Battling The Bishops

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

It made only the faintest blip on John Kerry's campaign radar screen--or anyone else's--when an Archbishop from St. Louis, Mo., told a local television station four months ago that the Massachusetts Senator with a staunchly pro-choice voting record should "not present himself for Communion" in that archdiocese. In the frenzied days when Kerry strategists were gearing up for their first nationwide round of primaries, they were far more preoccupied with introducing Kerry to voters as a decorated Vietnam veteran, untangling him from the contradictions of his Senate voting record and figuring out how to dodge the inevitable "Massachusetts liberal" label. In all their internal discussions of the candidate's personal strengths and liabilities, a top adviser recalls, nobody ever even raised what was perhaps the most personal one of all: Kerry's Catholicism and the fact that he could become the first person of his faith since John F. Kennedy to run as the nominee of a major political party.

If that didn't seem like such a big deal then, it does now. A handful of other church leaders have since echoed Archbishop Raymond Burke's declaration that Catholic politicians who vote against church teachings are unfit for the sacrament that more than any other symbolizes a Catholic's ongoing connection to the faith. At least one of those leaders--Colorado Springs, Colo., Bishop Michael Sheridan--has even suggested that unrepentant Catholics who so much as vote for a pro-choice politician should stay away from the Communion rail. Kerry meanwhile insists that he will continue to practice both his faith and his politics as always, and so the watch is on. Can the Democratic nominee travel the country throughout the next five months of Sundays without a priest turning him away? As Kerry campaigns this week in Colorado--a state his strategists have designated one of their top targets in November--more than 250 American Catholic bishops and several Cardinals will be there too, discussing, among other things, how to deal with the increasingly tense relationship between the church and many Catholic politicians.

The bishops will hear from a task force, led by Washington Archbishop Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, that is supposed to give them a set of guidelines on the issue shortly after the election. McCarrick has said he has "not gotten comfortable" with the idea of confronting anyone at the altar, even as he has asserted that Catholics conscious of grave sin should not take Communion. The antiabortion group American Life League responded in early May with full-page newspaper ads in the Washington Times featuring a picture of the crucified Christ and asking, CARDINAL MCCARRICK: ARE YOU COMFORTABLE NOW?

That kind of recrimination is also bearing down for the first time on many pro-choice politicians around the country. The pastor of Democratic Senator Dick Durbin's hometown parish in Springfield, Ill.--where Durbin's children attended Catholic school and his daughter was married--announced in April that the Senator could not receive Communion there. Although Durbin had not attended the church regularly for seven years, since he began worshipping near his condo in Chicago, the resulting debate has put him in a difficult spot. He recently declined to give the eulogy at a close friend's funeral for fear that his presence on the altar with the local bishop would create an embarrassing scene. "It's very painful," Durbin told TIME. "It's one of the most painful experiences I've had in public life. You can't really put into words how tough this is to deal with."

It is proving painful as well for the American Catholic hierarchy, which is still trying to re-establish its credibility after the sexual-abuse scandal that shook it in 2002. A deep divide has opened between a vast majority of Catholics and the newly vocal minority of bishops and priests who are publicly advocating a hard line with Catholic politicians--and even voters--who stray from church teachings. In a TIME poll conducted two weeks ago, three-quarters of Catholics said they disagree with the bishops who would deny the Eucharist to politicians who disagree with the church on abortion, and nearly 70% said the Catholic Church should not be trying to influence either the positions that Catholic politicians take on the issues or the way that Catholics vote. That held true even among majorities of Catholics who consider themselves very religious and who attend Mass at least once a week.

None of that has been lost on the Kerry campaign. "It's one thing for a bishop to tell Catholic politicians to refrain from taking Communion but quite a different thing when the church hierarchy begins to bring that pressure to all Catholics," says Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. President Bush's campaign also sees the issue as producing a potential upside for Kerry. A top Bush strategist is concerned that it unsettles the moderate slice of the Catholic electorate that both parties are courting, puts Kerry in the sympathetic position of being a victim and--worst of all, as far as the Bush campaign is concerned--makes people aware that he is a Catholic. Indeed, one of the more striking findings of the TIME poll is that fully a third of Americans know Kerry's religion, which is slightly higher than the percentage who named some version of Protestantism when asked the religion of Bush.

The 63.4 million--strong Catholic vote has become one of the most sought after swing constituencies. Catholics are particularly important in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, making up 25% to 30% of the vote in that part of the country, says Bush campaign strategist Ralph Reed. "In a very close election, if you increase or swing that constituency by 10%, that's 100,000 votes in every one of those states."

Catholics were once one of the most reliable blocs for Democrats, but their voting patterns have become less predictable and more complex. Other denominations have taken clear sides in this election: Protestants favored President Bush by a 19-point margin in the TIME poll (55%-36%), and those who are neither Protestant nor Catholic gave Kerry an edge of more than 50 percentage points (73%-21%). Catholics divided nearly right down the middle: 45% for Kerry; 43% for Bush. Within those numbers, however, there was a subplot, one that echoes the overall polarization of the electorate. Among Catholics who consider themselves very religious, Bush enjoys a 23-point majority; among those who say they are not very religious, Kerry leads by more than 46 percentage points, and among those who say they are somewhat religious--a group nearly as big as the other two combined--Bush held a statistically insignificant 47%-43% lead.

Of course, what matters more than anything else is which of these groups actually shows up at the polls on Election Day. "Orthodox Catholics are really motivated," says Deal Hudson, a conservative Catholic activist who publishes the magazine Crisis and who is close to the White House. "There's huge energy at the grass roots against Kerry." Bush, too, has courted conservative Catholics (he paid his third visit to the Pope two weeks ago), who in recent years have largely buried their mistrust of evangelical protestants and fostered political alliances on such issues as abortion and gay marriage.

But those are Catholics whom Kerry never expected to win. "For most Catholic voters, his appeal--and the campaign's appeal--is around issues that are of importance to the Catholic faith: social justice, the death penalty, taking care of the poor," says Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill. "Catholics, like most people, take things an issue at a time, and they'll decide on the entirety of John Kerry's record and the plan that he puts forward."

His own approach to Catholicism, Kerry says, has shaped both his identity and his values. The former altar boy says he wore a rosary into battle in Vietnam but went through a period of agnosticism and anger upon his return, finding his way back to his faith after "a lot of reading and a lot of thinking." He told TIME in an interview last March, "It's an important part of my getting through tough periods in my life and remains a bedrock of values--of sureness, I guess--about who I am, where we all fit, what our role is on this planet." Kerry is fascinated, he says, by various religious traditions, and in the 1980s he went to Israel with Jewish friends and read the Sermon on the Mount on the Mountain of Beatitudes. He says he and his wife Teresa also visited Capernaum, the site on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus is said to have performed healing miracles. Kerry adds that learning last year that his paternal grandparents were Jewish "opens a wonderful window actually onto how we all get to be where we are and who we are. It's an interesting journey--a classic American journey in many ways."

Aides say it makes Kerry uncomfortable to find his faith on public display. "For Kerry, his faith, obviously, as with most Catholics, is a private thing," says one. "For this to suddenly become an election issue is something that someone of his instinct for reserve and privacy backs away from."

As it happened, Kerry's candidacy came on the heels of a "doctrinal note" from the Vatican warning Catholic lawmakers that they have a "grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life." Some influential Catholic leaders say the bishops are merely doing their job. "These bishops are not interested in helping George W. Bush, at least most of them certainly are not," says Father Richard Neuhaus, founder and publisher of the neoconservative interfaith monthly First Things. "You have very prominent people--John Kerry being the first Catholic presidential candidate in 44 years--who seem to be fundamentally misrepresenting the teaching of the church. The bishops have a responsibility to say, 'Hey, just a minute--that's not right.'" But others see the bishops' own ambitions at work. "Bishops are picked not because they're independent but because they are reliable company men who follow the policies of the Holy See," says Father Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame. "Burke in St. Louis is angling to become a Cardinal. Sheridan in Colorado Springs would love to be an Archbishop. What better way to get noticed than to deny Communion to politicians and voters who are pro-abortion? They get points in Rome!"

But most of the American Catholic hierarchy would just as soon see the explosive question go away. "For the majority of bishops, there is a reluctance. They see this as an extremely complicated issue where it's very hard to draw lines," says theologian Avery Cardinal Dulles. "They see [denying Communion] as a kind of last resort and would rather see other ways of teaching preferred--maybe a denial of certain honors, like honorary degrees, and refusing a platform at Catholic parishes or universities to speakers who are known to be flagrantly pro-choice ... To deny Communion at the altar to somebody who comes up to receive it creates a scene, which is very unpleasant and very disturbing."

And some say there is even a double standard at work. For all the attention that has been given Kerry's problems with the clergy of his church, "there have not been an equal number of stories about the way Bush has ignored his own faith group, the United Methodist Church, by declining to accept a delegation of bishops that wanted to talk to him about the war," says Philip Amerson, president of the Claremont School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary in Claremont, Calif.

Kerry has already rewritten the history of what it means to be a Catholic in politics: the last Catholic candidate for President on a major party ticket ran up against suspicion that he would be taking orders from his church. This one is finding his beliefs under fire because he won't. And the fact that the weapon of choice is a sacrament, some Catholic leaders say, is the strangest twist of all. "The Eucharist is about our unity, not our divisions," says Bishop John Kinney of St. Cloud, Minn. But as long as the Catholic Church itself is divided about its political obligations, the Eucharist may also become a symbol of controversy. --With reporting by Perry Bacon/Washington, Sarah Sturman Dale/Minneapolis, Rita Healy/Denver and Marguerite Michaels/Chicago

With reporting by Perry Bacon/Washington, Sarah Sturman Dale/Minneapolis, Rita Healy/Denver and Marguerite Michaels/Chicago