DR. JACK R. VAN ENS, AUTHOR

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SHOULD BISHOPS DENY COMMUNION TO PRO-CHOICE CATHOLICS?

Democrats scored a convincing victory in the presidential election, with support for women's abortion rights. A week later, 220 Roman Catholic bishops struck back. They didn't like it that one of their own, Catholic Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr., is pro-choice. He's not alone. The Democratic ticket for our nation's highest elective offices won 54 percent of the Catholic vote.

Many voting Catholics didn't heed Rome's non-negotiable anti-abortion stand. Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, PA said he couldn't endorse his city's favorite son, Joe Biden. "I cannot have a vice-president elect coming to Scranton to say he's learned his values there when those values are utterly against the teachings of the Catholic Church," huffed Bishop Martino. Aren't Biden's values top-notch in his Senate career?

Colorado's three bishops, in a videotape played during Mass before the election, urged Catholics to vote against pro-choice candidates. There's no wiggle room on this wedge issue. Taking a cue from the bishops' hard-line tactics, a priest in Greenville, S.C. barred parishioners from receiving Holy Communion if they cast their ballots for Obama.

History repeats itself when the Catholic Church penalizes pro-choice members. Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, circulated a private memo in the summer of 2004. He advised American bishops to refuse Communion to pro-choice Catholic officeholders, including Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

Kerry said all the right stuff about being pro-life but wouldn't coercively press these religious views on the American public. In a July 2004 interview with an Iowa newspaper, Kerry sounded very traditional. "I oppose abortion personally," he declared. "I don't like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception."

Kerry got himself in hot water with Catholic prelates because he wouldn't force personal religious conviction on the American public. "I can't take my belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew, or an atheist."

The bishops won't tolerate disagreement on their non-negotiable anti-abortion stance. Kerry lost their support.

John F. Kennedy's view of church and state separation rankled bishops, too. In 1960, presidential hopeful Kennedy felt pressure from a Protestant coalition who opposed having a Catholic in the White House. Rumors circulated how Kennedy, if elected president, would grant aid to parochial schools, using taxpayers' dollars. He vigorously opposed any aid whatsoever. But a second rumor wouldn't die. Would he honor religious liberty in the U.S. or bow before the Catholic hierarchy? The Catholic Church didn't endorse the colonial conviction of religious liberty until Vatican Council II met in 1965.

Kennedy spoke before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association of wary Protestant clergy. "I believe in an America," Kennedy declared, "where the separation of church and state is absolute-where not a Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act ...."

According to many bishops today who want church doctrine about abortion written into U.S. law, JFK badly stumbled. "I believe in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair," Kennedy emphasized, "neither imposed on him by the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding office." Bishops don't like private Christianity. They want personal faith against abortion that goes national, endorsing laws outlawing abortion.

Thomas Jefferson and his presidential opponent John Adams in the hotly contested presidential election of 1800 would blanch at the current bishops' grab for legal power. Jefferson and Adams didn't cross Catholics because few lived in the colonies. Presbyterians and Congregationalists organized the dominant religious bloc. These believers stressed an educated Christianity and established in 1746 the College of New Jersey-now Princeton University where leaders prepared for political service.

The Presby-Congregationalist coalition judged Jefferson an atheist and heretic. Most held membership in the Federalist Party President Adams led. Still, they didn't approve of Adams because he showed Unitarian sympathies, denying the Trinity.

Like many current conservative Christians, Presby-Congregationalists believed biblical beliefs served as the foundation of laws that preserved our liberties. "If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it," lamented Jefferson's chief evangelical critic, President Timothy Dwight, Yale's president.

In memoirs written a decade after the 1800 election, Adams identified his political enemies. "A general suspicion prevailed," sighed Adams, "that the Presbyterian Church (which was presumed to be behind the national day of prayer) was ambitious and aimed at an establishment of a national church." Adams surmised that dissenters, who didn't like the cozy relationship between Presby-Congregationlists and his administration, voted for Jefferson, costing him the election.