Killea Tactic Can Only Hurt the Church in the Long Run : Abortion: Public officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution, not the Vatican. They should represent all voters, not just Catholics.

The Roman Catholic Church will hold the feet of Catholic politicians to the fire, warned a congregation of some 300 bishops meeting in Baltimore earlier this month. If those elected officials fail to vote against abortion in any form, many of the bishops said, they may risk excommunication.

Now Lucy Killea, a Catholic legislator and an openly pro-choice candidate for state Senate, has been barred by Bishop Leo T. Maher of San Diego from receiving Communion until she recants her position on abortion.

The church will probably be unsuccessful in its efforts to force Killea or most other Catholic elected officials to vote the church doctrine on abortion. But even if the church is able to dictate the blind allegiance of some legislators with these tactics, in the long run it can only lose.

Every public opinion poll taken on the question of abortion shows that a majority of Catholics support the right of a woman to choose a safe, legal abortion. In 1972, just a year before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade, a Gallup Poll showed that 57% of Catholics favored legal abortion. By 1980, Gallup reported that this number had increased to nearly 77% of American Catholics.

Polls continue to show overwhelming Catholic support for this fundamental right, despite increased public opposition of the church. And this is not simply a theoretical expression of American pluralistic values. Those same polls show that, when faced with this decision in their own lives, a majority of Catholic women chose abortion to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Obviously, the church is still not the state and it can decide who its members will be and what they must avow publicly to remain in good standing. The bishop of San Diego and other members of the Catholic hierarchy are entitled to their deeply held faith and the vigorous expression of their moral stance on abortion. They are not automatically excluded from the public debate on this issue simply by virtue of their position in the church.

At the same time, they cannot compel their orthodox religious view of abortion to be adopted by the politicians, who then may exert the power of their office to impose the church’s view on everyone else. If others are to accept the Catholic view in making their personal decisions on abortion, it must be by force of reason, not force of law.

Sadly, the bishop seems to have forgotten the lesson of our Constitution and the lesson of history. Every public official takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, not the Vatican. They are elected to represent all of the voters in their districts, not just the Catholic voters.

This demand by the church hierarchy for undivided loyalty can only return us to a dark age of religious intolerance when many individuals were denied the opportunities to be full members of our society because of their faiths.

At the formation of our nation, Virginia still prohibited “papists” from holding public office. Georgia’s Constitution of 1777 limited participation in its legislature to Protestants. New York effectively prohibited Catholics from elected office by requiring naturalized citizens to “abjure foreign allegiance and subjection in all matters ecclesiastical and civil.”

During the summer of 1787, as the nation struggled to write a Constitution, Charles Pinckney, a Constitutional Convention delegate from South Carolina, proposed the radical concept that no person be barred from holding public office on account of his religion. The North Carolina delegates expressed vehement opposition to the notion of eliminating religion as the litmus test for public office. They, like others, were afraid that atheists, pagans and even Roman Catholics might assume power.

In response to these arguments, delegate James Iredell, who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asked how men of any faith could be excluded from our political life without destroying the very principle of religious liberty for which our nation stood.

The voice of reason prevailed, and the delegates adopted Article VI, barring any religious test for public office. In its place we now require that government officials “shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution.”

Yet, the spoken fear has remained for centuries that the doctrinaire views of Catholicism would make a member of this faith follow the dictates of the church and not the Constitution. A Catholic politician’s allegiance would be with Rome, not Washington, breeding more religious strife.

In large part because of these fears, no Roman Catholic was ever elected President until 1960, and few were even seriously considered before that time. It was not so long ago that many in this nation wondered aloud if John F. Kennedy would follow the Constitution or the Vatican in matters of state.

We are a nation conceived in a struggle for liberty of conscience. Many of us trace our ancestors to movements seeking sanctuary from the religious intolerance suffered by minority faiths throughout history. Recognizing the tyranny inherent in a religious state, we made the solemn promise, through our Constitution and Bill of Rights, that each of us would be free to decide matters of faith for ourselves without government compulsion or impediments.

Now we face the most serious national division along religious lines in decades. The action of Bishop Maher raises the question once again of who governs in a democracy: the people or the church. The Roman Catholic Church has told its members that on the issue of abortion they must choose between faith and public obligations at the risk of moral peril. That choice can only take us back to a time of religious intolerance and distrust that betrays the American spirit.