Here at “On Faith,” the Post’s Lisa Miller recently wrote that Rick Santorum could be called a “cafeteria Catholic,” someone who “cherry-picks” which teachings of the faith he wants to follow and which he doesn’t. He might even be “not all that Catholic,” says Miller. But what are Miller’s examples of Santorum’s alleged “cherry picking,” and do they really represent deviations from “rules and doctrines” of the Catholic faith, as she puts it?
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Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum speaks to supporters and caucus voters during a campaign stop March 17, 2012 at Westminster Christian Academy in Town and Country, Missouri.
First, the death penalty. Miller cites a 2005 statement of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, arguing for an end to the death penalty in the United States. As a senator, Santorum did not work to end the death penalty; quite the contrary. But what does the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church say on the subject? “The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”
While the Catechism goes on to urge public authorities to consider the need for the death penalty in many societies as “rare” if not “non-existent,” it does not impose an obligation on citizens or public officials of the Catholic faith to abolish capital punishment outright. The question of the death penalty’s use is a prudential one, which Catholic teaching leaves up to the judgment of those invested with public authority—the laymen who hold office and the voters who choose them. In short, there is no Catholic “rule or doctrine” calling for the complete abolition of the death penalty. And the position staked out by the U.S. bishops does not change that fact.
Second, Miller mentions “torture.” She rightly notes the church’s unequivocal position against torture, but she tendentiously asserts that Santorum is in favor of it. She acknowledges—only implicitly to dismiss as obviously wrong—Santorum’s view that our government’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” against captured enemy terrorists was not torture. Miller’s link to a news article elsewhere does not establish that she is right and Santorum is wrong about what constitutes torture. She has only identified a disagreement about a practice, not a “deviation” on Santorum’s part from what his church teaches. Miller’s Post colleague Marc Thiessen (also a Catholic) has written an entire book (“Courting Disaster”) responsibly making the case that the Bush administration had no policy amounting to “torture.” I recommend it to her.
Her third item is our policy toward Iran. Here Santorum is presented as ready to “threaten Iran with bombs,” whereas a committee of the bishops led by Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines recently counseled restraint. This seems to be a wholly manufactured difference between Santorum and leading prelates in his church. Even “preventive war” (taking steps to attack first against an imminent aggressor) is not ruled out by anything the church has ever authoritatively taught, nor even by the letter of Bishop Pates that Miller cites. As in the case of the death penalty, Catholic recognition that we live in a fallen world, where public authorities have a duty to protect innocent life, leads to the conclusion that deadly force can be morally employed, even preemptively. Also like the question of the death penalty, questions of war and peace are preeminently political judgments for the laymen invested with responsibility for the nation’s defense. The church has principles to offer, not policies, much less decisions in individual cases.
Finally, Miller mentions immigration. Though she writes that “only on this issue has Santorum explicitly distanced himself from the church,” it is perhaps her weakest example, because the church authoritatively teaches practically nothing about this subject. The U.S. bishops, Miller says, “support immigration reform that includes a way for illegal aliens to earn citizenship.” True enough. But Santorum, she writes, “wants to build a fence between the United States and Mexico” and on his Web site, she says, he “conflates immigrants with ‘drug cartels, violent criminals and terrorists.’” Score that as, respectively, a half-truth and a falsehood. Santorum’s site says “secure the border first,” but that isn’t the whole of his policy.
And as for his alleged “conflation” of “immigrants” with criminals and terrorists, try to find it yourself on that Web page. You can’t. What Santorum does say is that the Obama administration has given us an “exposed border and a nation vulnerable to drug cartels, violent criminals, and terrorists.” This is arguably so. But nowhere does Santorum say that “immigrants” generally or even “illegal immigrants” are part of that problem. Who’s doing the conflating here?
But let’s come back to Santorum vs. the bishops on this one. At most the bishops may be said to be speaking pastorally on this subject, but not authoritatively. Their views are worthy of respectful engagement, but they do not demand obedience. It is no test of anyone’s faithful Catholicism to inquire whether they agree with the bishops about immigration.
Miller seemed moved to write this critique of Santorum by the fact that conservative Catholics can sometimes be heard to call their liberal brethren “cafeteria Catholics.” But in the case of many (not all) liberal Catholics, there really are serious deviations from “rules and doctrines” taught by the faith. The teachings against abortion and contraception are unequivocal and authoritative. Ditto for the teachings on the priesthood of celibate men, and on the preservation of marriage as between one man and one woman. The bishops defend these doctrines as pillars of the Church’s teaching, and when they speak it is the church we hear. On these questions, it is our brethren on the left who are not “all that Catholic” if they are at odds with the bishops.
But the case is different for the principles that govern the use of the death penalty, the use of military force, or policymaking on immigration. The bishops are rightly revered as the shepherds of the faith, but they know that they lack the authority to “loose and bind” the voters and public officials of the Catholic faith on these questions. Individually and collectively, the bishops’ views (even the pope’s view) on these matters are instances where they speak for themselves, in a great ongoing conversation among Catholics. They know they cannot, and so they do not, speak ex cathedra on questions as intricate as immigration policy.
Ironically, Miller’s standard for Santorum’s Catholicism is just the kind of test John F. Kennedy insisted was wrong for his fellow Americans to apply. The complaint about Kennedy in 1960, in some Protestant circles, was that he would, as president, do the bidding of Rome or of the American bishops, sacrificing his judgment (and his constitutional responsibilities as president) to religious authority. According to Miller, Rick Santorum can only be a completely good Catholic if he lets the bishops make immigration policy, remake our criminal justice system, and determine whether we can attack Iran. Luckily for Santorum, she is wrong.
Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University.
