My Take: How evangelicals could grow to love Muslims

Editor’s Note: Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core. His new book is called “Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America.”

By Eboo Patel, Special to CNN

Paul Ryan has set off joyous cheers in the land of conservatives largely because of his fiscal views but also because of his Catholic faith.

He is just the most recent member of his church – think House Speaker John Boehner, Republican runner-ups Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, and Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia – to be viewed as a flag-bearer for the conservative cause, a movement whose foot soldiers are largely evangelical Protestants.

The dynamic of evangelicals cheering for Catholics is one of the most stunning shifts in American political history. Just 50 years ago, evangelicals were ringing the alarm about the rising prominence of Catholics in American politics, not falling in line behind them.

“Our freedom, our religious freedom, is at stake if we elect a member of the Roman Catholic order as president of the United States,” Norman Vincent Peale told a conference of evangelical leaders in September 1960.

Materials handed out at the Peale conference claimed ‘Universal Roman Catholicism’ was both a religion and a political force whose doctrines were ultimately incompatible with the American ideals of freedom, equality and democracy.

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And the conference’s keynote address alleged that Catholics practiced “mental reservation,” which allowed them to lie about their intentions in order to gain power. And when they succeeded, they would make second-class citizens of everyone else.

Replace “Roman Catholic” with “Muslim” and “Church hierarchy” with “caliphate” in those pronouncements and today we are witnessing a similar energy directed against a different faith community using largely the same categories.

In today’s parlance, Kennedy was part of a stealth jihad meant to replace the U.S. Constitution with sharia law and practicing taqqiyya to mask this dawa offensive.

As they believed about Catholicism then, many evangelicals now view the very nature of Islam as incompatible with American values. Evangelicals rate Muslims lower on a “‘favoribility” scale than any other religious group, according to “American Grace,” a book by scholars Robert Putnam and David Campbell.

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Evangelical churches are favorite venues for Islamophobic speakers and prominent evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham regularly call Islam a threat to America.

It is easy to draw a straight line between the evangelical anti-Catholic prejudice of previous generations and the Islamophobia of today, essentially saying that “evangelicals have to hate someone.”

But that’s too cynical a take for me. The more interesting – and certainly more hopeful – storyline is the one about change.

Evangelical attitudes changed markedly towards Catholics in the past generation, and they are changing towards Muslims now.

Without doubt, the evangelical shift on Catholics can be partially explained by the two religion traditions finding common cause on political issues like abortion. But in “American Grace,” Putnam and Campbell point to what they believe is a more important reason.

Over the course of the past fifty years, more evangelicals got to meet Catholics and the warmth in those personal relationships became generalized towards the larger community. If your Pal Al is Catholic and a good guy, then by extension Catholics as a group and Catholicism as a religion have some good qualities.

This is precisely the dynamic taking place between evangelicals and Muslims, a story for me best illustrated by a Dallas-based pastor named Bob Roberts. Bob grew up in the 1960s in East Texas and remembers the Pope regularly being referred to as “the Great Whore of Babylon” in his father’s Southern Baptist church.

He absorbed the anti-Catholic prejudice along with everyone else. But when he went on service trips to Southeast Asia as an adult, he discovered that the people doing the most intense, committed development work were inevitably Catholic. At first he admired them from afar. Then he got to know some up close, and they turned out to be not so bad.

After September 11, 2001, the anti-Muslim feeling was open and intense in Bob’s community. Truth be told, Bob felt it himself.

But he was self-aware enough to recognize the similarity between the irrational prejudice he absorbed about Catholics growing up and what he saw happening toward Muslims now.

So he did the same thing with Muslims that he’d done with Catholics: get to know them personally through common projects. Bob has traveled everywhere from Afghanistan to Gaza to do interfaith service projects with Muslims.

And now he is bringing fellow evangelicals along and involving the members of his Dallas mega-church in local interfaith projects. He’s speaking to young evangelical leaders about the importance of building relationships with Muslims as a Christian practice.

I know because in the midst of the opposition to the so-called Ground Zero mosque a couple years ago, a young pastor came to my office and asked me to guest preach about Islam at his evangelical church. He told me that Bob had sent him.

This is how communities change. Evangelicals make up 40% of America – when they change, America changes.

Maybe in 50 years, there will be no surprise when the loudest cheerleaders for Muslim presidential candidates and Supreme Court justices are evangelical Christians.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eboo Patel.

Mitt Romney: ‘President Obama has failed to address immigration …

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – “Unfortunately, despite his promises, President Obama has failed to address immigration reform,” Romney said while speaking before the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Orlando, Florida.

“For two years, this President had huge majorities in the House and Senate — he was free to pursue any policy he pleased. But he did nothing to advance a permanent fix for our broken immigration system. Instead, he failed to act until facing a tough re-election and trying to secure your vote.”

Romney took a different approach to the sensitive issue of U.S. immigration than he did half year ago, when he was campaigning in the Republican primary race. Romney is currently not saying he will reverse President Obama’s unilateral act of letting some illegal aliens stay in the United States and work. Romney is now saying he will “replace and supersede” Obama’s order with something permanent.

Romney had previously declared that he was against letting any illegal aliens stay in the United States, including those who had been here a long time and had children in school.

Romney scored points against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the 2012 primaries by objecting to Gingrich’s plan to grant permanent resident status to a limited number of illegal aliens who had been in the United States 25 years.

Gingrich explained his position last December in a televised debate in Des Moines, Iowa.

“I started with cases that I think are very hard to argue about: somebody who has been here 25 years, somebody who has been a good local citizen, may well belongs to your church, has children and grandchildren in the United States,” Gingrich said.

“And I would have said flatly, I do not believe the people of the United States are going to send the police in to rip that kind of person out and ship them out of this country, particularly because those are precisely the people who are going to end up in churches as sanctuaries,” Gingrich said.

Dianne Sawyer then asked Romney, “How many people should be sent back home to their country? Should they be tracked down to establish who they are, sent back home to their country?”

Romney took a hardline to the right of Gingrich. “I believe that any time that we start talking about a form of amnesty, whether it’s technically amnesty or not, when we start talking about how people have been able to come here and stay illegally for some period of time that they’re going to be able to stay here permanently and become permanent residents of the United States with rights to our education system, our health care system, and so forth, we will then create another magnet that draws people into our country illegally,” Romney said.

“So the right course for us is to, once again, talk about what you described, secure the border,” said Romney. “Once we do that, we can start talking about the 11 million or whatever number that might be that is in the country illegally.

“My own view is, those 11 million people should register the fact that they’re here in the country,” Romney said. “They should be given some transition period of time to allow them to settle their affairs and then return home and get in line–at the back of the line with everybody else that wants to come here.”

2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

Poll shows political woe for lawmakers who regularly talk religion

Politicians may want to abstain from talking about religion, a new poll showed.

The Pew Research Center found that 38% of Americans questioned in a recent survey felt that lawmakers and campaigning politicians bring up their faith too often.

That was the highest percentage for that answer in the annual Pew religion-in-politics poll, which was first launched in 2001, when just 12% failed to give their blessing to faith-based political chatter.

But the poll, released Wednesday, also revealed that 30% of Americans believe there is not enough talk about religion in the political arena.

The results could signal that some of the Republican presidential candidates this year are taking an unholy risk in the campaign battles over government-mandated birth control, gay marriage and funding for Planned Parenthood.

Rick Santorum, whose Catholic faith represents the backbone of his political ideology, has courted religious conservative voters — and won key victories in the Deep South as a result. He’s argued on the stump that religion ought to play a much larger role in the public square.

Newt Gingrich often trumpets his faith, too. The twice-divorced former House Speaker credits his conversion to Catholicism with turning around his messy personal life.

Front-runner Mitt Romney is a Mormon, who has often spoken generally about his faith without getting into specifics — an approach likely intended to not alienate the Christian voters he would need to win the party’s nomination.

Romney’s supporters are more likely than Santorum’s to say there’s too much expression of faith by political leaders, the poll found. Some 55% of the ex-Pennsylvania senator’s backers indicated they believe there is too little talk about faith and prayer by lawmakers, compared to just 24% among Romney supporters.

The survey found “some important signs of public uneasiness with the mixing of religion and politics,” Greg Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Forum, told the Daily News.

The survey was conducted between March 7 and March 11, a month after the Obama administration directed some religious institutions to cover contraceptive services in their employees’ health care plans.

The move provoked furious opposition from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and sparked an unsuccessful effort by Senate Republicans to overturn it.

But the Obama Administration later softened its stance, determining that insurance companies would pay for the coverage and not religious employers.

Woe for lawmakers who often talk religion?

Politicians may want to abstain from talking about religion, a new poll showed.

The Pew Research Center found that 38% of Americans questioned in a recent survey felt that lawmakers and campaigning politicians bring up their faith too often.

That was the highest percentage for that answer in the annual Pew religion-in-politics poll, which was first launched in 2001, when just 12% failed to give their blessing to faith-based political chatter.

But the poll, released Wednesday, also revealed that 30% of Americans believe there is not enough talk about religion in the political arena.

The results could signal that some of the Republican presidential candidates this year are taking an unholy risk in the campaign battles over government-mandated birth control, gay marriage and funding for Planned Parenthood.

Rick Santorum, whose Catholic faith represents the backbone of his political ideology, has courted religious conservative voters — and won key victories in the Deep South as a result. He’s argued on the stump that religion ought to play a much larger role in the public square.

Newt Gingrich often trumpets his faith, too. The twice-divorced former House Speaker credits his conversion to Catholicism with turning around his messy personal life.

Front-runner Mitt Romney is a Mormon, who has often spoken generally about his faith without getting into specifics — an approach likely intended to not alienate the Christian voters he would need to win the party’s nomination.

Romney’s supporters are more likely than Santorum’s to say there’s too much expression of faith by political leaders, the poll found. Some 55% of the ex-Pennsylvania senator’s backers indicated they believe there is too little talk about faith and prayer by lawmakers, compared to just 24% among Romney supporters.

The survey found “some important signs of public uneasiness with the mixing of religion and politics,” Greg Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Forum, told the Daily News.

The survey was conducted between March 7 and March 11, a month after the Obama administration directed some religious institutions to cover contraceptive services in their employees’ health care plans.

The move provoked furious opposition from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and sparked an unsuccessful effort by Senate Republicans to overturn it.

But the Obama Administration later softened its stance, determining that insurance companies would pay for the coverage and not religious employers.

Will presidential candidates wear ashes at Wednesday debate?

Editor’s note: Tune in Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET for the last presidential debate before Super Tuesday, the CNN/Arizona Republican Party Debate hosted by John King. Follow it on Twitter at #CNNDebate and on Facebook at CNN Politics. For real-time coverage of the Arizona and Michigan primaries, go to CNNPolitics.com or to CNN apps or the CNN mobile site.

By Eric Marrapodi, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor

Washington (CNN) – “You’ve got something on your forehead.”

Every year on Ash Wednesday it’s how the awkward conversation begins.  A well meaning co-worker points out a black smudge on someone’s forehead, not knowing it’s supposed to be there.

The smudge is the imposition of ashes, often on the forehead in the shape of a cross.  Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lenten season, when Christians take time to prepare for Easter through a time of fasting and prayer.  The  imposition of ashes nears a holy obligation for many Catholics, although technically it is not.

As two prominent Catholic presidential candidates take to the debate stage for the CNN Republican Presidential Debate in Mesa, Arizona, lots of people are asking will they or won’t they wear ashes?

In the race for the Republican nomination for the White House, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have made no secret of their Catholic faith.

Santorum was born into a Catholic family and served as an altar boy.  A Santorum aide told CNN that Santorum attended Mass Wednesday morning in Mesa, Arizona.  He was spotted by CNN’s Kevin Bohn after Mass at his hotel with ash on his forehead.

Gingrich converted later in life as an adult to Catholicism. The former House Speaker told CNN’s Shawna Shepherd on Wednesday that he would not be going to Mass on Ash Wednesday. Though he said he’s been in the past, Gingrich noted that Ash Wednesday is “not a holy day of obligation,” referring to days on which Catholics are required to attend Mass.

Gingrich did say he was giving up dessert for Lent, while his wife Callista Gingrich joked that she was giving up “her opinion.”

As the presidential hopefuls get ready to take the stage under the lights and pancake makeup on Wednesday night, what’s a Catholic candidate to do?

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“There is no regulation or even a suggestion regarding how long the ashes remain,” according to Monsignor Rick Hilgartner, the executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Secretariat of Divine Worship.  Hilgartner helps the Catholic church in the United States oversee liturgical matters.

“Sometimes they just don’t ‘stick’ for long, so if someone receives them in the morning they might simply brush off through normal routines later in the day,” he said.

The ashes come from palm fronds, or the stems and leaves, used to celebrate Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week when Christians remember Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and being greeted like a king, with the crowd waving palm fronds and laying their coats on the ground. During Holy Week Christians remember the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Easter Sunday marks the end of Holy Week and the end of any Lenten fasts.

In the Catholic tradition parishioners keep the palm fronds in their house all year, until the start of the Lenten season. The church then collects the fronds and burns them to create the ash.

Receiving ashes is a symbolic gesture, said Hilgartner.  He notes in different countries the ashes are distributed in different ways.  In Italy, for example, ashes are sprinkled over the top of the head.  Last year on Ash Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI received his ashes sprinkled on the top of his head.

“Whatever the method, the symbolic gesture is just that…There is no discussion about what might be ‘valid’ or ‘licit,’” he said.

The ashes are a physical reminder of mortality and a call to live a better life. In the Catholic tradition when they are applied a priest can say, “Remember man, from dust you came and from dust you shall return” or “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”

Suppose a Catholic who happened to be running for president needed makeup for a televised debate, Hilgarten says there would be nothing wrong, “if out of necessity the ashes were removed in order to prepare makeup for a public appearance.”

“It’s not like a tattoo. They could get them and by the time they’re doing their debate they could be gone,” Monsignor Crosby Kern said. Kern is the pastor at the Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, Louisiana.

“Catholics are not required to get ashes,” Kern said. Ash Wednesday is not a Holy Day of Obligation in the Catholic liturgical calender, as Christmas, Easter, and several other days are.

While the New Orleans Police department may be busy on Mardi Gras night clearing Bourbon Street of tourists, Kern said come Ash Wednesday morning the faithful show up en mass to get their ashes.

“We’re full at the cathedral. We have three masses and they’ll all be full,” he said.

While it may not be an obligation, it is an important tradition for millions of Catholics.

In Washington, politicians often are seen with ashes. Most notably in recent years, Vice President Joe Biden has been seen on past Ash Wednesdays with the ash on his forehead.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama released a statement on Ash Wednesday.

“Today, Michelle and I honor Ash Wednesday with Christians around the country and across the world,” the statement said. “This is at once a solemn and joyous occasion, an opportunity to remember both the depths of sacrifice and the height of redemption. We join millions in entering the Lenten Season with truly thankful hearts, mindful of our faith and our obligations to one another.”

With Gingrich choosing not to get ashes and Santorum receiving them, the question remains whether Santorum will make an effort to keep them for their time in the national spotlight.

–CNN’s Shawna Shepherd, Dana Bash, and Kevin Bohn contributed to this report.

Why does Santorum despise the separation of church and state?

Secular-baiting has become something of an art form in high GOP circles ever since Newt Gingrich began his pioneering explorations of the genre back in the 1990s.

A milestone in the evolution of this rhetoric occurred in 2007 when Mitt Romney likened secularism to radical Jihadism in a memorable speech.

Those were impressive accomplishments, for sure. But let me say that no one, but no one, can demonize, Talibanize, or Stalinize secularism like Rick Santorum. On occasion he has done so, I would admit, with a fair degree of intellectual seriousness, as in this 2010 speech. Though for the most part his pronouncements on the subject amount to rank and preposterous name-calling.

View Photo Gallery: Scenes of religious faith meeting politics in the 2012 campaign.

Back in 2003 he lamented: “I want to remind people of the societies that have been secular in nature. Starting with the French Revolution, moving onto the fascists, and the Nazis and the communists and the Baathists, all of those purely secularists hated religion, tried to crush religion.”

Recently he claimed the Obama administration believes that “secular values should be imposed on people of faith.” “Don’t you see,” Santorum sighed, “how they see you? How they look down their noses at the average Americans. These elitist snobs!”

Needless to say, Santorum’s aversion to separation of church and state has led him to repeatedly anathematize John F. Kennedy. For it was the nation’s first Catholic president who famously called in 1961 for separation. Looking back, Santorum was “frankly appalled” by Kennedy’s “radical” stance.

Fresh off his three victories last week, Santorum upped the ante: “the intolerance of the secular ideology. It is a religion unto itself. It is just not a biblical based religion. And it is the most intolerant just like we saw in the days of the atheists in the Soviet Union. . .and they fear dissent why? Because the dissent comes from folks who use reason, common sense, and divine revelation and they want no part of any of those things.”

So let’s review, shall we? Secularism is defined by Santorum variously as a religion, intolerant of religion, atheist, leftist, liberal, intolerant of dissent, Gallic, Nazi, Communist, elitist and, of course, the official ideology of the Obama administration. Oddly, in a recent debate we found candidate Santorum praising “secular” Pakistan over a theocratic Iran, but by now the reader may realize that when it comes to public discussions of secularism logical coherence is expressly discouraged.

The truth is that for decades terms like “secular,” “secular humanist,” “atheist,” and “liberal,” have been used by the right as if all were synonyms of one another and synonyms of every form of depravity known to the species. Santorum is not the first conservative Christian public figure to draw these loose associations, though he is presently the most visible.

This raises the question of why the practice of disparaging secularism has continued for so long. This is a complex prompt, but I want to suggest one quick answer here. The highfalutin’ rhetorical assaults on secularism permit culture warriors to avoid the real problem of how to let religion function in a public square teeming with diverse and often antagonistic religious actors.

It is easy, lucrative, and even pleasurable, to pulverize sinister secularism. It rallies the base, secures contributions, and helps conservative voters focus on demonic (i.e., liberal, Democratic) forces possessing our political system. It is much harder, however, to explain how citizens who base their civic thinking on Santorum’s “divine revelation” could possibly live in peace when those revelations might lead them to completely different policy prescriptions. Anti-secular rhetoric, at its core, is a demagogic evasion.

Yet Santorum and others will keep baiting secularism, and evading difficult issues, until someone stops them. As I think through the future of an admittedly troubled secular movement, I note that Santorum’s co-religionists often have a far better appreciation of the value of the secular than he does.

Writing in the magazine America, the Jesuit Raymond Schroth reflects on the vast discrepancy between Santorum’s views on Kennedy and his own: “I don’t know where Santorum was in 1960, but he was two years old. I was surrounded by Jesuit scholastics in philosophy studies. We knew the speech had been written with the advice of Catholic theologians and that Kennedy knew the proper role of conscience, as well as religion, in making public decisions.”
Father Michael Ssenfuma conducts the Catholic Mass Sunday at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Montgomery, Ala. (AP)

It may be lost upon candidate Santorum, but religious minorities in America such as Catholics often have pragmatic reasons for being wary of permitting religion to play too large a role in public life. This truism is often lost upon anti-theist movement secularists as well. Which is unfortunate because it is precisely by reaching out to religious individuals that the secular movement can re-energize itself.

Friday is Last Day to Register Online for Republican Convention

Those interested in attending the California Republican Party spring convention later this month have until Feb. 17 to pre-register online.

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich will the convention, and the current guest list also includes House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, the third-highest ranking Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Darrell Issa, a congressman from Southern California.

The convention includes two seperate town-hall events specifically for Asian and Latino republicans. A Catholic mass will also be held at 5 p.m. on Feb. 25. A full schedule is available here.

The convention runs from Feb. 24-26 at the  in Burlingame, and Gingrich will be the keynote speaker on Feb. 25 at 12 p.m.

For more news about Belmont and surrounding areas, including unincorporated San Mateo County,  follow us on Twitter  and  “like” us on Facebook.    Get Patched in daily by signing up for our newsletter.

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“Speaker Gingrich brings energy and vision to the Convention during a critical election year,” said Tom Del Beccaro, the state’s Republican Party chairman.

To learn more about the convention, visit: www.cagop.org/index.cfm/convention.htm

One Day Left to Register Online for Republican Convention

Those interested in attending the California Republican Party spring convention later this month in Burlingame have until Feb. 17 to pre-register online.

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich will headline the convention, and the current guest list also includes House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, the third-highest ranking Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Darrell Issa, a congressman from Southern California.

The convention includes two seperate town-hall events specifically for Asian and Latino republicans. A catholic mass will also be held at 5 p.m. on Feb. 25. A full schedule is available here.

The convention runs from Feb. 24-26 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport hotel in Burlingame, and Gingrich will be the keynote speaker on Feb. 25 at 12 p.m.

Patch will interview San Mateo County Republican Party Chair Chuck McDougald, resident of South San Francisco, at the convention.

“Speaker Gingrich brings energy and vision to the Convention during a critical election year,” said Tom Del Beccaro, the state’s Republican Party chairman.

To learn more about the convention, visit: www.cagop.org/index.cfm/convention.htm

Newt Gingrich Is Catholic?

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Newt Gingrich and the Faith Leaders

In his latest bid to be more relevant to the Republican primary voter, Newt Gingrich has unveiled his “Faith Leaders Dream Team” – a group of seven advisors he has chosen to guide him in dealing with the “radical secularism” of the Obama administration.

Has Callista ever explained Catholicism to him, or is he just giving it lip service?

Top of the list are Tim and Beverly LaHaye. You might remember him as the co-author of those Rapture books, the Left Behind series? Yo, Newt – Catholics don’t believe in the Rapture. If you will be so kind as to pick up a copy of your Catholic Bible, you will find a huge disclaimer at the start of Revelations. To condense, the Church only leaves it in because the original compilers put it in.

Then, there’s Don Wildmon, the infamous Don Wildmon of the American Family Association. The 74-year-old Wildmon is anti-same-sex marriage, anti-abortion, anti-pornography and gets involved in such “public policy issues” as deregulating the oil industry and opposing labor rights.

George Barna is less well known. He runs a market research firm that specializes in studying religion in America. His current personal project is a group called Metaformation, an organization dedicated to “helping people optimize their life journey.” Sounds vaguely new-age, doesn’t it?

Mathew Staver, aka Mat Staver, is the dean of Liberty University School of Law. They are affiliated with Liberty University, which is implicated in the Lisa Miller’s abduction and international flight of Isabella Miller to avoid sharing custody with Janet Jenkins.

Jim Garlow is an outspoken commentator, Senior Pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego. He believes that if President Obama is re-elected, this country is doomed.

J. C. Watts is a former Oklahoma Congressman, with no connection to any kind of church or religious organization, which leads us to the least likely man on this Faith Leaders Dream Team – Chuck Norris. I guess Christ needs a martial arts-proficient bodyguard.

Notice who’s missing? Not one single representative of the faith Newt claims to embrace as a convert – Catholicism. These people, especially Tim LaHaye, Don Wildmon, Mat Staver and Jim Garlow are about as far from Catholicism as one can get and still be called Christian.

You can bet Catholics will notice the omission in this Dream Team.

Related articles

• Newt Gingrich: Gay Marriage is Pagan, a ‘Fundamental Violation of Our Civilization’ (towleroad.com)
• AFA’s Don Wildmon: Vote Gingrich Or America Will Be Destroyed Forever (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• Gingrich Unveils Faith Leaders Coalition (barthsnotes.com)
• Rev. Wildmon: Palin Right, Newt Is ‘Crucified’ by Romney Allies (jamespatrick1.wordpress.com)
• Tim LaHaye Endorses Newt Gingrich (towleroad.com)

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Catholics Split Over Obama Contraceptive Order

The conflict between the Catholic Bishops and the White House over contraceptive coverage has American Catholics choosing sides.

Catholics narrowly support the White House position in polls. There are potential political consequences: In presidential elections, Catholics are swing voters. They supported Al Gore in 2000, President George W. Bush in ’04 and President Obama in ’08.

The GOP presidential hopefuls are certainly using this issue. Framing it as a question of religious freedom is a guaranteed way to fire up the conservative base.

“If you believe in the right to worship God without government interfering, come join us,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.

Mitt Romney vowed: “This kind of assault on religion will end if I’m president of the United States.” And Rick Santorum added: “What they’ve done is an egregious affront to religious liberty.”

Mandate ‘Beyond Politics’

In the audience at that Santorum event in Rochester, Minn., was Charles Slater, a family physician who agrees with the candidate.

“I think a lot of people don’t understand or see that that’s a principle that people of Catholic faith are being asked to violate,” he said. “So the mandate from the government goes beyond politics. It goes down to the very center of theology, Catholic theology, or teaching about the human person.”

But not all Catholics share that view when it comes to birth control. In fact, 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lifetimes. A new survey by Public Policy Polling shows that a narrow majority of Catholic voters think women employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have access to contraceptive coverage through their health plans.

Among them is Pat Schaffer in Minneapolis, who says Catholic institutions are not being asked to supply birth control themselves, only to include such coverage in health care plans.

“If the employee agrees with them, then they won’t use the contraception,” she says. “And if the employees in conscience disagree with the bishops, then it’s up to the employees what to do, and I don’t see how the bishops have the right to force the employee to take a particular stand any more than they have the right to control how an employee uses their wages.”

Seeking Exceptions

Across the river in St. Paul, students at University of St. Thomas have been talking about this issue in classrooms and over lunch at the student services building.

“I believe it’s the Amish [who] have the option to opt out of the draft, and the Quakers have the option, too,” said Katie Moosbrugger, a Catholic studies, German and education major. “There are lots of exceptions for religious institutions … and Catholics, we don’t hold that contraception is something to be supported.”

Hanna Heinicke, also a student at St. Thomas, acknowledges that it’s complicated but says she has to “err on the side of the bishops.”

“I think it’s not fair that religious organizations would have to provide services that they feel are morally wrong,” she says.

But Heinicke supports the overall health care bill signed by Obama in 2010.

“I’m actually a huge fan of it,” she says. “I think everyone should have the right to have health care. I think it’s a human right.”

In Washington on Thursday, a group of women backing the White House rule on the issue held an event at the National Press Club. Their concern, amid all of the debate, is that the president stick to his guns.

“I have faith in him that he will do the right thing. I will be praying that he does the right thing,” said Callie Otto, a student at Catholic University of America. “But I will also be praying that the bishops can realize that they’re wrong and they back down so he doesn’t have so much pressure.”

Catholics on each side of this are offering prayers. For its part, the Obama administration is looking for an answer that allows it to defend its decision and also somehow address the concerns of its opponents.