A CATHOLIC PROBLEM? MAYBE

...There are scores of his speeches and legislative proposals to support it...

...Minnesota's great archbishop, John Ireland, contended until his death with the Eastern bishops who sought to hold Catholic immigrants on the Eastern seaboard in order to build a political force...

...I don't think they believed me...

...within that Spanish-speaking population they vary from well-off descendants of the conquistadores and affluent Cuban refugees in Florida to Cesar Chavez's chicanos, and, to citizens of the Rio Grande valley, who came as wetbacks...

...Continued on page 638) Abigail McCarthy (Cont...

...One does not question the candidate's good will -just the premises on which he is acting...

...So far Governor Carter has not established this connection in his statements of his plans...

...There was no significant Catholic shift from Eisenhower...

...But it was also the Reverend Robert Drinan who said in another connection, "Christians retreat into the simplicity of the evangelicals and the pentecostals rather than move forward into the complexity of the moral dilemmas of the marketplace, the educational scene or the government...

...Aside from the fact that I know people who aren't quite comfortable in the room with Geno Baroni, I think we must acknowledge that these statements, although they seem statements of prejudice, evince an indefinable difficulty that may not quite melt away...

...They may be the priorities of his ideological or religious group...

...Studies have shown that if Catholic voters can be characterized in any way, it is that they tend to be more aware of the connection between the teaching of the gospel and its application to social problems than the members of many other churches...

...Does anyone...

...One-quarter of them are Spanish-speaking...

...They come from families who first came to this continent with Lord Baltimore in the 17th century or from Vietnamese families who arrived in the last air-lift...

...They are uncomfortably aware that many other convinced Christians have taken a stand against those very laws in the formal meeting of their churches...

...Abigail McCarthy Mayor Daley's faithfulness to the Democratic party and his commitment to its candidate have no doubt heartened the Carter forces who realized, somewhat belatedly, that they had been cavalier in their treatment of the Catholic bishops and their representatives at the Democratic convention...

...Senator Mondale's concern for the family and its problems is unquestioned...

...Despite John Kennedy's assurances before the Houston ministers long ago, many Americans are still convinced that Catholics vote as they are told...

...the editors...

...they are more often his economic priorities...

...Some of the gesures toward Catholics in the post-convention weeks seem to indicate not only a lack of sensitivity but a total lack of accurate information...

...All of us who bear the label Catholic, no matter what our credentials or experience in the political and economic struggles of our time, know how indelible this labeling is...

...There are circles in which we are always and forever suspect...

...The charismatic movement among Catholics has shown that we, too, thirst for a very personal religious experience...

...The President has said that he believes that the people of the whole country should be allowed to vote on the issue...

...We now know how useful this motivation was to Senator Dole, President Ford's running mate, in his last state-wide election in Kansas, a state not known for a large Catholic population...

...Carter subsequently explained that he opposed his party's platform on this point because it "insinuates that Catholics, Protestants, Jews or private citizens don't have a right to seek such an amendment...

...There is the argument, for example, which was advanced by one Carter spokesman, that potential vice president, Walter F. Mondale, took much the same stand vis a vis abortion as did Carter, and that he had no trouble getting reelected and elected (he was originally appointed) in Minnesota where one-quarter of the population is Catholic...

...This is not necessarily true...

...they do not even vote Catholic...

...In the election of 1960 John F. Kennedy won in Minnesota by a very scant majority at the same time that Hubert Humphrey was reclaiming his senate seat with a landslide...

...In other words, they are not all Irish, Italians, or Poles...

...I don't think the Pope is very much interested, and I'm sure that even Cardinal Cody wouldn't presume to tell Mayor Daley what to do...

...that he understood the Catholic people better than they did...

...I would myself like to discount the more subtle uneasiness expressed in the distrustful statements of such ethnic symbolic figures as Jimmy Breslin and Geno Baroni, but I am not sure that I can...

...NOTE: After a meeting with Jimmy Carter, which took place after this column was written, Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, chairman of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that although Mr...

...But there are other aspects of the problem...

...It was hard not to give a quiet cheer, then, for Mayor Daley the other day when he so doughtily stood by his endorsement of Jimmy Carter, thereby joining combat, it would seem, with no less an adversary than Cardinal Cody on their mutual home ground...

...During the Roosevelt years thousands of German Catholics in Minnesota who had not previously become Republicans, did so...

...And again, "The churches of America have always tended to acquiesce in a status of being purely personal, sectarian ways of life...

...Even Catholics who do not support the amendment must feel that this is more fair than the approach of the Democratic platform which summoned opposition to the amendment effort-surely a Constitutional right of those who seek it...

...Somewhat unsettling to political strategists of the right-to-life forces coming from a faithful attendant at daily Mass...

...They are incredibly various in origin...

...It was a basic kind of spirituality, he thought, with which Catholics could be comfortable...

...The President has the advantage-with which he is decidely uneasy, it is true-of the so-called abortion plank in the Republican platform which calls for the amendment to the Constitution...

...The Reverend Robert Drinan, when queried, said that he felt that the majority of Catholics would be comfortable with Carter's religious style...

...A person faced with the choice of presidential candidates has warring priorities...

...Mayor Daley is evidence that, in the political order, no one is just Catholic: he or she is rich, poor, or middle-class...

...they are also newly-arrived French Canadians swelling the population of the New England border states...

...If there is one thing which can unite Catholic voters as Catholics, it is any display, or appearance of, anti-Catholicism...

...There are in the United States some 48 million Catholics...

...When I was last in Washington people seemed to think that Mr...

...He was a Republican and thought that one way for the arriving Catholic immigrants to become more thoroughly integrated into the American scene was to join the Republican party...

...Does he...

...In the central plains states they are Germans and central Europeans...

...Carter did not himself support such an amendment, he had "indicated he would not oppose an effort to obtain a constitutional amendment" to overturn the Supreme Court decision on abortion...

...The Mayor was not yielding his place as a Catholic, however...

...And Baroni said that he couldn't quite put his finger on his feeling about Carter but that he had met with him several times and "didn't feel quite comfortable in the room with him...

...In the meantime what of the Catholics and Ford...

...What is one to think, for example, of a candidate who assured an interviewer that his openness toward Catholics was shown in his choice of issues coordinator, Joseph Duffy...

...Breslin said provocatively, you remember, that he didn't trust anyone south of New Jersey "because of what they did to Al Smith in Georgia...

...They are descended from the first French voyageurs along our northern border or Cajun descendants of the first French explorers in Louisiana...

...Minnesota Catholics not only do not vote Democratic...

...Wasn't there something rather specious about the announcement of a family problems coordinator on the candidate's first trip to New England and that that family advisor was Joseph Califano...

...He cautioned the Carter forces to abstain from trying to silence those who wanted an amendment to the Constitution and said that their voices should be listened to...

...One Catholic columnist, rather carried away in the period of Democratic euphoria just after the convention, said that Jimmy Carter was sending a message to the bishops...

...Califano's chief qualifications for this post were his Italian name and the fact that he was vice-presidential candidate Mon-dale's lawyer...

...For more than a century the churches and most people in America have assumed that the political life of the nation can survive on the basis of those moral principles which are brought to public life by the elected and appointed officials of the nation...

...The political strategy of the pro-life people may not have millions in its legions, but it does have impassioned and totally focused adherence...

...Insofar as the so-called Carter problem is centered on the pro-life political strategy, the Democrats may well take heart...

...The argument, therefore, from the Mondale experience can be discounted...

...He had apparently assumed that Unitarian Duffy was Catholic- isn't everyone with an Irish name...

...There are more important issues this year than abortion," the Mayor is reported to have said...

...I spent some hours this spring trying to convince some of my friends, who work in the coalition to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, that the way to enlist Mayor Daley's enthusiastic support in Illinois was not through the Pope or Cardinal Cody...

...Mayor Daley is also dramatic evidence that many a Catholic may agree with all the bishops that abortion is abhorrent, but might not agree with the majority that it should be prohibited by law...

...The assumption is that the Catholics in Minnesota usually vote Democratic-that they are a part of the normal Democratic constituency there...

...That really isn't the way it works," I told them...

...he has simply assured us of his own personal religious conviction...

...a farmer, auto worker, oil entrepreneur, migratory laborer, or union organizer...