THE FAITH FACTOR.

Byline: Jeff Wright The Register-Guard

It's been 44 years since Don Edwards voted for a fellow Catholic, John Kennedy, for president. Now, finally, he gets a second chance, thanks to John Kerry's presidential bid.

Except that Edwards, a retired wood products executive, plans to vote for President George W. Bush, who is Methodist.

"I just have a very uncomfortable feeling about Kerry," Edwards said. "Even though we're both Catholic, I just don't feel the man is being very honest."

Like Edwards, Barbara Sumner attends St. Jude Catholic Church in south Eugene. But Sumner intends to vote for Kerry - not so much because he's Catholic, she insists, but because she believes he's right on the issues.

"I like when he says that faith without good works is nothing, which is what good Catholics believe," she said. "Faith is not enough."

Both presidential campaigns covet Catholics' votes - and no wonder. The church's 62 million members represent about 23 percent of all U.S. voters, more than enough to swing an election.

But times have changed dramatically since 1960, when an overwhelming 83 percent of Catholic voters chose Kennedy in his narrow victory over Republican Richard Nixon.

For one thing, there was no U.S. Supreme Court ruling then giving women the constitutional right to abortion - much less the specter of Catholic bishops suggesting that Catholics who support a woman's right to choose abortion, as Kerry does, should be denied the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Another factor is Catholics' move from the edges to the center of society, said Monika McDermott, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut who's done research on Catholics' voting behavior.

"When they felt stigmatized in the 1960s, Catholics had reason to band together and support one of their own," McDermott said. "Now they have no reason to behave that way."

Today's mainstreamed Catholics are also "increasingly inclined to vote their conscience, not what their church says," says Patricia Killen, professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.

As a result, Catholics today are less a voting bloc and more a predictor of presidential politics, Killen and McDermott agree. While historically Democratic, Catholics in recent decades have consistently gone with the presidential winner, regardless of party.

"Catholics may be less a swing group than a bellwether group," McDermott said.

For that reason alone, the presidential campaigns are keen on winning a majority of Catholic votes. President Bush, for example, visited Pope John Paul II this year, and the Republican National Committee has asked sympathetic Catholics to share parish directories with the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Polls on the subject have been inconsistent, however. The Christian-oriented Barna Research Group in California - in a poll released last month, before the presidential debates - detected a "seismic shift" in Catholic support, with a 53 percent to 36 percent edge for Bush.

A Gallup poll in August, meanwhile, found that Catholics who attend church on an infrequent basis favor Kerry, while Catholics who attend church regularly favor Bush. Fortunately for Kerry, 65 percent of Catholics attend church on a less than weekly basis.

Bush appeals more to practicing Catholics, the poll found, because of his stands on abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, which align with church teachings on those subjects.

When it comes to voting patterns, traditional Catholics "share much more with conservative evangelical Protestants than they do with their fellow Catholics," PLU's Killen said.

Traditional Catholics, Killen said, tend to focus on a few select church teachings, while ignoring others dealing with such issues as poverty, hunger, nuclear weapons and the death penalty.

The Catholic Voting Project, a nonpartisan group based in New York City, makes the same point with a voters' guide that compares the two candidates' stands on 30 issues with the positions taken at last year's U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Kerry fares better than Bush when all 30 are considered.

But Bush fares best in a voters' guide distributed by another nonpartisan group, San Diego-based Catholic Answers, which lists five "nonnegotiable" campaign issues, including euthanasia and human cloning.

Jack Pynes, a retired teacher in Eugene, said he can't support Kerry because of his stand on the "nonnegotiable" issue of abortion, and doesn't understand how other Catholics can.

"A lot of people can claim to be of a particular faith and then kind of do the smorgasbord, picking what they want," said Pynes, who attends St. Mary parish in Eugene. "I don't know how strong Kerry is on faith, but he's proven time after time in his voting record that he doesn't follow church views."

But Shirley Fogarty, a part-time hairdresser who also attends St. Mary, said Kerry has her vote.

"I just can't vote for Bush based on one issue only," she said. "There are too many other areas I feel he's failing in."

Fogarty said she likes the fact that Kerry "is very modest about his faith. I think the Catholic Church has made more of an issue of it than he has. I tend to be a little more concerned when I hear President Bush talking about being a born-again Christian."

EDWARDS IN EUGENE

Kerry running mate Sen. John Edwards will be at a rally today at the University of Oregon 

Where: East lawn of the Erb Memorial Union

Time: The gates open at 12:30 p.m.

Tickets: 345-5981

CATHOLIC VOTER GUIDES

Catholic Answers: www.catholic.com

Catholic Voting Project: www.votingcatholic.org

CAPTION(S):

Don Edwards, who supports President Bush, and Barbara Sumner, who supports Sen. John Kerry, attend St. Jude Catholic Church in Eugene. Neither bases political preference strictly on the candidate's religious affiliation, and both are voting their consciences.