Joseph Califano on squaring church and state.

The Second Vatican Council encourages Catholics to rely more on individual conscience. But not until I became secretary of HEW did I begin to appreciate the significance — and limitations — of my personal convictions in making public decisions in a pluralistic democracy. I had been immersed in the Catholic religion — devout parents and relatives, 16 years of Catholic education — but my faith had never been tested until I became HEW secretary. I went from the sidelines into the arena, from sitting in the pew at Mass on Sunday to living with my faith throughout the week.

I found no automatic answers in Christian theology and the teachings of the church (or in the Democratic Party’s or the administration’s positions or in the science of medicine) to the perplexing and controversial questions of public policy on abortion, sterilization, aging, in vitro fertilization, fetal research, extending or cutting off the final days of terminally ill patients, and recombinant DNA and cloning. I was grateful for my entire life experience, from the streets of Brooklyn and the Jesuit classrooms at Brooklyn Prep and Holy Cross to the West Wing of the White House and my years as a Washington lawyer. I brought it all to the decisions at HEW, and I needed every bit of it.

Determining appropriate public policy on these matters is too complex, morally as well as politically, in our pluralistic democracy to be resolved by a jerk — or bend — of the knee by public leaders, legislators and judges who are Catholic — or by the Catholic bishops who seek to influence such policy.

It is interesting to me that Califano allowed his email to be included at the end of the piece, enabling some potentially interesting dialogue to ensue.

As I read this piece, I was once again struck by the different languages that the different sides of these types of issues speak. I’m not talking about the baby v. the fetus. No, it’s different than that. There is in the piece a certain pride in crafting agreeable and minimally satisfactory policy and coming up with good language that said enough without saying too much. It’s all rather abstract, and, I suppose a necessary element of the process, but these kinds of self-defined successes and priorities are not what the other side of the debate are interested in, or even the way they (we?) think…it’s more like…how many lives did you save today? How many kids died because of your policy? How many poor people suffered more or less because of the language you hammered out?

I’m not saying that Califano is terribly guilty of this, because he is obviously a man with a conscience who was in the positions he was because he wanted to impact lives in positive ways. But still, the priorities seem to peak through – the bureaucrat’s priorities.

Yes, policies affect peoples’ lives, but what I have often found myself fighting against, more than anything in my debates with others on this subject, is the commitment to abstraction endemic to this debate. It’s all connected, somehow, with riding in a car, I think, years ago, with Rosemary Bottcher, a long-time officer of Feminists for Life, who said something like, “They’re real kids. We can’t ever forget we’re fighting for the lives of real kids. These aren’t ideas. They’re people whose lives are threatened.”