Catholic Bishops in AmericanPolitics
Fisher, James T.
neither had the establishment extended itself to him as a potential source of wisdom or of entrde to the Reagan administration. Thomas's crucial failure was not to embrace what Carter...
...660: Commonweal The collapse of the New Deal coalition and the political realignments of the past three decades loom large in Byrnes's analysis of recent American politics, and he gives it a provocative twist...
...This is a book for thinking hard about the political dimensions of episcopal leadership...
...Once given a break, they must put up or shut up...
...For all of Byrnes's interest in models of political realignment, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is really a book about bishops and the politics of abortion...
...It would be nice to think that so sensible and simple an approach could be achieved...
...For further information regarding all programs: Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry Boston College, Dept...
...To this fanfiliar story Bymes adds a valuable discussion of the 1966 founding of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, inspired by the Vatican Council's "Decree on the Bishops' Pastoral Office" and charged with providing a national forum for the collective voice of the hierarchy...
...Carter is deeply ambivalent about it but, unlike Thomas, for example, or Shelby Steele, he isn't willing to say that it simply ought to be done away with...
...Catholics in this country, as we know, became more self-confident, sophisticated, and national in their outlook...
...But on this issue, we seem to be past the point where anything can be either simple or sensible...
...James T. Fishes" imothy A. Byrnes argues, in this short book on a very large topic, that the prominence of Catholic bishops in American politics since the late 1960s owes more to the electoral strategies of national parties than to the hierarchy's desire to influence voting behavior...
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...On the one hand, as Byrnes acknowledges, they actually enjoyed little authority over Catholics as voters (abortion proved not to be a factor in the election results...
...The bishops' subsequent pastorals on nuclear weapons and the economy had little political impact in Byrnes's judgment because they were too radical to fit the context of party politics in the 1980s...
...The only valid justification, he says, is to give people who otherwise might not get one, a chance to show what they can do...
...Instead, he was shunted into the National Achievement Scholarship program, reserved for the best black students, while white classmates with lower scores got National Merits...
...In 1970 Republican registrars in California would stand outside of Catholic churches to entice communicants to switch parties...
...If Catholics have left the Democratic party in droves it is not at all clear that "moral issues" are the reason...
...But it is clear that individual bishops have enjoyed their greatest political successes as part of a broader coalition oriented toward Republican, if not New Right, positions on crucial issues...
...And he sees no signs that the Democratic party plans either to move to the left on these issues, or to abandon its prochoice abortion position...
...What can save affirmative action, Carter says, is a return to its roots...
...Byrnes explains that even so prominent an institution as the National Catholic Welfare Conference was rebuffed in the 1920s by Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston in its efforts to promote national legislation on child labor...
...The struggle over abortion rights intervened, changing forever the relationship between the bishops and American politics...
...On the contrary, the durable and demeaning stereotype of black people as unable to compete with white ones is reinforced by advocates of certain forms of affirmative action...
...Catholics became a key target of these postmodern pols, according to Bymes, because their presumed conservatism on social issues could help "I've warned you, bishop ...no politics...
...their adversarial positions were directly linked to criticism of specific candidates--most notably Geraldine Ferraro, in the case of O'Connor...
...The bishops had thus become political actors in a volatile environment over which they had little control...
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...The bishops played a crucial role in this realignment because, although few believed by the 1970s that they could deliver the masses of Catholic voters to a candidate or party, they could "affect that vote at the margins" where elections are won or lost...
...C THE BISHOPS GET USED CATHOLIC BISHOPS IN AMERICAN POLITICS Timothy A. Byrnes Princeton University Press, $29.95, 177 pp...
...These leaders found a ready following within the New Right...
...Thomas's crucial failure was not to embrace what Carter contends has become the shibboleth of the civil rights leadership: affirmative action...
...And what about this shibboleth, affirmative action...
...That failure marked him as an outsider and an enemy, and nothing could make up for that...
...That is, the belief that the political landscape is periodically reconfigured inspired Republican party professionals to hasten that process by creating new issues to unsettle traditional voter loyalties...
...Forget all the justifications on the basis of enhancing diversity and adding to the range of perspectives available in schools or colleges or the broadcast industry or any other arena...
...defeat Democratic presidential candidates in the urban Northeast and Midwest...
...The ferocity of the black attack on this conservative black nominee to the Supreme Court--the dean of a New York City law school compared him to a"black s n a k e " - could not be accounted for simply on the basis of intellectual disagreement...
...I call it the 'the best black' syndrome, and all black people who have done well in school are familiar with it," Carter writes...
...Byrnes astutely notes that the return of the abortion struggle to the state level may bring the bishops to focus once again on local politics, devising nonsectarian strategies to influence state legislatures...
...Bymes demonstrates that by 1967 the bishops were committed to opposing the legalization of abortion, at precisely the moment when Richard Nixon and his handlers were discovering the power of divisive issues to attract new voters...
...Child ofa Comell University faculty member, he found himself excluded from consideration for a prestigious National Merit Scholarship despite his having earned the second highest score in his high school...
...Do the bishops fully understand the political realignment to which they have, sometimes unwittingly, contributed...
...At the same time, a powerful bloc of bishops led by Cardinals John O'Connor and Bernard Law emerged in the 1980s to insist that abortion remain the central issue of Catholic politics...
...But first they neeeded to surmount the defensive provincialism which characterized their activities in the era of the "immigrant church...
...This dichotomy between 'best' and 'best black' is not merely something manufactured by racists to denigrate the abilities of professionals who are not white...
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...Catholic Bishops in American Politics is a judicious if somewhat narrowly focused study which should provoke many large questions for other scholars: How are we to understand the relationship between the political activities of the bishops and the political identities of the rest of the church's people...
...At the same time, their positions could be ignored by party leaders when they cut across partisan lines, as Cardinal Joseph Bernardin discovered in his efforts to promote a "seamless garment" agenda on a variety of "life" issues...
...The bishops saw their role as protecting the interests of an embattled subculture: as late as 1962 "the bishops' political role...continued to be a direct function of their authoritative leadership of a clearly identifiable minority...
...This was a tribal reaction, a community retaliating against one considered a traitor and a betrayer...
...By 1976 the bishops were ready to press for a constitutional amendment banning abortion and soon found their position construed as an endorsement of President Gerald Ford in his race against Jimmy Carter...
...The reasons for Carter's ambivalence are clear in the account of his own experience...
...And at some point, there ought to be no more need for breaks...
...Realignment," he writes, "is now more than an analytical theory of political change...
...it is also a political strategy designed to cause that change...
...The "two Johns," John XXIII and John F. Kennedy, and all they represented helped transform the role of the bishops in American politics...
...Nixon's "Catholic strategy" was particularly effective in his 1972 campaign, when, in a public letter to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York, he "disavowed the prochoice findings of his own presidential commission on population...
...Catholic liberals wanrdy applauded this development: Just as the Democratic party had utilized the growth of central government to further a progressive social agenda, so too would the bishops speak powerfully in the unique Catholic idiom of social justice...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
