I have been asked to share with you my reflections upon the experience of elected officials who try to reconcile personal religious conviction with a pluralist constituency.
In discussing the matter, I do not pretend to be a theologian or a philosopher. I speak only as a former elected official and as a Roman Catholic baptized and raised in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church. I am attached to the church both by birth and by decision. In the interest of space constraints, I will try to keep my reflections plain.
Catholicism is a religion of the head as well as of the heart. To be a Catholic is to commit to certain dogmas. It also means a commitment to practice the faith day to day.
The practice can be difficult. Today's America, as we all know, is a consumer-driven society, filled with distractions and temptations for people struggling to live by spiritual impulses as well as material ones. Catholics who also hold political office have an additional responsibility. They have to try to create conditions under which all citizens are reasonably free to act according to their own religious beliefs, even when those acts conflict with Roman Catholic dogma regarding divorce, birth control, abortion, stem cell research, and even the existence of God.
Catholic public officials, like all public officials, take an oath to preserve the United States Constitution, which guarantees this freedom. And they do so gladly, not because they love what others do with their freedom but because they realize that, in guaranteeing freedom for others, they guarantee their own right to live their personal lives as Catholics, with the right to reject birth control, to reject abortions, and to refuse to participate in or contribute to removing stem cells from embryos.
This freedom is perhaps the greatest strength of America's uniquely successful experiment in government, and so it must be a dominant concern of every public official. There are other general legal principles that affect the official's decisions operating at the same time. The First Amendment, of course, which forbids the official preference of one religion over others, also affirms one's right to argue that his or her religious belief would serve well as an article of universal public morality, that this belief is not narrowly sectarian but fulfills a universal human desire for order or peace or justice or kindness or love or all of those things-values most of us agree are desirable, even apart from their specific religious priority:
So I can, if I choose, argue-even as a public official-that the state should not fund the use of contraceptive devices, not because the pope or my bishop demands it but because I think that for the good of the whole community we should not sever sex from an openness to the creation of life. And surely I, as a public official, can, if I am so inclined, demand a law to prevent abortions or stem cell retrieval from embryos, not just because my bishop says it is wrong but also because I think that the whole community, regardless of its religious beliefs, should agree on the importance of protecting life, including life in the womb, which is, at the very least, potentially human and should not be extinguished casually. I, even as a public official, have the right to do all of that.
