Bishop Defends Clergy’s Public Policy-Making Role

An amiable, astute and straightforward American bishop faced the top brass of American newspapers Friday and told them why he and his colleagues are plunging more extensively into public affairs.

It is because those affairs have taken on greater and more complex moral dimensions that cannot be settled for the well-being of humanity merely on technical grounds, said Roman Catholic Bishop James W. Malone of Youngstown, Ohio.

The issues nowadays are “filled with moral content,” he said. In a time “when we can do almost anything,” he added, a key question increasingly is “what we ought to do,” or more sharply, “what we ought never do.”

Malone, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and its chief spokesman, laid out the philosophical framework for religious involvement in politics, calling it essential both to faith and to democracy.

Old as the Prophets

Their interaction has mounted lately in the United States, amid some controversy about it, but it is as old as the biblical prophets.

In an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, meeting in Washington, Malone said that in the modern atmosphere of technological prowess, the country cannot make “wise policy” without examining whether it is moral.

Citing issues from “genetic surgery” to “nuclear winter” and from “in vitro fertilization” to “Star Wars” defense, he said the swelling moral ramifications have drawn religious forces increasingly into the public arena.

It is the distinct duty of religious bodies to apply religious and moral “values and principles to public issues,” he said. To exclude them, he said, would risk “losing perspective on the human dimensions of public policy.”

Use of Persuasion

“Our impact will be in direct proportion to our persuasiveness,” he said, however. “The exercise of moral authority in a pluralistic democracy is necessarily by way of persuasion, not coercion.”

Malone, 65, midway through his three-year term as head of the nation’s Catholic bishops and their chief spokesman, marks his 25th anniversary as a bishop on Sunday, with a national interfaith celebration of it.

About 40 bishops from across the country and ecumenical representatives of Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Judaism, as well as civic officials, are expected in Youngstown for the occasion.

At the editors’ meeting in Washington, Malone said the bishops’ engagement with political issues sometimes brings complaints of church intrusion into state affairs, but the real objection often is to “our conclusions.”

Double Standard

For instance, such critics contend that the bishops’ opposition to abortion is intruding “improperly into the public domain,” he said, but the same critics applaud the bishops’ condemnation of nuclear war as a “public service.”