The Changing Politics of the Catholic Church

Is it fair to say that in the past, the Church came down on a more conservative side on some of these issues? Is it not surprising, the direction that we're seeing now, as opposed to what it was in the recent past?

Well, yes and no. That's a complicated story. It's better to [look at] a range of issues rather than just one and isolate it.

If you take the 1980s, there are four major issues on which the Catholic bishops have been highly visible in the national debate. One of them has strong moral content, but the four issues are interesting when you look at them. They've been the nuclear question (they published their Pastoral Letter on Ethics and Nuclear Policy in '83). Secondly, last November they published a similar Pastoral Letter on Ethics and the Economy. Thirdly, they've been involved in the abortion debate. And then fourthly, the Central America debate.

If you take those four issues, it's hard to talk about "conservative/liberal" in standard American political terms, because the abortion question is usually identified as a conservative issue. The other three positions they'd have identified as liberal issues. You have the same institution dealing with all of them.

Secondly, if you take the economic question, for example, and look at their economic letter in 1986 that just came out, there was a recent, long article on it in The Nation magazine [stating] that it was the most radical document on the economy put out by a major institution in the last thirty or forty years. Well, in fact, the Catholic Bishops in 1919 had said almost the same thing, so they've always been left of center on those issues.

In the foreign policy area, it is fair to say that in the 1940s and '50s, the Catholic bishops, and generally the Catholic community, was in a position perceived to be clearly to the right of center (sort of a moderate right of center), a strong anti-Communist position. While there's not really been any shift on the communist question, there is a different perspective that guides the overall policy today. That different perspective is as a result of a shift in the wider church, the Catholic Church as a whole. For example, in the Catholic Church in Latin America the position has shifted significantly, and as that Church has shifted -- and as U.S. policy is very involved in Latin America as a whole -- Latin American bishops speaking to the U.S. bishops have asked us to take up certain issues. So there's been a wider shift.

But a short answer to your question, has there been a shift on some issues? Yes, there has. Shift on all issues? No.

Now, in understanding how this, shall we say, moderate transformation in views on foreign policy, what are the factors? Were perceptions of the Vietnam War important? Is there a generational change going on? Is it just part of this larger debate within the United States about our role in the world, and our declining power, and so on?

It's a little bit of all of those. First of all, the fact that you get a Bishops' Conference in a nation involved in foreign policy issues -- that, to some degree, is a shift that you can attribute to the Second Vatican Council. The Council initiated a process of de-centralization within the Catholic Church. The primary place in which the overall direction of the Church on international affairs is set is in the Vatican. It always has been, and still is. But the idea that local Bishops' Conferences, like the one in the United States, would enter the foreign policy arena is much more likely after Vatican II. That's the first thing.

Secondly, the issues change. The awareness of the nature of the moral question involved in nuclear weapons became clear over a period of time in Catholicism. From the time of Pious XII in the 1950s, for example, when he would speak to the nuclear question, and the statement of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 on the nuclear question, it isn't that you get a radical shift. Pious XII knew he had a new problem on his hands but, there was a much greater sense of urgency, of tone, and a much greater sense of restrictions to be placed on what are called "modern weaponry." So you get a shift in the intellectual framework.

Thirdly, you get a shift in the position of the Church in issues throughout the world. If you look today, for example, in many places in the world, whether you're talking about Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Philippines, or South Africa, you have the Catholic Church, almost invariably, involved in a situation where they're faced with an authoritarian government of some stripe. It's of the very nature of the Church that it's one of the hardest institutions in a society to close down. You can't close it down, and because an authoritarian government can close down unions, universities, political parties, you very often get the Church left in a sort of face-off with an authoritarian government -- sometimes of the left -- Poland, Czechoslovakia -- sometimes of the right -- Chile, for example, or South Africa.

The experience of the Church in those countries is that they get into a head-on collision. We're filming this show on the day that the Pope is visiting Chile, and that is going to be a straight face-off, and there clearly are going to be some very critical things said of the Chilean government, because the Church in Chile has been saying critical things for ten years. But when you get the Churches in those situations, there's a certain feedback to the Church in the United States, because our policy is so important to what happens in all those other countries. So you have to see this as part of a larger process. It is a transnational context.

I was just thinking that to myself.

Sure, the Church is a transnational institution. And there are feedback and flows, so that there has been a shift in the position the Church holds in a number of places because of the role it plays in a society. That feeds back into other sectors of the Church, because when the bishops in Latin America get into a head-on collision with a local government, at a certain point it becomes clear that the U.S. government is linked to that government in one way or another. Either we can exercise leverage to the good, or we're simply implicated with the government in exercising no leverage. So the bishops of a country like that, very likely, will come to the bishops of the United States and say, "What can you do in terms of U.S. policy, because we're trying to deal with the local policy?"

So the local national church's ability to define an autonomous position in part rests on its internal constituency. That is, it's dealing directly with the people. Then on the other hand, these transnational ties provide a lever either to the Vatican or to other churches ...

Both. And that's important, because when I say it's hard to close down the Catholic Church, I think there are two reasons why it is difficult. One is, because it's always locally rooted -- rooted into hundreds, maybe thousands of parishes across a society. But the second thing is, you're linked to other places on the globe, and if you start to move in on the Church in one place, you are going to hear from other places on the globe.

In fact, the positive outcome that we had in the Philippines was very much due to the Church there.

Good example.

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