by Niall Gooch, The Critic
I blame John F Kennedy. During his campaign for the US Presidency in 1960, he was forced to substantially repudiate his Catholic identity to reassure voters and opinion-formers that he would not be Rome’s man in the White House. “I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” he said to a meeting of newspaper editors in April 1960. “I do not speak for the Catholic Church on issues of public policy — and no one in that Church speaks for me.” JFK praised the separation of church and state and proclaimed his “total independence … from any form of ecclesiastical dictation.” The strong implication is that religious belief is a kind of personal eccentricity, indulged on Sundays and in the privacy of your own home, but kept strictly in the background when it comes to civic and national decision-making.
Ever since then, Catholic politicians who support legislation that runs counter to the Church’s core moral teachings have resorted to the Kennedy dodge, usually in conjunction with the slippery formula developed by Christian pro-choicers about how they are “personally opposed” to something but don’t feel they can “impose their beliefs” on everyone else. The idea is that they can operate with a kind of bifurcated conscience, and stay in the good graces of both their fellow Christians and the gatekeepers of acceptable secular opinion. This has been a fairly successful strategy for liberal British Catholics; for a variety of reasons, both good and bad, the leadership of the Church has been extremely reluctant to sanction prominent Catholic lawmakers who support, say, liberal abortion laws.
Once in a while, however, some cleric refers to play by the polite British rules and decides that he is, after all, going to Make A Fuss.