Catholic & political: between a rock & a hard place.

The first presidential election I gave any thought to was Nixon-McGovern, 1972. My first-grade teacher asked if we knew whom our parents would be voting for. After we raised our hands it became clear that my parents were the only ones for McGovern. (I was grateful for the support when one girl said she wasn't sure.) This occurred in Muncie, Indiana--christened "Middletown" USA in a groundbreaking sociological study of the early twentieth century. As the feeble support for McGovern showed, Muncie was still a reliable barometer of the nation's sentiments. McGovern lost in a landslide election.

My parents voted for McGovern because of the war in Vietnam. My father, who served in the Army in Vietnam (1967-68), returned opposed to the war. My parents also supported McGovern because they thought he best represented their ideals about social justice and opportunity for all. The idea that politics must serve the common good and help care for the weakest segments of society seeped into my own political consciousness at an early age.

I was fascinated by politics. I couldn't read enough books recounting FDR's grappling with the Great Depression and, as a boy, I was a convinced Democrat who wanted to be president. Not until my high-school years did I have second thoughts. That was during Ronald Reagan's first term. I couldn't bear Reagan. One day, though, my debate coach, a liberal like me, mulled over the Reagan presidency on the long ride home from a tournament. Why is it, she asked, that amorality seems to be the prerequisite for effectiveness? I asked what she meant. She talked about how President Jimmy Carter, for all his high-mindedness, seemed not to get anywhere (as in the Iran hostage crisis), but Reagan, who was stockpiling weapons like crazy and cutting taxes for the rich, appeared to be getting results.

That comment didn't turn me into a Republican, but it did make me wonder about being a Democrat. Maybe we were too soft, maybe we were too often misled by naive ("idealistic") notions of how the world works. Welfare programs did seem, as Republicans repeatedly said, to keep people in a state of dependence instead of empowering them. Our nation did seem better able to negotiate peace from a position of strength. The debate coach's comment also touched another nerve: a longing to support my country and see it succeed. I wanted my country to be a shining example to the world. I'd grown up in a terrible period which included the war in Vietnam, Watergate, a faltering economy, the hostage debacle, and Carter's misplaced worries about a national "malaise." One thing Reagan got right, in my view, was his utter conviction that we could usher in a new day. America need not succumb to self-doubt: it was "morning in America."

Where was the Democrat who could combine Reagan's optimism and effectiveness with Carter's compassion and moral probity? That's what I was looking for as a college undergraduate and officer of the University Democrats. But one day I found myself no longer thinking of myself as a Democrat. I'd become a Catholic.

More precisely, I decided to claim for my own the religious tradition into which I'd been born. My secular, atheistic philosophy (embraced in earnest as a teenager) had brought me to a dead end. I felt desperate, trapped in myself, and I didn't see how I could generate the energy to live according to my own ideals. I didn't even know if my ideals had any real foundation. Seeing no way to help myself, I had to look elsewhere. I opened my mind, and gradually my heart, to the possibility of faith. Over time the sense of rescue, the experience of salvation and conversion, transformed my most basic choices. I started thinking about going to seminary. I quit the University Democrats, telling a fellow member that being Catholic now defined my political views in a way that being a Democrat no longer could.

My embrace of Catholicism compelled me to reconsider political opinions I had taken for granted, with abortion being perhaps the most profound example. A woman's right to choose was an infallible dogma for Democrats--a view I had never seriously questioned. Before my conversion, I had never thought much about the life of the unborn child. Becoming a practicing Catholic and taking into account the teaching of the church did not make me feel any less compassion for women in the terrible situation of contemplating an abortion, but it did challenge my notion of when life begins and what it entails (when understood in the context of God's love). On many other questions, political positions advocated by the church matched views I had long held. I felt right at home, for example, with the U.S. bishops' pastoral letters on the economy, nuclear arms, and capital punishment. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's "seamless garment" approach made perfect sense to me. As Catholics, we should be internally consistent in our beliefs and come to coherent, consistent moral and political choices.

This ought to be the end of the story. However, the waters got stirred along the way, and integrating my personal beliefs and political choices has proved to be anything but easy. I did not become a priest; I am not living a life of sacrificial service to the poor. In some ways, I feel that my life as it is now sells my ideals short. I haven't embraced voluntary poverty; I am not a social activist. My life is comfortable and privileged and my sacrifices are anything but dramatic. On the other hand, by not becoming a priest--by marrying and raising two children--I have entered into a life that is, I am sure, most in tune with the person who, deep down, I believe myself to be. Moreover, it puts me in touch with experiences (challenges) that many share and that I otherwise would have missed: marriage, parenting, providing for and protecting one's family, pursuing a career.

Catholicism, while continuing to have great influence on my political views, has not, by itself, supplied the neat integration of life and ideals I had hoped for. It was one thing to think of a radical, self-sacrificial commitment as a twenty-three-year-old seminarian. It is something else altogether to do so as a thirty-eight-year-old married man who wants to respect the views of his non-Catholic wife, materially provide for his two young children, and find his own way in a world full of risks. The church is wise, but it does not supply blueprints for living. Its credibility has also been undermined by institutionalized bad habits and failures of judgment and courage.

Life would be easier if I knew for sure that it was all going to work out in the end; if I knew with absolute certainty that God has given us an immortal soul, is watching over us, and will judge us mercifully at the end of our days. I don't know these things for sure, I can only take them on faith. I believe this is the cosmic plan, and I struggle mightily to live my life accordingly. But doubt is not something I ever get around entirely.

And what if what the church teaches isn't true? What if, after all, power decides, might makes right, and idealism and notions about people's inherent dignity are just wishful thinking? Then shouldn't we just get real and stop kidding ourselves and make sure that America remains a strong, safe, and prosperous country? If this world is all there is, don't we have an obligation to make the best of it?

My suspicion is that many Catholics are stuck between Catholic idealism and Nietzschean realism, wanting to trust the angels of their better nature, but fearing that the gospel is not true and hedging their bets just to be on the safe side. I'm afraid this hedging is what I do myself. It's so easy to talk a good game of ideals (going to church, supporting good causes, saying the right words) while looking the other way and relying on our military's pulverizing might and U.S. multinationals to guarantee our disproportionate prosperity and our freedom to speak of noble values.

We are in the midst of a "war" on terrorism that threatens much of what we hold dear. We are also in the midst of a presidential election that will decide who will lead us in that war. I don't doubt that the dangers we face are real or the steps we must take to preserve this nation will be harsh. At the same time, I've been waiting for a Catholic Lincoln to make his appearance, someone who combines political realism with conscience and the ability to call the American people to their better nature. When will we see a Democratic leader who possesses the moral clarity and intellectual vigor to say something like:

  With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
  right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
  the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him
  who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to
  do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace,
  among ourselves, and with all nations.

So far, he's not on the ballot.

Timothy P. Schilling writes from the Center for Parish Spirituality, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In November he will vote by absentee ballot.