U.S. bishops tackle El Salvador, nukes, poverty and abortion
For a year now, Roman Catholic nuns and priests have gathered each Friday at the Federal Building in Providence to protest U.S. policy on El Salvador. In conservative Amarillo, Texas, Bishop Leroy Matthiesen is urging workers to quit the Pantex nuclear-bomb plant, resulting in a United Way cutoff of a $61,000 annual grant to Catholic Family Services. In Seattle, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen is risking prosecution by refusing, as an anti-nuclear protest, to pay half his income taxes. San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn is asking his hospitals to ignore a Defense Department plan to allocate beds because, he says, it "contributes to the illusion of a winnable nuclear war."
Rarely has the U.S. Catholic Church been involved so visibly and officially in so many public controversies at the same time. Church agencies and activists are playing a major role in a variety of local conflicts and in four national issues in particular: El Salvador, where they adamantly oppose U.S. military aid; nuclear arms, which they contend both sides should stop building; Reaganomic budget slashing, which they consider devastating for poor Americans; and abortion, which the church condemns in virtually all cases. The last, abortion, comes most directly out of traditional Catholic doctrine and represents a right-of-center stance, while the other three positions find allies on the political left. Says Commonweal Editor James O'Gara: "There has never been anything like this head-to-head confrontation between the church and U.S. foreign policy."
Priests, nuns and laity are all involved, but the most dramatic new factor is the leadership from bishops. Once belittled by church liberals as excessively cautious. much of the hierarchy is out in front of many in its U.S. flock of 50 million. Indisputably, though, the episcopal presence has been lending the causes an image of centrist respectability. "With American bishops, you're not dealing with radicals or anti-American kooks," says Father David Tracy of the University of Chicago.
Poverty is the current issue with the longest history in American Catholicism. The 1919 "Bishops' Program," well in advance of the New Deal, advocated a minimum wage, unemployment compensation and old-age insurance. But on foreign policy, Catholic bishops formed ranks behind whatever Administration was in power. "Being an immigrant church, we wanted to show we were more American than anyone," explains Father Cuchulain Moriarty, who runs San Francisco's archdiocesan social justice commission.
That attitude began to change after 1960, when Catholics "arrived" with the election of John F. Kennedy as President. Then Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council muted the church's fierce anti-Communism and emphasized social justice and peace. Vatican II also led, in 1967, to an upgrading of the U.S. hierarchy's modest Washington office into the U.S. Catholic Conference, which now employs a staff of 250 people working on religious as well as social issues.