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Holy Warriors
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com via Truthout
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/04/21/tk/index.html
Thursday 21 April 2005
Cardinal Ratzinger handed Bush the presidency by tipping the Catholic vote. Can
American democracy survive their shared medieval vision?
http://www.truthout.org/imgs.art_01/3.042105H.jpg
(Photo: salon.com)
President Bush treated his final visit with Pope John Paul II in Vatican
City on June 4, 2004, as a campaign stop. After enduring a public rebuke from
the pope about the Iraq war, Bush lobbied Vatican officials to help him win the
election. "Not all the American bishops are with me," he complained, according
to the National Catholic Reporter. He pleaded with the Vatican to pressure the
bishops to step up their activism against abortion and gay marriage in the
states during the campaign season.
About a week later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to the U.S.
bishops, pronouncing that those Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were
committing a "grave sin" and must be denied Communion. He pointedly mentioned
"the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for
permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" -- an obvious reference to John Kerry,
the Democratic candidate and a Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician
sought Communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be ordered to "refuse to
distribute it." Any Catholic who voted for this "Catholic politician," he
continued, "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and so unworthy to
present himself for Holy Communion." During the closing weeks of the campaign,
a pastoral letter was read from pulpits in Catholic churches repeating the
ominous suggestion of excommunication. Voting for the Democrat was nothing less
than consorting with the forces of Satan, collaboration with "evil."
In 2004 Bush increased his margin of Catholic support by 6 points from the
2000 election, rising from 46 to 52 percent. Without this shift, Kerry would
have had a popular majority of a million votes. Three states -- Ohio, Iowa and
New Mexico -- moved into Bush's column on the votes of the Catholic "faithful."
Even with his atmospherics of terrorism and Sept. 11, Bush required the
benediction of the Holy See as his saving grace. The key to his kingdom was
turned by Cardinal Ratzinger.
With the College of Cardinals' election of Ratzinger to the papacy, his
political alliances with conservative politicians can be expected to deepen and
broaden. Under Benedict XVI, the church will assume a consistent reactionary
activism it has not had for two centuries. And the new pope's crusade against
modernity has already joined forces with the right-wing culture war in the
United States, prefigured by his interference in the 2004 election.
Europe is far less susceptible than the United States to the religious
wars that Ratzinger will incite. Attendance at church is negligible; church
teachings are widely ignored; and the younger generation is least observant of
all. But in the United States, the Bush administration and the right wing of
the Republican Party are trying to batter down the wall of separation between
church and state. Through court appointments, they wish to enshrine doctrinal
views on the family, women, gays, medicine, scientific research and privacy.
The Republican attempt to abolish the two-centuries-old filibuster -- the
so-called nuclear option -- is only one coming wrangle in the larger
Kulturkampf.
Joseph Ratzinger was born and bred in the cradle of the Kulturkampf, or
culture war. Roman Catholic Bavaria was a stronghold against northern
Protestantism during the Reformation. In the 19th century the church was a
powerful force opposing the unification of Italy and Germany into
nation-states, fearing that they would diminish the church's influence in the
shambles of duchies and provinces that had followed the breakup of the Holy
Roman Empire. The doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870 was promulgated by
the church to tighten its grip on Catholic populations against the emerging
centralized nations and to sanctify the pope's will against mere secular rulers.
In response, Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, launched what he
called a Kulturkampf to break the church's hold. He removed the church from the
control of schools, expelled the Jesuits, and instituted civil ceremonies for
marriage. Bismarck lent support to Catholic dissidents opposed to papal
infallibility who were led by German theologian Johann Ignaz von Dollinger.
Dollinger and his personal secretary were subsequently excommunicated. His
secretary was Georg Ratzinger, great-uncle of the new pope, who became one of
the most notable Bavarian intellectuals and politicians of the period. This
Ratzinger was a champion against papal absolutism and church centralization,
and on behalf of the poor and working class -- and was also an anti-Semite.
Joseph Ratzinger's Kulturkampf is claimed by him to be a reaction to the
student revolts of 1968. Should Joschka Fischer, a former student radical and
now the German foreign minister, have to answer entirely for Ratzinger's
Weltanschauung? Pope Benedict's Kulturkampf bears the burden of the church's
history and that of his considerable family. He represents the latest
incarnation of the long-standing reaction against Bismarck's reforms --
beginning with the assertion of the invented tradition of papal infallibility
-- and, ironically, against the positions on the church held by his famous
uncle. But the roots of his reaction are even more profound.
The new pope's burning passion is to resurrect medieval authority. He
equates the Western liberal tradition, that is, the Enlightenment, with Nazism,
and denigrates it as "moral relativism." He suppresses all dissent, discussion
and debate within the church and concentrates power within the Vatican
bureaucracy. His abhorrence of change runs past 1968 (an abhorrence he shares
with George W. Bush) to the revolutions of 1848, the "springtime of nations,"
and 1789, the French Revolution. But, even more momentously, the alignment of
the pope's Kulturkampf with the U.S. president's culture war has also set up a
conflict with the American Revolution.
For the first time, an American president is politically allied with the
Vatican in its doctrinal mission (except, of course, on capital punishment). In
the messages and papers of the presidents from George Washington until well
into those of the 20th century, there was not a single mention of the pope,
except in one minor footnote. Bush's lobbying trip last year to the Vatican
reflects an utterly novel turn, and Ratzinger's direct political intervention
in American electoral politics ratified it.
The right wing of the Catholic Church is as mobilized as any other part of
the religious right. It is seizing control of Catholic universities, exerting
influence at other universities, stigmatizing Catholic politicians who fail to
adhere to its conservative credo, pressing legislation at the federal and state
levels, seeking government funding and sponsorship of the church, and vetting
political appointments inside the White House and the administration --
imposing in effect a religious test of office. The Bush White House encourages
these developments under the cover of moral uplift as it forges a political
machine uniting church and state -- as was done in premodern Europe.
The American Revolution, the Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty, the
U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were fought for explicitly to uproot
the traces in American soil of ecclesiastical power in government, which the
Founders to a man regarded with horror, revulsion and foreboding.
The Founders were the ultimate representatives of the Enlightenment. They
were not anti-religious, though few if any of them were orthodox or pious.
Washington never took Communion and refused to enter the church, while his wife
did so. Benjamin Franklin believed that all organized religion was suspect.
James Madison thought that established religion did as much harm to religion as
it did to free government, twisting the word of God to fit political
expediency, thereby throwing religion into the political cauldron. And Thomas
Jefferson, allied with his great collaborator Madison, conducted decades of
sustained and intense political warfare against the existing and would-be
clerisy. His words, engraved on the Jefferson Memorial, are a direct reference
to established religion: "I have sworn eternal warfare against all forms of
superstition over the minds of men."
But now Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay threatens the federal
judiciary, saying, "The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a
separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that
Congress didn't stop them." And Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will
participate through a telecast in a rally on April 24 in which he will say that
Democrats who refuse to rubber-stamp Bush's judicial nominees and uphold the
filibuster are "against people of faith."
But what would Madison say?
This is what Madison wrote in 1785: "What influence in fact have
ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have
been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority; in
many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny;
in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the
people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty may have found an
established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to
secure & perpetuate it needs them not."
What would John Adams say? This is what he wrote Jefferson in 1815: "The
question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the
world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious
miracles?"
Benjamin Franklin? "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
And Jefferson, in "Notes on Virginia," written in 1782: "It is error alone
which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject
opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men
governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject
it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desireable?
No more than of face and stature. Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as
there is danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size,
by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is
advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor
morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men,
women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt,
tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards
uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world
fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the
earth."
The Republican Party was founded in the mid-19th century partly as a party
of religious liberty. It supported public common schools, not church schools,
and public land-grant universities independent of any denominational
affiliation. The Republicans, moreover, were adamant in their opposition to the
use of any public funds for any religious purpose, especially involving schools.
A century later, in 1960, there was still such a considerable suspicion of
Catholics in government that the Democratic candidate for president, John F.
Kennedy, felt compelled to address the issue directly in his famous speech
before the Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12.
What did Kennedy say? "I believe in an America where the separation of
church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the
President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would
tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is
granted any public funds or political preference ... I believe in an America
that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public
official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the
Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source --
where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon
the general populace or the public acts of its officials."
Now Bush is attempting to create what Kennedy warned against. He claims to
be conservative, but he seeks a rupture in our system of government. The
culture war, which has had many episodes, from the founding of the Moral
Majority to the unconstitutional impeachment of President Clinton, is entering
a new and far more dangerous phase. In 2004, Bush and Ratzinger used church
doctrine to intimidate voters and taint candidates. And through the courts the
president is seeking to codify not only conservative ideology but religious
doctrine.
When men of God mistake their articles of devotion with political
platforms they will inevitably stand exposed in the political arena. When
politicians mistake themselves for men of God, their religion, however sincere,
will inevitably be seen as contrivance.
As both president and pope invoke heavenly authority to impose their
notions of tradition, they have set themselves on a collision course with the
American political tradition. In the name of the Declaration of Independence,
the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, democracy without end. Amen.
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President
Clinton and the author of The Clinton Wars, is writing a column for Salon and
the Guardian of London.
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