Catholics Matter

LAST MONTH I described how the Catholic Church in the United States is waging an increasingly viable campaign against the death penalty. This month I want to tell you how that fight is connected with other tenets of Catholic moral teaching, and how the Church is helping to change the political landscape of the world’s most powerful land.

We saw last month how the three bishops of the south-western state of Arizona launched a remarkably strong denunciation of capital punishment just before the scheduled execution of Richard Cromer. That was a battle the bishops lost: Cromer was duly put to death by lethal injection, the first man to be executed in Arizona for seven years.

In the same week that Cromer died, however, the Church was engaged in other death penalty controversies throughout the country, scoring both victories and defeats. So many skirmishes on so many fronts may seem bewildering. But America’s moral and religious battles are almost always fought out in political terms; and American politics is now passing into the intense phase of its four-year electoral cycle. Many offices are in play, not just the presidency. The results may shape American society for years to come.

Repentance & rehabilitation

Here are some of the Church’s present capital punishment fights.

In Trenton, the capital of New Jersey, the issue is politics. The legislature passed a Death Penalty Moratorium Act, after strong lobbying by the Church, and the bishops have been pressing to have their victory made permanent, going so far as to insist that “the focus of our criminal justice system should not be revenge or retribution, but rather repentance and rehabilitation for those who have committed crime”. The electoral mathematics seem to be in their favour.

In Ocala, Florida, the issue is pain. Virtually all American executions are now by lethal injection, rather than the electric chair, hanging or shooting. The impetus behind lethal injection is the claim that such executions are painless as being anaesthetised before an operation. Opponents of the death penalty point to a cause célèbre, the lethal injection of Angel Diaz last December: a second dose was required, and it would appear Diaz suffered for more than half an hour before dying. Diaz’s confessor, who witnessed his execution, is now involved in arguing against the execution of Ian Deco Lightbourne, a former altar boy who murdered a woman in 1981, on the grounds that he too would face excruciating minutes on the gurney.

In Cullman, Alabama, the issue is moral responsibility. Richard Anthony Martin had taken an almost lethal amount of the illegal drug methamphetamine one night in September 2005 when he shot three bullets into the head of a 26 year old. Was he responsible enough to deserve death? Would not life imprisonment without parole be adequate? Father Miguel, a member of the Franciscans Missionaries of the Eternal Word, has been arguing so. Executing criminals is only “permitted if there is no way of keeping the person from harming the community,” and since prisons are capable of keeping people incarcerated without any chance of escape, “today the death penalty just doesn’t make any sense”. And he points to the possibility of conversion, “The Church is always seeking the salvation of souls including those that have murdered because God always seeks the conversion of a sinner, not the death of the sinner”.

In Washington, DC, the issue was juries. The Supreme Court upheld a law that makes it much easier for prosecutors to reject prospective jurors who have qualms about the death penalty when imprisonment for life without parole is available as an alternative punishment. In most states juries decide on whether to condemn convicted murderers, and one would expect the Supreme Court’s ruling to lead to an increase in death sentences. But public support for capital punishment has weakened over the last decade, even jurors who in principle approve of it have proved reluctant to impose it. It is possible that juries will be inclined to agree with Father Miguel; and that Father Miguel’s sentiments will prevail with the courts in Ocala and Cullman, and the state legislature in Trenton.

Pivotal Catholic vote

Electoral politics in the United States are usually baffling to foreigners, and indeed to many Americans. The country is so large that no one political idea can have winning national appeal. The Republicans and the Democrats, the two behemoths which have virtually monopolised power since the Civil War, cannot function the way parties are understood in Europe, with ideological positions and a national leadership. They are rather coalitions of sectional movements which often have little in common. White social conservatives in the South, with particular anxieties about race, share the Republican machine with sexually-conservative Mormons from the West, corporations who want big government contracts, and secular North-easterners who want small government and low taxes. Poor blacks, Jews and other minorities, North-easterner social liberals, economic anti-liberals and affluent cosmopolitans share the Democratic machine.

These are unstable coalitions, and an energetic outside force – the Catholic Church, for instance – can change the contours of party policy, and thus of government. Catholics are easily America’s largest religious group, and politicians are paying more attention to the Church as Catholic votes become more pivotal.   

Shift of sympathy

For decades Catholic voters faced a moral dilemma. Since most were members of minorities, they were natural Democrats; but then, from the 1970s onwards, the Democratic party became increasingly intolerant of anti-abortion candidates.

However, virtually all Republican candidates (and, indeed, most Democrats) strongly supported the death penalty. Now, as both death sentences and executions dwindle in number, the dilemma is easing. The Republican Party, for the first time ever in a non-landslide year, won the Catholic vote in 2004. Polls indicated that Catholics were being driven from the Democrats by ‘conscience issues’ – abortion and homosexuality in particular. And the Democrats themselves seem to have decided that strident advocacy of abortion loses far more votes that it gains.

There thus seems to be realignment in American politics. Catholics, and conservative Protestants, are setting the agenda. As popular and political support for the death penalty softens, it becomes easier and easier for religious voters to exert through conservative candidates their opposition to abortion, euthanasia and stem-cell research. 

Pilate politicians

Hence the new-found confidence of Catholics over such issues. At the local level, in Parkville, Maryland, a Monsignor James Farmer has forbidden the Boy Scouts who meet in his church, St. Ursula’s, to have as a guest speaker a state senator, Katherine A. Klausmeier. He objects because she supports embryonic stem cell research. The American bishops have declared that local churches avoid honouring or giving a platform to “those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles,” and in the new climate, this declaration is being taken more seriously by [parish priests]. The Parkville case is a cause célèbre, but it is also on the way to being typical.

And on the national level, bishops are also becoming more confident in attacking specific candidates, especially Catholics standing on platforms that outrage Catholic teaching. Rudy Giuliani, the popular ex-mayor of New York, is one such politician. He is, unusually, a Republican – in fact, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. But the Bishop of Rhode Island, the Rt. Rev. Thomas Tobin, was uninhibited in deploring Giuliani’s refusal to oppose legal abortion, “I can just hear Pilate saying, ‘You know, I’m personally opposed to crucifixion, but I don’t want to impose my belief on others.’ Rudy’s preposterous position is compounded by the fact that he professes to be a Catholic”.

When Giuliani addressed the bishop’s criticism at a debate with other Republican candidates (all of them more hostile to abortion than he is), a bolt of lightning cut off his microphone. His opponents jokingly backed way from him, and Giuliani said, laughing, “For someone who went to parochial schools all his life, this is a very frightening thing”. But the opposition of the Church is by no means comic. It may well cost him the presidency.

For America is a republic in which Catholic opinion matters practically as never before – it is a world power in which Catholic moral teaching is closer and closer to becoming law.