Changing Witness: Catholic Bishops and Public Policy, 1917-94.

Think quickly: Which public policy issue has been the centerpiece of the American Catholic hierarchy's political agenda over the last twenty-five years? Which issue has occasioned the most politically forceful statements by the bishops, both individually and collectively, and which issue has involved the bishops most directly in the American political process? If like mine your answer to these questions is "abortion," then you will be as surprised as I was at the tone and conclusions of Michael Warner's Changing Witness: Catholic Bishops and Public Policy, 1917-94.

In this highly interesting but deeply flawed book, Warner, a historian at the Central Intelligence Agency, argues that the American Catholic hierarchy in the 1970s and 1980s, manipulated by leftists and pacifists on the national staff of the United States Catholic Conference, abandoned the church's Thomistic vision of an organic society, and its traditional condemnation of Soviet communism. In place of these traditional foundations, he argues, the bishops have turned to trendy calls for "distributive justice," and morally suspect criticisms of American foreign and defense policy. He also scores the bishops for abandoning the principle of subsidiarily in favor of national programs and bureaucracies. And he laments the hierarchy's usurpation of the laity's proper role in applying the church's moral teachings to specific political and social circumstances.

As a critique of the bishops' conference as a bureaucratic entity and of the bishops' famous pastoral letters on peace and the economy, there is much of value in Warner's analysis. But it is an analysis representing one perspective in the church's own culture wars. Accordingly, Warner clearly lays out a number of ideological and philosophical disputes that have been raging within American Catholicism for decades, and he articulately offers his own position on each of them:

* The bishops, for example, saw American nuclear policy of the 1970s and '80s as a central element in a dangerous arms race; Warner lauds this same policy as the key to America' righteous victory in the cold war.

* The bishops denounced income inequality in the United States as a moral scandal; Warner prefers to view the American economy in terms of what he calls "the papal vision of a natural social order--with its Aristotelian view of a benign and universally beneficial social inequality."

* The bishops expressed outrage at the violence and oppression perpetrated by U.S.-supported governments in Central America; Warner emphasizes the evils of Marxism-Leninism and draws attention to the development and flowering of democracy in the region.

This kind of dialogue with the bishops' conference is a very worthy exercise. Not all of his readers will agree with Warner's judgments, of course, but all will benefit from engagement with his arguments. Moreover, many of his readers will also appreciate the way he places those arguments, and his disagreements with the bishops, in a broad historical and philosophical context. What is much less worthy, however, is the way in which Warner's ideological bias blinds him to the role that abortion has played in shaping, and at times distorting, the bishops' role in American politics. As a result, Warner fails to recognize how the hierarchy's positions on these other policy issues, regardless of those positions' merits or appropriate philosophical grounding, have often been subordinated, in the political arena, to the church's opposition to abortion.

Over and over again, during the period in which Warner claims the conference's staff has been leading the bishops astray, those same bishops took pointed, and at times partisan, public stands on abortion policy and politics. Leading spokesmen for the hierarchy directly challenged candidates for national office over their stands on abortion; bishops across the nation banned prochoice politicians from speaking at Catholic functions or at Catholic institutions; some of those same politicians were denied sacraments by local prelates; others were threatened with excommunication or otherwise denounced from pulpits, cathedral courtyards, and press-conference podiums. And, of course, just recently, the American cardinals joined together to "strenuously oppose and condemn" President Bill Clinton's "shameful" veto of the ban on intact dilation and extraction/partial birth abortions.

This history of pointed and explicitly political activity cannot be ignored when characterizing the Catholic hierarchy's approach to American public policy. Moreover, for better or for worse depending on one's point of view, the politically charged nature of these anti-abortion activities simply has not been matched by the hierarchy's treatment of those issues to which Warner gives so much attention.

There are, to be sure, many potential explanations for the bishops' overriding emphasis on abortion as a public policy and political issue. Maybe abortion really is, as Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston has repeatedly claimed, the "critical issue" of our day, requiring particular attention and energy. Maybe those bishops who most loudly trumpet the church's teaching on abortion are more willing to accept the partisan implications of their actions than are some of their colleagues. Maybe the unusually close relationship between the church's moral teaching on abortion--abortion is wrong--and the church's policy position on abortion--abortion ought to be illegal--creates a uniquely partisan dynamic concerning the issue. The relationship between the church's moral teaching on the dignity of the poor, for example, and particular policy positions that might flow from that teaching is not nearly as obvious.

These are a few explanations for the emphasis on abortion, and I am sure others could provide more. 1, for one, would like to know what Warner's explanation for this emphasis is. I would be interested to know how he would characterize and account for the political priorities of leading members of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. And I would like to benefit from his analysis of how those priorities fit into the philosophical debate about which he writes so passionately.

Instead, Warner chooses to place the controversy surrounding the place of abortion on the church's agenda outside the parameters of his work. Indeed, he writes as though abortion has not been a major focus of the bishops' attention recently. His index of names, for example, includes thirteen references for the Reverend J. Bryan Hehir, the staff member at the United States Catholic Conference widely credited with (blamed for?) drafting the pastoral letters on peace and on the U.S. economy. But that same index contains only a single entry for Cardinal John O'Connor, the outspoken archbishop of New York, and there is none at all for the equally prominent Cardinal Law. This is, to put it bluntly, a strange ordering of priorities for a book purporting to be about Catholic bishops and public policy. But that ordering of priorities is exactly what allows Warner to refer to "the gradual withdrawal of the bishops from the forefront of the abortion controversy," and to assert that "the bishops and their advisors appear reluctant to fight the abortion battle unless forced to do so in the context of some other issue." These claims are readily contradicted by the facts of recent history. But they, and others like them, arise naturally out of the unfortunate, ideologically driven approach that mars this potentially valuable book.

Timothy A. Byrnes teaches political science at Colgate University and is the author of Catholic Bishops in American Politics.