The Bishops and the Ballots

...He told the demonstrators, an estimated 100,000 from all over the island, that if they disapproved of the way the PDP legislative majority had handled the bill, they were "free to organize a political party...

...driving three dogs called El Mundo, El Imparcial and San Juan Star to attack the church, which was shown as a kneeling woman embracing Christ on the cross...

...Its candidate for Governor received only 51,000 votes, or 6.6 per cent of the 780,000 cast, as against the 455,000 votes (58.3 per cent) received by Governor Luis Munoz Marin, founder and leader of the PDP, in his successful bid for a fourth term...

...Not knowing their motives, we can only wonder at the discrepancy between their zeal and their effectiveness...

...Thanks to liberal constitutional provisions concerning minority representation, two of the more militant organizers got elected to the Commonwealth legislature...

...And yet the lay organizers of CAP have already announced that they expect soon to begin a new campaign to register the party and line up candidates for 1964...

...During the recent campaign the church hierarchy in the island tried hard to change the voting habits of the Catholic part of the electorate but failed miserably in the attempt...

...Another CAP handbill listed 14 points in two parallel columns, the first headed "What Communism Says and Does All Over the World" and the other headed "What the Popular Party and the Other Parties Say and Do...

...One of the CAP slogans was "Add the Cross to the Rosary...

...There is no way of knowing what the bishops thought were their chances of success when they decided to intervene in insular politics, if indeed they considered the matter at all...

...He conducted an almost totally inactive campaign, seldom venturing forth from Ponce and appearing only once or twice on television...

...3. That sterilization is a mortal sin...

...Whatever the exact figure, the plain fact is that tens of thousands of practicing Catholics chose to disobey if not defy their priests and higher clergy...

...At an early moment the two bishops had authorized the use of church property to aid the campaign...

...The irruption of clericalism had given Munoz his only effective campaign issue, and he exploited it to the limit —even turning the pastoral letters to his own advantage...

...Signs urging Catholics to help register the party appeared in the churches, and petitions were available for signing in the parish houses...

...All three daily newspapers, El Mundo, El Imparcial and the San Juan Star, ran front-page editorials condemning the bishops for violating the principle of separation of church and state and for trying to impose Church doctrine on Catholics and non-Catholics alike...

...The furor reached its height on October 28 with the release of the second pastoral letter, which declared it to be a sin to vote for the PDP...

...and in many a Catholic home...

...And surprisingly few people have in fact done so...

...It is true that free birth control advice and materials are available as part of the pre-maternal health services which are offered by the 160 public health clinics scattered across the island...

...Nor is there any way of telling whether their aim was to influence only this particular Puerto Rican election or whether they had wider and possibly longer-range ends in view...

...Contraceptive information and equipment have been available for the asking, but not since 1944 has any effort been made to encourage people to take advantage of them...

...He is known as the "pistol-packing bishop" because of having obtained a permit to carry a gun...

...CAP spokesmen and publicists freely identified the party with the church and indeed with the will of God...

...As for the birth control issue, here again the bishops' position evoked little popular sympathy or support...

...They took another full page to display a large photograph of Pope John XXII and to point out that His Holiness as well as the bishops of Puerto Rico teach "I...

...The many Puerto Rican Catholics who do not regard birth control as a sin would seem to have been poor prospects for conversion to the view that it is a sin to vote for the PDP...

...Some who were originally disposed to go along with the church's criticisms of the PDP became offended by the increasingly strident, even sacrilegious, tone of CAP propaganda...

...Lacking issues that could attract voters away from their traditional party ties, the Christian Action party suffered the even graver disadvantage of lacking an effective leader...

...The Lord's Prayer took up most of the full-page ad which they ran the day before the election...

...Others objected to being told how to vote and how not to vote by men of the cloth, who in their view had no business getting involved in politics...

...A firebrand and an extremist, this Brooklyn-born cleric had a long record of open hostility toward the Popular Democratic party and its leadership...

...If the findings of a survey conducted in 1948 are still valid, around 25 per cent of adult Puerto Rican Catholics (20 per cent of the men, 30 per cent of the women) attend church one or more times a month...

...For the benefit of the secular-minded, he took the role of champion of the separation of church and state...

...Sermons on the duty of good Catholics to support the new party became a regular feature of Mass in many parishes...

...selves in politics about six months before the election...

...Most people agreed with Governor Munoz that children spent too little time in school as it was...

...2. That natural and divine law prescribes religious instruction for children...

...Munoz was shown standing on a broken tablet labeled "Ten Commandments...

...on this basis, the faithful would number at least 200,000...

...Nor did they interest those who had long believed in statehood for Puerto Rico and now had good reason to think that the Statehood party was gaining in strength...

...But, as Munoz and other party leaders kept pointing out, the program was begun in 1939, two years before the PDP came to power...

...Furthermore, less than 10 per cent of those Catholics who do not practice birth control give religious reasons for not doing so...

...And yet, as this study points out, knowledge and practice of birth control methods, including female sterilization, are fairly general among all classes and religious groups in Puerto Rican society...

...Their main case against the PDP Government was that it was promoting birth control, which is "against the law of God...

...However important the religious education and birth control issues may have been to the church, they simply could not arouse much interest or indignation among the rank and file of voters...

...They picked as their candidate for Governor an aged and obscure political scientist at the Catholic University in Ponce who, as it turned out, was not even a registered voter...

...Whether they will in fact be allowed to do so depends...

...Needless to say, he was no match for Munoz Marin, a brilliant and tireless campaigner in addition to being a popular and respected public figure...

...An easy but erroneous answer would be that all the practicing Catholics were moved by them and voted accordingly, whereas those who ignored the bishops were members of the church in name only...

...Under his guidance priests in every part of the island were mobilized to help register the CAP—to copy voter lists, circulate petitions, and generally direct the local registration efforts...

...Their intent was to cause Catholics to put aside their customary political allegiances and support a new party which had no leadership and only two issues—religious instruction for public-school children, and elimination of Government activities in the field of birth control...

...Flags bearing the CAP insignia, a rosary on a field of papal yellow and white, flew from church gates and parish-house porches...

...The 14 items, identical in each column, included such statements as "The Church should not mix in politics," "Those who defend Christianity are crazy" and "The Church is an enemy of progress...

...The moving spirit behind the venture was the other American prelate, James E. McManus, Bishop of Ponce...

...The letter touched off heated discussions in the press, on the sidewalks...

...In short, it left loyal Catholics no alternative but to vote CAP or stay home on election day...

...What is the future of clericalism in Puerto Rican politics...

...Therefore, to support any other candidate for Governor or resident commissioner but our own would be against the will of God...

...and in the background was a building labeled "Godless Public School...

...They had still less appeal to convinced advocates of independence, for whom the achievement of a republic, though becoming less likely every year, was still the only goal worth working for...

...Their delayed reaction was the more curious because the Government had long since given up active promotion of birth control techniques...

...During the final week of the campaign the CAP propagandists worked overtime to get the bishops' message across...

...A Christian ought to be disposed to defend Christ and his Church...

...One a Senator-at-large and the other a Representative-at-large, they will have a ready-made forum for keeping the cause alive during the next four years...

...That is why He wanted us to form a party...

...But this would put the number of active and devout Catholics at barely 50,000, which is patently too low a figure...

...We have to uphold Christ's doctrine and obey the voice of our bishops who are the representatives of God on earth...

...Soon thereafter a group of priests and laymen founded the Christian Action party (CAP...

...As luck would have it, his politically inept opponents in the Statehood and Independence parties could not decide whether to approve or condemn the pastoral letters and compromised by remaining silent, thus leaving the impression that among the political leaders Munoz had a monopoly of moral courage and civic virtue...

...Nothing illustrates the political naivete of the CAP policymakers so well as their choice of standard-bearer...

...That the Ten Commandments were established by God and that no human authority (be it legislature, governor or political party) can alter them...

...This segment of Catholic opinion regarded them as alien overlords who did not really understand Puerto Rican Catholicism...

...Differing only in format, all the advertisements displayed a neatly typewritten letter addressed to Governor Munoz from a small farmer in the hills, one Don Inocencio Cintron...

...Few Catholics who have used methods other than those approved by the church (rhythm and abstinence) admit to any qualms of conscience in so doing...

...4. That birth control is a mortal sin...

...But in view of the level of political wisdom the churchmen seem to have displayed so far, one would not want to lay any bets on what their decision might turn out to be...

...They published scores of letters from readers expressing similar views, and also a number of letters supporting the bishops— including several from Bishop Mc-Manus himself, who criticized the editorials and took issue with some of the anti-clerical letter writers...

...On October 21 the prelates released the first of their famous pastoral letters, the one in which they prohibited Catholics from voting for candidates of the Popular Democratic party...

...The letter also denounced the platforms of the Statehood and Independence parties for failing to conform to Catholic ideals...

...I am a Christian rather than a politician," he wrote, "and I believe that the three parties, Popular, Statehood and Independence, do not work for the Christian morality of our people...

...The issues on which the bishops chose to do battle had little appeal for those Catholics who identified the PDP with economic progress and wished to keep the party in power...

...But the main reason why so many Catholics, nominal and practicing alike, voted contrary to the bishops' orders is that those orders made no political sense...

...Still others made no bones about their resentment of the fact that the ringleaders of the movement, Archbishop Davis and Bishop McManus, were Americans...

...one would imagine, on the bishops' calculations of what the church gained and lost as a result of its first venture into politics and of what the costs of a second debacle would be...

...For the final push CAP partisans distributed a badly drawn but graphic cartoon of a dissolute-looking Governor Munoz, bullwhip in hand...

...According to a study published in 1959, "less than one out of every ten families in Puerto Rico has ever obtained contraceptives from the pre-maternal clinics" (Reuben Hill, J. Mayone Stycos and Kurt W. Back, The Family and Population Control, University of North Carolina Press, p. 124...

...They did so for a variety of reasons...

...A flier called "The Voice of the CAP" contained a variety of tasteless gibes...

...including this one: "If you want some tramp to rape your daughter, vote for the Popular Democratic party...

...The clergy began to busy themHENRY WELLS, a specialist on Puerto Rico, recently visited the island to observe the elections first hand...

...The Christian Action party got less than five per cent of the votes in Ponce, where Bishop McManus has been a public figure for many years...

...This statement, according to the pastoral letter, makes it "evident that the philosophy of the PDP is anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, and that it is based on the modern heresy that the popular will and not the divine law decides what is moral or immoral...

...On May 22 the then Bishop (later Archbishop) of San Juan, James P. Davis, addressed a mass rally of the faithful which he had called to protest against the refusal of the Commonwealth legislature to pass a religious education bill...

...The rosary symbol, incidentally, later appeared on the ballot above the space used for voting a straight party ticket...

...In view of the decisive verdict rendered on November 8, it would seem unlikely that Catholic political action has much of a future in the island...

...They based the prohibition on certain statements in the PDP platform which they found incompatible with Christian morals, especially the PDP tenet that it is not right for a free government to prohibit conduct not considered immoral by a respectable segment of public opinion...

...In mid-October a series of full-page CAP advertisements in El Mun-do, the leading San Juan newspaper, strongly suggested that the will of God is what the bishops say it is and that the bishops must be obeyed in temporal as well as spiritual matters...

...The long-dominant Popular Democratic party (PDP), which the bishops had forbidden Catholics to vote for, polled more votes than ever, whereas the new Christian Action party, which the bishops had sponsored and urged Catholics to support, made a poor showing...

...They and their lay collaborators succeeded in collecting some 70,000 signatures before the August 28 deadline—enough to qualify CAP candidates to run for the main elective offices but not widely enough distributed to register the new organization as a full-fledged political party...

...Why did most Puerto Rican Catholic voters remain unmoved by CAP's appeals and by the pastoral letters...

...If the higher clergy found it so offensive, why had they waited 20 years to make a public issue of it...

...They reproduced the second letter as a full-page advertisement in El Mundo, under the banner headline: TO VOTE FOR THE POPULAR party is A SIN...

...For most Catholics this was a poor exchange...

...Eduardo Flores, the party secretary, told newsmen late in August that "God has enlightened us to the realization that we cannot have faith in any of the existing parties or in any of their gubernatorial candidates...

...Parents whose children were attending the overcrowded public schools, nearly all of them in double-session, could find little merit in the church's demand that an hour a week be made available for religious instruction off the school premises...

...Scarcely best known for his piety, he nevertheless assumed the role of defender of the church against the error of its bishops...