I’ve notice a resurgence on the right wing Catholic blogs of the notion that Catholic politicians should be punished by denial of the sacraments, or even excommunication, for not toeing the Church’s line on such issues as gay marriage and abortion. SUZANNE made that argument yesterday during the Mel Gibson discussion.

I’d be curious about the reaction of SUZANNE and other conservative Catholic bloggers to this post from last year, which garnered no answers at all.

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Since the emergence of the current European states the Vatican has been viewed with suspicion by rulers. Jesuits, in particular, were suspected in the courts of Europe of being Romish secret agents, bent on establishing de facto Catholic rule behind the scenes. Think Cardinal Richelieu and the image of an “eminence grise” and you have the picture.

This image was largely unjustified, but pervasive. And it was imported to the new world. In Canada suspicion of Catholicism was strengthened by the defeat of Montcalm, the ensuing British rule, and the continued Catholic domination of politics in Quebec right up until the 1950s. In the US, Protestants formed the great majority of immigrants , bringing with them a long standing distrust of Roman Catholicism.

When large numbers of Catholics from Ireland and Italy began migrating to the US in the mid-19th, anti-Catholicism emerged as an important force in the political landscape. Many folks don’t remember that the Ku Klux Klan were established to suppress Catholicism, as well as blacks: Southerners feared domination of the US by Catholics who, they assumed, were all under the domination of a foreign power - Rome.

The first Catholic Democratic nominee for president, Al Smith, was defeated largely because of the fear that a Catholic president would take orders from the Pope. From T.H. White’s “The Making of The President”, 1960:

“Methodist Bishop Adna Leonard declared: “No Governor can kiss the papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House.” Even liberal Protestants were concerned. The Christian Century declared it could not “look with unconcern upon the seating of a representative of an alien culture, of a medieval, Latin mentality, of an undemocratic hierarchy and of a foreign potentate in the great office of the President of the United States.”

When Kennedy captured the Democratic nomination in 1960, he discovered that many southern Protestants still believed ithat every Catholic is obliged to obey the Pope’s commands without question. On September 12, 1960, he delivered his famous statement to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. (my emphasis)

“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 a 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 — and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

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 — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

Read the whole speech. It’s worth it.

Kennedy’s clear and unequivocal commitment directly addressed the fears of American Protestants that a Catholic president would bow to Vatican pressure. In the last year, however, the Vatican seems to be doing its level best to reverse that. The current international synod of bishops in Rome is debating the possibility of refusing Communion to what the 1983 Code of Canon Law calls manifest grave sinners, including politicians who support abortion, gay marriage and other things the Church disapproves of.

If the Church continues to insist that it will publicly rebuke and humiliate Catholic politicians who decline to advance the Church’s agenda, I foresee two possible consequences, not mutually exclusive:

a) A resurgence of pre-Kennedy suspicion, fueled by the fact that Rome is now doing precisely what non-Catholics feared it would;

b) A diminishing number of Catholics politicians, who are increasingly being compelled to place the instructions of the Vatican ahead of the views of their constituents. Faced with that dilemma, a Catholic will be forced to abandon either his faith or his career.

In either case, the net result is a diminution of Catholic influence.

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