to Texas to instruct the candidate on the church's
social teachings. In January 2001, Bush's first public outing as
president in the nation's capital was a dinner with Washington's then-
archbishop, Theodore McCarrick. A few months later, Rove (an
Episcopalian) asked former White House Catholic adviser Deal Hudson to
find a priest to bless his West Wing office.
"There was a very self-conscious awareness that religious
conservatives had brought Bush into the White House and that [the
administration] wanted to do what they had been mandated to do," says
Hudson.
To conservative Catholics, that meant holding the line on same-sex
marriage, euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research, and working to
limit abortion in the United States and abroad while nominating judges
who would eventually outlaw it. To make the case, Bush has often
borrowed Pope John Paul II's mantra of promoting a "culture of life."
Many Catholics close to him believe that the approximately 300 judges
he has seated on the federal bench -- most notably Catholics John
Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court -- may yet be his
greatest legacy.
Bush also used Catholic doctrine and rhetoric to push his faith-based
initiative, a movement to open federal funding to grass-roots
religious groups that provide social services to their communities.
Much of that initiative is based on the Catholic principle of
"subsidiarity" -- the idea that local people are in the best position
to solve local problems. "The president probably knows absolutely
nothing about the Catholic catechism, but he's very familiar with the
principle of subsidiarity," said H. James Towey, former director of
the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives who is
now the president of a Catholic college in southwestern Pennsylvania.
"It's the sense that the government is not the savior and that
problems like poverty have spiritual roots."
Nonetheless, Bush is not without his Catholic critics. Some contend
that his faith-based rhetoric is just small-government conservatism
dressed up in religious vestments, and that his economic policies,
including tax cuts for the rich, have created a wealth gap that
clearly upends the Catholic principle of solidarity with the poor.
John Carr, a top public policy director for the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops, calls the Bush administration's legacy a "tale of
two policies."
"The best of the Bush administration can be seen in their work in
development assistance on HIV/AIDS in Africa," says Carr. "In domestic
policy, the conservatism trumps the compassion."
And other prominent Catholics charge the president with disregarding
Rome's teachings on the Iraq war and torture. But even when he has
taken actions that the Vatican opposes, such as invading Iraq, Bush
has shown deference to church teachings. Before he sent U.S. troops
into Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein, he met with Catholic "theocons"
to discuss just-war theory. White House adviser Leonard Leo, who heads
Catholic outreach for the Republican National Committee, says that
Bush "has engaged in dialogue with Catholics and shared perspectives
with Catholics in a way I think is fairly unique in American
politics."
Moreover, people close to Bush say that he has professed a not-so-
secret admiration for the church's discipline and is personally
attracted to the breadth and unity of its teachings. A New York priest
who has befriended the president said that Bush respects the way
Catholicism starts at the foundation -- with the notion that the
papacy is willed by God and that the pope is Peter's successor. "I
think what fascinates him about Catholicism is its historical
plausibility," says this priest. "He does appreciate the systematic
theology of the church, its intellectual cogency and stability." The
priest also says that Bush "is not unaware of how evangelicalism -- by
comparison with Catholicism -- may seem more limited both
theologically and historically."
Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, another evangelical with an
affinity for Catholic teaching, says that the key to understanding
Bush's domestic policy is to view it through the lens of Rome. Others
go a step further.
Paul Weyrich, an architect of the religious right, detects in Bush
shades of former British prime minister Tony Blair, who converted to
Catholicism last year. "I think he is a secret believer," Weyrich says
of Bush. Similarly, John DiIulio, Bush's first director of faith-based
initiatives, has called the president a "closet Catholic." And he was
only half-kidding.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: A Catholic Wind in the White House
- From: robertrice
- Re: A Catholic Wind in the White House
- From: Sid9
- Re: A Catholic Wind in the White House
- Prev by Date: Daniel: Obama 'transcends' mere investigation
- Next by Date: White women begin to turn away from Clinton
- Previous by thread: Daniel: Obama 'transcends' mere investigation
- Next by thread: Re: A Catholic Wind in the White House
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
