Post #3 expresses how I also feel. To those who think the Bishops should “express what the Church teaches,” I believe that in a secular society, that invites backlash. NonCatholics see such statements as attempts to catholicize the government. Just because practicing Catholics are not threatened by that does not mean that much of the rest of the country doesn’t recoil.
Proposition 8 won in CA by, yes, an alliance of certain religious groups (including Catholics!), but there weren’t a lot of Catholic leaders with clerical collars putting their faces in front of TV cameras to do that, and I do believe we might not have won had that happened, especially in a state as irreligious & nontraditional as CA. Ditto for Mormons. Mormon officials did not come on TV and make statements as Mormon officials. It was the strategy and the language, devoid of ecclesiastical titles and garb, that won the passage.
The Church and its followers should be very careful of combining several different agendas, or in some cases competing agendas, into the political marketplace. Church officials and CAF members may deplore the “secularization of American society” (a frequent phrase), but officially the U.S. gov’t is secular, and the majority of Americans are comfortable with that. So if non-Catholics have misgivings about particular legislation or particular trends, they will not necessarily be convinced, and in fact may become unconvinced, if the stated rationale for an argument is that “the Catholic Church believes it.”
I’m not arguing for invisibility. I’m arguing for judiciousness and to see issues, and argue them, from the perspective of what can appeal to any American. The word ‘secular’ is not dirty. It’s the common ground to which all Americans can relate in one fashion or another. Proposition 8 was not won with religious language; it was won with secular language appealing to human values, and in so doing it brought along with it lots of nonbelievers who stated that they merely “felt uneasy in their gut” about the prospect of a radical new definition of marriage. That’s what values-language does: it appeals to the ‘natural law’ principles that the Church herself believes exist in all human beings from birth.
By contrast, the place for clerics to discuss with Catholics how their consciences should be formed with regard to secular issues is not on CNN or MSNBC, but in Catholic settings.
Relating this to Kennedy, what the Bishop could have done, and he would have been respected more for (by Matthews and by others), is to refuse to engage Kennedy publicly on the excommunication issue (which I understand was forced by Kennedy). He should have continued that conversation privately, and shifted to very different language on the public political issues.
When Rabbis have a religiously grounded concern about something happening in the secular U.S. arena, they also don’t use religious language, though they very well could. They understand how the theological constructs are not the reasons for non-Jews to vote or not vote, support or not support something.
Much of the public does not buy into even the concept of natural law, let alone how the Church defines that. Catholics on this forum still are very much operating from definitions and assumptions not shared by the majority of Americans. I don’t think Catholics should change (naturally) to reflect some other reality; I think they have to be aware in the public square of how messages are received, despite how those messages are meant.