Beyond the Bishops

A group of pro-gay Catholic protesters gathered in San Francisco last year. (Flickr/Steve Rhodes)

In November, as the Washington, D.C., City Council debated whether to allow same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia, the Washington Archdiocese threatened to cut social services to 68,000 poor and homeless if same-sex marriage became legal. On Dec. 1, City Council voted 11-2 in favor of the bill anyway, calling the Archdiocese’s bluff. The Church reiterated its commitment to the poor, although the future of such social services remains tenuous. The Catholic Church signs a contract with the city of Washington to provide services for the poor, largely through Catholic Charities. The legalization of same-sex marriage would force the Church to recognize gay marriage by, most notably, providing health benefits to same-sex couples under its employ. The Church is calling this a breach of religious liberty.

Critics point out that the Church is really only hiding behind ‘religious liberty’ to flex its political muscles, and they have a point. The Church has found ways around this problem before. For several Catholic Universities and the City of San Francisco, for example, the Church allows benefits to employees’ spouses or a “legally domiciled adult.” This makes the big to-do over D.C.’s same-sex marriage bill look suspicious (as does Catholic Charities’ refusal to discuss the problem with the press). But just because the bishops are willing to play politics with services to the poor, doesn’t mean liberal Catholics aren’t working for economic justice.

The media doesn’t often shine its spotlight on liberal Catholic organizations, but their work demonstrates that the conservatism of the Catholic bishops is often out of step with the majority of American Catholics. “There are about 300 bishops that oversee dioceses, there are 65 million Catholics” in the United States, says David Nolan, director of communications at Catholics for Choice, “the Bishops views are not reflected in what the majority of Catholics think.”

Established in 1973, CFC is a liberal Catholic organization that believes the right to an abortion is both moral and within the purview of Catholic social teaching. CFC supported same-sex marriage in D.C. despite the Washington Archdiocese’s threat to end its social services and worked with several smaller Catholic organizations such as Dignity USA and Call to Action to make their support known to the City Council in the weeks before the vote. The Bishops are out of touch with American Catholics, claims CFC, and they have the numbers to prove it.

The most vocal work of the Catholic bishops in recent months has been on the health care front, where they oppose any reform that does not severely restrict access to abortions. According to CFC’s poll numbers, 73 percent of Catholics believe health care reform is an important social justice concern. While the Bishops still refuse to support the health care bill without stricter limitations on abortion, 68 percent of Catholics do not feel this is a reason to oppose health care reform; 56 percent believe the bishops should not even take a stance on health care.

Even though they’re already out of touch, Church hierarchy shows signs of becoming even more conservative in the coming years, with studies showing that younger priests are more conservative than their older counterparts. This makes sense, Nolan says, since “conservative popes install conservative bishops who ordain conservative priests.” That’s not to say that liberal Catholicism is not a strong aspect of church, he adds, but “our work will always be hard.”

While CFC’s pro-choice, pro-marriage equality position sets it at odds with the Catholic bishops, not all liberal Catholic organizations are as wary of Church leadership. Rather than fight the bishops, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG) chooses to work with Church leadership on a variety of issues without taking controversial positions on abortion or gay marriage. Acting Executive Director Victoria Kovari stresses that CACG chooses to look for common ground between the bishops and themselves, allowing CACG to engage the Church on a variety of social justice issues like immigration and poverty. Its pro-life leanings and silence on the gay marriage issue allows them to collaborate with church leaders on other social justice issues like immigration and poverty.

When the D.C. gay marriage debacle raged, CACG declined to take a stand. Kovari explaines that CACG usually stays out of local disputes, but accurately observed that, “this hostility [between the City Council and the Church] didn’t happen in other areas that passed similar laws.” That’s because the Catholic hierarchy was playing politics this time, leveraging its social justice obligations in order to push its conservative agenda. CACG would be in a tight spot, both logistically and morally, if the Church carried out its threat.

For its moderate stance, CACG has drawn fire on both sides of the political aisle. Attacked as “fake Catholics” for their support of health care reform from the right, Catholics for Choice pilloried CACG in a report on the organization, casting them as closet conservatives because of their moderate pro-life stance, “CACG may just seem like another Catholic social justice organization … However, a closer look reveals that a key aim of CACG is to oppose the availability of legal abortion.”

It may seem disheartening that the broad coalition of Catholics who prioritize social justice over culture wars should nevertheless be kept from working together because of differences over them. But in many ways, the landscape of liberal Catholic organizations mirrors the larger political landscape of the left, in which progressives pressure Congress for important liberal reforms and moderates hash out compromises. Neither CFC nor CACG would like to be seen as compromising or conniving—after all, religious morality, whichever side you are on, is supposed to be absolute—but the result is a variety of approaches from liberal Catholics who despite their differences are working towards the same goals on poverty, immigration, and most aspects of health care reform, among others.

Despite the conservative leanings of the Church hierarchy, Obama, a decidedly progressive candidate, took the Catholic vote by 9 points, suggesting his commitment to health care, immigration reform, and the environment resonated with Catholics’ moral compass. In addition to CFC and CACG, many organizations are forming and responding to the conservatism of their leaders, take the recent formation of Catholics for Marriage Equality in Maine, for example. “For a long time, we’ve been on the defensive, working against the war, to not let programs get cut,” Kovari says, but with the new administration, we’ve changed “from an oppositional force to a force where a lot of the issues we stand for find a much more receptive group of people who are in charge.” In 2009, CACG tripled its base to about 45,000 supporters and quadrupled its number of online donors; such enthusiasm indicates that Catholics are embracing the "common good" and leaving their traditional hierarchy in the dust of the culture wars.

While the way Catholics vote is important, there is no longer a Catholic vote per se; they seem to go where the national winds blow: Bush in 2004, Obama in 2008. The varied and growing commitment to liberal Catholicism will continue to put pressure on an increasingly narrow-minded Church. Here’s to hoping more progressive Catholics can keep their Church in line with its own history of service. Same-sex marriage, barring any intervention from Congress, will become practice in the District this spring, and Catholic Charities will continue to serve the poor. If the Church can’t move along with the times, it risks becoming small, pure, and extreme–and then politically obsolete.

Pema Levy is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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