In attendance was Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie; but Terry McAuliffe of the Democratic National Committee, also a Catholic, was not. The nation's most prominent Catholic politician--Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry--was not invited, explained Hudson, because he is pro-choice.
Monaghan has set up a conservative Catholic political action committee called the Ave Maria List, whose purpose is to "restore the culture of life in our country" by supporting anti-abortion candidates. According to its literature, "the List mobilizes Catholics to support and financially assist pro-life candidates, and works to defeat pro-abortion candidates and incumbents.We will target our support with laser-like precision on the most competitive races."
During the 2002 election cycle, the PAC collected $214,400 and distributed $294,065--$102,429 of it to a group called Strategic Media Services Inc., a media buying firm that took in $14 million dollars in 2002, distributing 100% of it to Republican campaigns, according to the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism group.
And conservative Catholics have been going after Kerry hard. On March 9, Ono Ekeh, founder and moderator of the Catholics for Kerry email discussion list, was fired from his job as program coordinator at the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for African-American Catholics. The firing happened after Hudson publicized Ekeh's political position in Hudson's weekly e-letter.
All during the spring, bishops in Colorado Springs, St. Louis, Nebraska, Orlando, Newark, Trenton, and Camden publicly announced they would deny Communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians--most notably, of course, Kerry. Media coverage was intense. As a result, Kerry decided to take Communion in liberal Catholic centers around the country, with photographers trailing him at every stop.
After Archbishop John Myers of Newark made his announcement, New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey, a pro-choice Democrat, decided to refrain from the sacrament. State Senate Majority Leader Bernard Kenny, also a Democrat, announced he was leaving the church. He said his pastor told him he would be offered Communion once more and then would be told "not to come again."
Yet so far, pro-choice Catholic Republicans such as Sen. Susan Collins of Maine; former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have not been targeted. (Deal Hudson says Collins and Schwarzenegger, who are in positions to influence legislation, should be denied Communion.)
In mid-May, 48 Catholic Democratic members of Congress, including about a dozen considered pro-life, issued a letter of protest. They said the bishops are "allowing the church to be used for partisan purposes." They also questioned why these bishops made abortion a litmus test while ignoring politicians who voted counter to the church by endorsing the death penalty and the war in Iraq.
On Wednesday (June 2), the Catholic Democrats followed with a report claiming that Kerry votes most often with the church hierarchy among Catholics in the U.S. Senate. The report, issued by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., gave Kerry an overall score of voting with the church's political priorities 61% of the time, while Republican Catholic Senators all ranked at the bottom of the list.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has set up a task force to discuss the communion issue, but its head, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, says no guidelines are expected until after the election. On May 27, during an interview with the Catholic Press Association, he said that denying dissenting politicians Communion is a "slippery slope" and that "I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to ask my priests to do it..I'm not going to have a fight with someone, holding the sacred body and blood (of Jesus) in my hand."
McCarrick and bishops who agree with him will have to face the American Life League, a Catholic pro-life group that is involved in a lobbying campaign to force bishops and cardinals to deny pro-choice Catholic senators Communion. They've vowed to spend about a half-million dollars on newspaper ads to get their message across. The most controversial at the moment is this one, highly critical of McCarrick. The organization has also written letters to 12 bishops and cardinals, each of whom has a pro-choice Catholic senator in his diocese.
The rallying cause may be abortion--but the political alliance is about much more than that. "Abortion rights is the cover for a lot of other cultural grievances," says David Gibson, author of The Coming Catholic Church. "It's the galvanizing issue that allows conservative Catholics to side with Republicans who might be in favor of the war in Iraq, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the death penalty"--issues upon which Catholic social teaching definitely frowns.
