Can Catholics put faith in politics?

When Mark Shields is cracking jokes about the tragi-comedies of Capitol Hill, some may find it hard to take this guy seriously. But if you don't, you'll be sorry.

As a nationally-syndicated columnist in The Washington Post and a television commentator for decades, Shields is known for being the sharpest wit on the Hill, as well as "the most trenchant, fair-minded, and thoughtful," as one reviewer described him.

After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame he served honorably in the United States Marine Corps and then worked on political campaigns from the courthouse to the White House in 38 states. Now he is most famous for his weekly gig on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer and as moderator of CNN's The Capital Gang.

A cradle Catholic, he spoke to us about how religion fits into American politics. The way he sees it, civic service is part of our Christian duty. And while many see politics as an all-around dirty business, Shields says it's still the best way to serve the common good.

How has being Catholic affected your view of American civic and political life?

Being involved in politics was considered to be an important civic duty and an important occupation where I grew up. Like a lot of people of my era, I was born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic. If you were Catholic, especially a Pope Leo XIII Catholic, you believed in workers' rights and you recognized that the free market was the greatest creator of wealth but a severely flawed distributor of resources and wealth. The Democrats' political philosophy was the one we seemed naturally at home with.

Something else that characterized us politically was our optimism, and that optimism came right out of scripture. I think it's awful tough for a Christian not to be an optimist. That optimism contributed to my interest in politics. And I can't overstate Kennedy's influence on my generation, the example that he set that politics was an important public calling, that we all had a duty to each other, to the country.

What did Kennedy's 1960 victory mean to American Catholics?

I was in Marine Corps boot camp at Paris Island, South Carolina when I filled out my absentee ballot for Kennedy. In boot camp at that time, you were cut off from the world for 13 weeks. You didn't have television, radio, or newspapers. I didn't find out that Kennedy won until the Thursday after the election when my drill sergeant, a white Southern Baptist, put his hand behind nay neck and said, "Your goddamn mackerel snapper won." Mackerel snapper was derogatory slang for Catholic back then.

I probably wasn't reflecting upon the cosmic meaning of his election then. I had a number of relatives who said they voted for Kennedy because they "liked his ideas," which was baloney--they voted for Eisenhower twice. It was because he was one of them, and there's no question about it.

I saw the same phenomenon to a degree with Jesse Jackson in 1984. I remember being at a Mondale rally during the California primary. I was talking to a black postal worker and asked whom he was supporting. He said he liked Mondale a lot, but he was supporting Jackson because before Jackson's campaign his 6-year-old son used to say that when he grew up he wanted to be Magic Johnson, but since he'd seen Jesse Jackson, his son wanted to be president.

In the same way that Jackson's campaign energized African Americans, Kennedy raised the bar for Catholics. We lost the old fallback for not trying to achieve anything new because "Catholics need not apply." That attitude is OK until the first time somebody from the tribe runs--whether a black, Jew, Catholic, or anyone who has consistently felt excluded. Voters realize that if the candidate performs well, then others are going to look at them differently, and maybe they'll be considered as qualified for other positions where perhaps they hadn't been part of the pool before. I think that's what the vote for Kennedy meant to a lot of people.

Kennedy and Kerry are both Catholics. But what else do they have in common?

Kennedy had no problem among Catholic voters. In 1960 Kennedy got 75 percent of their vote, which was a major breakthrough. (In 1956 Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson got only 50 percent of the Catholic vote against Dwight Eisenhower.)

Kerry doesn't have that level of support among Catholics. We've changed a lot since then. The mainline Protestant churches were a lot more important in 1960 than they are today. The size of their membership and their ability to set the political agenda has diminished.

The big question then was: Were you a bigot if you opposed the Catholic? The big question now seems to be: Is Kerry Catholic enough for American Protestants, much less Catholics?

Kerry is facing a lot of scrutiny about the authenticity of his Catholicism, but there was no similar litmus test applied by Catholics to Kennedy. He was the first real Catholic presidential contender we had. So we didn't ask how Catholic he was, and we didn't care whether he read the encyclicals.

His position on the Council of Trent never came up. He went to the same church we did, and that was enough. And the fact that his family was so wealthy and he was still Catholic probably gave him even more cachet.

Kerry comes from the same background as Kennedy--less money but the same sort of pedigree, credentials, and education--but he is not as personally appealing to Catholics. Part of Kerry's problem is stylistically he's not a good fit with many Catholics. He doesn't suggest a Catholic ethnicity most of us can identify with.

He once told a reporter he greatly admired "Pope Pius XXIII," who never existed. He meant John XXIII. The last Plus was No. 12--but I don't know, maybe Kerry's a visionary.

I think the great political journalist Theodore White described it best: When the political bosses--whether Catholic or Jewish, which most were in the 1960s--met Jack Kennedy they saw in him not themselves but the next generation. They saw what they hoped their children would become, that sense of confidence, poise, that command of the language.

He was truly the fulfillment of the American dream for immigrant Catholics, and he hadn't abandoned his background. He was still one of us, still counted on our parish rolls.

Didn't Kennedy face a Catholic litmus test from Protestant America when it worried that he would be taking orders on a hotline from Rome?

Yes, and that's why he made that famous speech to Baptist ministers in Houston, basically saying, "My religion will have no claim on my public values." Maybe it makes me a throwback, but I would hope that people's religious values do inform their public values, that they aren't totally separated. I hope they believe in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and that belief expresses itself in the public policies they support.

Following the Great Depression, most Catholics embraced the politics of the New Deal. We saw it as an extension of the social gospel and what we owe to those less fortunate. The inscription on FDR's memorial reads, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Can you imagine someone standing up in Washington today and saying that--Republican or Democrat? "What are you, a socialist?" they'd be asked. How narrow our perspective has become of what our mission as a nation is and what we have to do for each other.

I think a candidate who could step forward with a vision statement on an American common good would strike a very responsive chord among Catholic voters. Those communitarian values, that sense of what we do owe to each other is very Catholic. The best of America's generosity and social impulses are captured in that.

Do you think that kind of message is going to come from Kerry?

I'm not sure Kerry can come up with it. That's the great knock against the Democrats, isn't it?--that they've become a confederation of interest groups rather than a party capable of having a single, uniform message that speaks to the common good, that speaks to the national purpose. There's a sense that there is an absence of a core belief.

Do you think there still is what can be called a Catholic vote?

I'm not sure. The late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill was one of my favorite people in the business. It always used to bother him that Reagan, as he put it, "forgot where he came from." That's a cardinal sin for an immigrant people, but that notion probably would have very little currency with today's Catholics.

I guess you could measure our distinctiveness issue by issue. The Wall Street Journal had a pretty good poll of Catholics on what it called the key questions, and they found very little difference in opinion between Catholics and "mainstream" America.

Do you think John Kerry takes being Catholic seriously?

I don't feel qualified to answer that question. I've never discussed religion with him.

Do you think George Bush takes his religion seriously?

I think his conversion was authentic. I don't think it's contrived or an act. His "born again" Protestantism represents a certain break from where his family had been, as a traditional, St. John's, Lafayette Square Episcopalian.

But his faith still begs the question: Do your politics inform your beliefs or do your beliefs inform your politics? What is your faith mission in the secular order? Is it to work toward a society where everyone has health care and shelter? Is it to support capital gains tax cuts that are supposedly going to jumpstart the economy and thereby somehow eventually end hunger and homelessness? Personally, I think if you believe that, then you probably need to have an immediate encounter with reality.

Yet plenty of Christians do support those kinds of policies.

They think that social goods should only be achieved through personal acts of charity, but I think our social responsibilities fall on us both personally and on government. I don't think it's just one or the other.

You can't just say, "Gee, I support liberal candidates who believe government should respond to social problems, therefore I can be as mean-spirited as I want to people who work for me or with me or to those beneath me socially and economically."

Nor can you say, "Gee, I'm really personally committed to helping the poor and every three months I attend a fundraiser for that purpose, but I'm going to support someone who wants to dismantle the social welfare system." I think you have both personal and civic roles, and I don't know how the hell you divorce the two.

Is abortion going to factor heavily in the election?

I'm not so sure. This is a "big issues" election. This is war and peace and prosperity and poverty. In 2000 the country seemed headed in the right direction; prosperity seemed to be endless. That's not true today.

I'm not saying that there aren't voters who will make their decision based upon single issues like abortion, but I think Iraq and the War on Terror are going to be the big issues this time. Americans remain ambivalent about abortion.

As a nation, we're paradoxically pro-choice but anti-abortion. Should a woman having an abortion--in consultation with her conscience, clergyman, or physician--be a criminal? Well, no, most Americans would say.

But should we make abortion more widely available? Again, no.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's an awfully important issue, as do most people. The majority of Americans believe it's murder, the taking of a life. The terrible thing is that there is no debate on this anymore because everyone has absolutist positions much like in the gun control debate.

I think the prolife people have shown a lot more political adeptness lately by framing the larger question through the partial-birth abortion debate. The way I look at it is that it's politically difficult for politicians to deal with this because if you're arguing about who is deciding about an abortion, the majority of people are pro-choice. If you're arguing about what is being decided, the majority is prolife.

Yet neither political party seems able to frame the issue in a way that addresses that ambivalence.

Like so much of American politics, it comes back to money. Pro-choice folks have been a major source of money for Democrats, and prolife folks have been a major source of money, voices, and votes for Republican conservatives.

Politicians can't raise money by saying, "I'm 60 percent for the tax reduction and 40 percent against." They have to say, "I want to repeal all taxes." That's when checks get written. That's how money flows from the extremes and a political position becomes hardened.

Abortion has also gotten Republicans into regions where they hadn't been before. It has helped them with a lot of people who had, by inheritance, been Southern Democrats, border-state, or rural Democrats.

Republicans have been able to use the abortion issue and the cultural secularization represented by the Democratic Party to convert Democratic voters. It seems to a lot of people that Democrats are against the church and for the state. That feeling has been a Republican beachhead.

The conflicted voter in 2004 will probably be a blue-collar worker in Ohio or Michigan who is more populist economically but more culturally and religiously traditional.

He or she may agree with Democrats on the former, but they feel more comfortable with the Republicans on the latter. That conflict may very well hold the key to this election.

What role should the church play in political debate? Is it missing a chance to be more influential?

To listen to Bishop Michael Sheridan (of Colorado Springs), I probably ought to take all my pro-choice friends off my Christmas card list. Certainly I can't receive Communion with them, nor apparently anybody who supports a pro-choice candidate.

This year probably the most heated Senate primary took place in Pennsylvania between Aden Specter, an incumbent pro-choice Republican moderate, and Pat Toomey, a conservative prolife Republican Congressman.

President Bush and Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum--certainly the most prolife president we have had and one of the most ardent prolife senators--went in during the primary to campaign for this pro-choice candidate and said basically that the election of Specter was key to the survival of the republic, to say nothing of the survival of the Republican majority in the Senate.

Under Bishop Sheridan's test, does that mean Rick Santorum should be barred from receiving the Eucharist in his diocese? I guess it does. That's where his kind of thinking gets us.

I think the church diminishes its overall message if it does not address the larger social picture. I always thought that on this issue the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago made the most sense with his idea of the seamless garment: that we have a comprehensive responsibility to be totally prolife.

I don't mean to be a wise guy, but it seems to me some people think life begins at conception and ends at birth. We've got people who are against abortions, but, given a choice between funding Women and Infant Care (WIC) and cutting taxes, would choose to cut taxes.

We have a lot of contradictory messages now. We have the bishops' long-time endorsement and embrace of national health insurance and the preferential option for the poor.

And then we've got people like Sheridan telling us essentially that we can't receive Communion if we support Democrats, and Cardinal Mahony saying he would not deny John Kerry Communion. I think those mixed messages from bishops will eventually mean Catholics are going to get into diocese-shopping the way they parish-shop today.

To look at it from a positive angle, I guess you could say it's a sign of maturity in the church that we all don't feel required to talk with a single voice on every issue.

Do you have any advice for people who are turned off by contemporary political life?

It's so important for us to remain engaged in politics. Politics is nothing more and nothing less than the peaceable resolution of conflict among legitimate competing interests.

I don't know in a democracy as big and sprawling and diverse as ours how else we can resolve the conflicts and differences except through the care, the commitment, the intelligence, the passion, and the love of politics. I pray we never do it simply by muscle or numbers; too often it's being done by money.

I think that's what the politician's calling is, and when I see politics done well, I admire it and I admire its effectiveness. Here's one great example. Here in D.C. we had a problem. Kids in most states get subsidized resident-rate tuition through their state university systems, but there is no similar system here in Washington. Every student from the district trying to go to college, even in an adjoining state, had to pay out-of-state rates.

Tom Davis, a Republican congressman here in Virginia, came up with a proposal that was so decent and made so much sense it actually passed Congress and became law. That law says that any child who lives in D.C. who gets accepted at any state university can go at that state's resident tuition rate.

What an inspired thing. It's not changing the world, but it did change an injustice. Davis had a remedy and appealed to people's sense of decency.

Do you think religion has a role in public life?

There's a tension between personal faith and public life, but there certainly shouldn't be such an isolation that they're hermetically sealed off from each other. Some people's religion is so private, they unfortunately keep it from themselves.

What role do you think God is going to play in this election?

I think she's got bigger things to worry about.