The National Conference of Catholic Bishops

Father Hehir, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

I thought I would begin by asking you about your role as Secretary of the Department of Social Development and World Peace. What is involved in that?

The organization I work for is the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is the national agency of all the Catholic bishops in the country. It is a staff of about 300 people in Washington who deal with a range of issues for the bishops. The department that I direct deals with social and political affairs for the bishops. It has a two-fold function. The first is an analytical, policy function of doing analysis and proposing issues for the bishops to take positions on. The second half of the task is legislative, and that is to follow through on the positions the bishops have taken, relate them to the policy of the U.S. government, relate them to developments in the Congress. So it involves a good deal of testifying in the Congress and legislative activity to follow through on the bishops' positions.

Your graduate work was both in political science and religion?

I did my doctorate at Harvard, and I did an interdisciplinary doctorate in international relations and ethics. Half of it was in the Divinity School, and half of it was in the Government Department. So I've always had that two-fold interest.

It's an interesting combination, unusual in our times, is it not? Combining the study of power with the study of ethics and religion?

In the Catholic tradition there's been a long [history] of trying to evaluate political power in terms of moral categories. It reaches back at least to St. Augustine, and comes through the Middle Ages, through the sixteenth, seventeenth centuries where the Catholic moral teaching became one of the foundations for international relations. And then of course, in the twentieth century, you have this continual engagement by the Papacy in evaluating international relations. So, there was a tradition.

The difference is that when you try to approach that tradition in the twentieth century in a culture like the United States, you have to bring much more empirical capabilities to the analysis of problems, along with a normative view. You can't get away with just the normative assessment of problems without relating them to the empirical concreteness of the issues that people face.

How do you respond to people who say that in our system it's not a good idea to mix religion and politics?

There are two steps to answering that question in American culture. There's what I call a structural division of labor that is found in the First Amendment. The First Amendment to the Constitution doesn't talk about the separation of church and state, but that's what we've come to call it. That's a good structural division of labor, because what that says is that religious organizations, as religious, should expect neither favoritism nor discrimination as they fulfill their public functions. But you'll notice that the function of that division is to keep them free to fulfill a public function.

Once you get beyond that substantive definition of the problem, that there should be no special treatment given religious organizations, then you come to the substance of the problem. The substance of the problem is that the religious organizations in the United States are regarded as voluntary associations. That's the way religious organizations are understood in the face of public law in the United States. They're voluntary organizations like other voluntary organizations: professional associations, unions, other cultural organizations. In that role, the religious community is expected to bring to bear a particular religious, moral angle of vision on public affairs. And there's nothing in our tradition, or our constitution, that forbids that.

After you get the structure and the substance clear, you then need to look at the existential situation. The existential situation is that on a range of issues that run from medical technology to military technology today, it becomes increasingly crucial to have a systematic approach to the morality of public policy. On a whole range of issues, if you can't get some moral angle of vision and consensus, you find it very hard to make policy.

So, to restate what you're saying, you're an interest group for moral values.

An interest group whose specific contribution to the public debate is a systematic approach to religious and moral values as they relate to empirical affairs.

What is the determining factor in deciding what issue is engaged by the church?

There isn't one set grid. On the one hand, you certainly wouldn't engage an issue that hadn't been worked out within your religious moral vision. That is to say, you have to bring something to the problem. For example, when we did the letter on nuclear policy, we were drawing on a very long tradition of looking at ethics in warfare. So, the first thing is that you have some grounding in your own tradition.

Secondly, the saliency of a given problem presses itself onto the agenda of the Church, as it does other agencies in society, so that at various times you may take up a question that you wouldn't at another time.

Thirdly, in addition to the general saliency of the issue and your own tradition, there is the question of trying to select issues at certain moments that need to be lifted up for particular emphasis. There is a process here of selecting prismatic cases, that if you look in this case, at the intersection of ethics and public policy, you will learn something about the case and you might be able to say something to the wider public debate about moral values and public policy.

Let's do a case study now of what you're talking about. What was the timing of the Pastoral Letter on War and Peace?

You could track the timing in the following way. You have to look at what the American Catholic bishops did in light of what the papacy has been doing on contemporary warfare. Every pope since Pious XII (so that means every pope since the 1940s), has been stressing this question, that warfare has changed in our time and that, while the Catholic Church is not a straightforward pacifist church, the restrictions placed on contemporary technology need to be tightened. So you have a thematic idea.

Secondly, the U.S. bishops got particularly involved in the SALT II discussion, and we testified in favor of ratification of the SALT II treaty. But by that, the bishops were drawn into a rather extensive examination of the state of the question on arms control in order to take the position on SALT II. We gave a lot of emphasis to the SALT II discussion. We asked Cardinal Krol, of Philadelphia, to do the testimony -- we seldom ask a cardinal to go before the Congress. It was meant to say, "We are very serious about this."

The bishops, having been drawn into the problem, then began to say, "There's got to be more than just the testimony. What is our long-term contribution? What are we saying to the Church in this country?" And there was a very strong sense that being the Church in this place gave you a certain special responsibility for the nuclear question. The SALT II testimony was in '79. In '80, the bishops voted to proceed with this Pastoral Letter. And then it took us from 1980 to 1983 to produce it. So you can track a process of about six years that led to the letter.

Do these concerns filter up from the bottom in the sense that, at the parish level, there is greater concern, say, about nuclear issues? Or, is it both?

It varies. It varies with the issue. On the nuclear question, there were certain sectors of the Church that had a particular interest in the question and had pressed the bishops. But I wouldn't say you had a groundswell, in any sense. There were then certain bishops within the wider Conference (our Conference is 300 bishops spread all over the United States, so that you can get sub-groups in the Conference), there were certain bishops who had a particular interest in this question and, to some degree, they were identified with organized groups that had an interest. But I would say, on the nuclear question, the impetus came from the top-down in many ways, because as far as broadening the discussion into the life of the whole Church, that came when the letter was crystallized.

On the other hand, if you look at, for example, something like Central America, there's been both a particular interest by the Catholic bishops in Central America because of their concern about the direction of U.S. policy, but also because of their relationships with the bishops in Central America. So there's that dimension. Secondly, on Central America, there are very well-organized interest groups, if you want to call them that, around the country, and many of them in the Catholic Church interested in that question. So there was a press from below on the Central America issue.

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