The news
came last Tuesday when I was doing an interview on radio with a faithful reader
of The Catholic Thing, Mike Janocik in Louisville, Kentucky. He sprung
on me the findings from the National Catholic Election Survey, taken with quite
a large sample. They were the findings that George Marlin would
report the very next day in our columns, and so they struck with more of a
jolt, taken in for the first time.
Among those
who called themselves Catholics, Mr. Obama led Mr. Romney by eight points. I
quickly protested: A striking difference will appear as soon as the survey separates
the nominal Catholics from the Catholics who regularly attend Mass. But the
sample was already arranged in that way, and what it revealed was that Romney
led Obama by only one point.
That, it
seemed to me, was breathtaking and unbelievable. Could it be that there really
was no “Catholic vote,” because Catholics now mirrored the rest of the country
in their voting? I know, of course, the tradition that has held many Catholics
in the Democratic Party almost as a “default” position.
But as I
tell people, “We all used to be Democrats.” I grew up a child of the Cook
County Democratic Organization. At a pro-life meeting in Detroit many years
ago, a speaker debunking the population problem laid before us an imagined
scene in which everyone in the world were moved into Texas. And Texas, under
those conditions, would be less dense than his hometown of San
Francisco.
When it
became my turn I remarked that this account moved me to a recognition of faith:
If everyone in the world were moved to Texas, and there was no one anywhere
else – not in Europe, in Asia, in Africa – I still believed that there
would be. . .400,000 Democratic votes reported from Chicago.
But the
Democratic party in which so many of us had grown up is long gone. That party
has now made the “right to abortion” and gay rights the central pins on which
virtually all of its others interests hinge, along with the power of the public
service unions.
The party
has brought forth an administration that is perfectly willing to see Catholic
institutions close down if they will not fund contraception and abortion in
their medical plans. It would see agencies of adoption close if they refuse to
place children for adoption with homosexual couples.
In response
to the demands of the Democratic caucus in the House, we can expect to see
Catholic hospitals faced with the threat of losing tax exemptions, or
authorizations to expand, if they will not perform abortions. The assumption of
religious freedom, so long settled, so long taken for granted, is now treated
as problematic.
The current
administration and its adherents in the country do not show the least
expression of shame when they are faced with this record of treating religious
freedom as a matter of no consequence. No big deal. And now we are told that
most of the people who describe themselves as Catholics share the sense that
there is indeed, in this record, nothing of consequence; nothing that would
make a difference to their judgment on the government they would preserve in
power this November – or displace.
George
Marlin reflects the reaction of the savvy observers: first the shock at the
findings from the surveys, but then the flight to the diagnosis – that Mitt
Romney is not “connecting” with middle-class Catholics. Rightly or wrong, many
Catholics, worried about their own situations, are not sure, as George Marlin
says, that “their working-class values and priorities are [Romney’s].”
For some of
us, the complaint is bizarre, for it is hard to look at the personal lives
engaged here and see any notable advantage for Mr. Obama on the measure of
“caring.” Nor does he seem exactly comparable to his rival in the private
record of ministering to people outside his own family.
Obamacare
has already been holding out the prospect of heavy new taxes and regulations
kicking in when employers add a fiftieth employee; and one finds no
flicker of awareness on the part of Mr. Obama that his own policies may be
powerfully discouraging employers from the risk of creating new jobs.
But put all
of that aside, to the department of conjecture. We are talking now about an
administration as hostile to Catholic moral teaching as an administration can
be without branding itself explicitly as anti-Catholic.
The taking
of innocent life on a vast scale each year in abortions? No deal breaker, we
are to told, for most Catholics.
When we add
this up, it becomes a massive moral distraction to point to Mr. Romney’s
problems in “connecting” as though he bore the major fault here. The real
scandal involves a Catholic population that has somehow not noticed the war on
Catholic life taking place, or has decided that it doesn’t matter.
I once
asked a pro-lifer I knew, an Orthodox Jew, just how he made his argument to
Jewish audiences. He said, “I ask them, ‘Are you Jewish? If so, why aren’t you
respecting Jewish laws on the child in the womb?’”
Leave aside
Mitt Romney. The real question is for Catholics: Where is your own
responsibility to face up to what is happening around you, and the
responsibilities you bear – if in fact you are Catholic?
Hadley
Arkes is the
Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College and the Director of the
Claremont Center for the Jurisprudence of Natural Law in Washington. D.C. His
most recent book is
Constitutional Illusions &
Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law.
