COLUMN ONE : Catholicism a Political Issue Again : Church leaders are challenging officeholders on their abortion views. The debate reignites questions about religion’s role in politics.

At the crossroads of private faith and public judgment, a storm is brewing in the Roman Catholic Church with potentially profound implications for the wrenching national debate over abortion.

When New York Cardinal John J. O’Connor suggested last week in a lengthy message that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights may ultimately face excommunication, he dramatically underscored the rising tension between the church and some of its most famous members over the divisive issue.

At the same time, some analysts maintain, he may have inadvertently reignited questions about the Catholic Church’s role in politics that appeared to have been settled forever by John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960.

Kennedy dispelled the lingering fear that Catholic politicians owed their ultimate loyalty to the church by declaring that he would neither seek nor accept direction from church leaders on public policy.

“I do not speak for my church on public matters,” Kennedy told a group of Houston Protestants during the campaign’s most dramatic appearance, “and the church does not speak for me.”

But now, as part of an intensified campaign against abortion, some members of the Catholic hierarchy itself are aggressively challenging politicians who echo Kennedy’s insistence that church doctrine cannot be their sole guide on such sensitive policy questions.

“It is not of the nature of Catholicism for Catholics to be able to ‘pick and choose’ which substantive teachings they accept or reject,” O’Connor declared in his statement last week.

O’Connor quickly backed away from his warning about excommunication, and other bishops have indicated clear discomfort at attempting to control politicians through church teachings. Nevertheless, recent months have seen persistent church pressure against a number of Catholic officeholders who have voted in support of abortion rights while asserting personal opposition to the practice.

The pressure has ranged from mild public confrontation, to condemnations, to the withdrawing of honors and affiliations:

--Last November, Catholic state Senate candidate Lucy Killea, a supporter of abortion rights, was denied communion in San Diego.

--In Pennsylvania this past winter, Rosemary McAvoy, a Catholic state legislative candidate who favored legalized abortion, was stripped of her position as president of the parochial school board by local church officials.

--In New York, an auxiliary bishop declared earlier this year that Gov. Mario M. Cuomo was in “serious risk of going to hell” for supporting legal abortion.

--In New Jersey, Gov. James J. Florio recently resigned from the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, after a local bishop declared that politicians who support abortion rights could no longer speak at church events or serve in church offices.

This pattern of confrontation dates to last November, when the bishops as a group formally declared abortion to be the nation’s “fundamental human rights issue.”

But conflicts between church leaders and Catholic politicians over the question have flared intermittently through the decade. In 1984, O’Connor and other Catholic leaders sharply criticized Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine A. Ferraro, a Catholic, for her support of abortion rights.

Although some skirmishing persisted, an uneasy truce seemed to settle in after Cuomo argued in a 1984 speech at the University of Notre Dame that Catholic public officials, while accepting church doctrine against abortion in their own lives, could not justifiably impose their personal morality on a pluralistic society.

Now, though, the truce has clearly been sundered. With a number of Catholic officeholders using Cuomo’s formulation to justify their conversion to the abortion rights cause, O’Connor and other conservative bishops are redoubling their criticism of the governor’s argument as inconsistent with church doctrine.

“I simply cannot find anything in authentic Catholic teaching that can support a ‘personally opposed but’ position,” O’Connor wrote last week.

Some Welcome Battle

Some Catholics active in the anti-abortion movement have welcomed these steps--and the threat of more serious sanctions raised in O’Connor’s message on abortion. It is hypocritical, they argue, for liberal Catholic politicians like Cuomo to claim full standing in the church when they refuse to join in the anti-abortion cause.

“I’m glad the battle has been joined,” said Catholic Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), a staunch abortion opponent. “What I think it is, is a very late attempt at ending phoniness and hypocrisy. The bishops are trying to prevent public officials from lying in public--from saying, ‘I am a good Catholic,’ when they vote in favor of abortion.”

But other Catholics warn that O’Connor’s apparent threats against politicians who refuse to accept and promote church dogma on abortion could rekindle the prejudice that confronted Kennedy three decades ago.

“If these (confrontational) policies were generally adopted across the U.S., practicing Catholics could not run for office . . . because many non-Catholics would assume they could not be independent public servants,” said Father Richard P. McBrien, chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame. “This is a suicidal approach.”

Sensitive to that argument, not all Catholic leaders have embraced these confrontational tactics. “There are disagreements among the bishops about the wisdom of this approach,” acknowledged Richard Doerflinger, associate director for policy development at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ office of anti-abortion activities. These dissenting views may be aired in Santa Clara, where the bishops have gathered for their annual spring retreat through next week.

Already, Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland has called on church leaders to open “a dialogue on abortion” with parishioners and to “allow . . . our politicians as much latitude as reason permits.”

Similarly, Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin of Chicago, although enjoining Catholic officeholders to oppose abortion, recently declared “that the church can be most effective in the public debate on abortion through moral persuasion, not punitive measures.”

Some bishops, Doerflinger noted, fear that “the whole debate about public officials has the danger of diverting the debate from the victim of abortion to another class of self-proclaimed victims.”

Although Catholic gubernatorial candidates in Massachusetts and Ohio recently switched from opposition to support of legal abortion, for example, neither has faced sanctions from the local clergy. Similarly, during the recent gubernatorial primary in California, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony--who last year told Catholic politicians that they had “a positive moral obligation” to work against abortion--did not publicly pressure Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, who said that he was personally opposed to abortion but did not wish to restrict it.

Mahony privately discussed the issue with the attorney general, and “it was always civil--disagreeing, but understated,” Van de Kamp recalled. “It was not an all-or-nothing situation with (him) on the issue. I was not being condemned to hell . . . .”

A Potent Reminder

Catholics on both sides of the dispute agree that the conservative bishops’ principal purpose in this new offensive is less to change election results than the behavior and attitudes of their own parishioners.

Over the last two decades, church leaders have faced rising dissension over Catholic doctrine on many matters relating to sex. Despite strong church teachings to the contrary, polls show that most Catholics, like other Americans, accept birth control, premarital sex and legalized abortion. Catholic women are somewhat more likely to actually have abortions than Protestant and Jewish women, according to research from the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

Looking at those trends, Father Andrew M. Greeley, a sociologist as well as a novelist, concluded in his new book, “The Catholic Myth,” that “in sexual matters, the church has lost its ability to demand effectively different attitudes and behavior from its members.”

Greeley sees this shift as part of a larger evolution away from uncritical obedience engendered by rising Catholic education and income levels. But many Catholic conservatives believe that disaffection from the church’s position on abortion in particular has been encouraged by the clergy’s previous refusal to punish Catholic officeholders visibly proclaiming abortion rights views.

By chastising politicians who support abortion rights, conservatives maintain, the bishops are not interfering in politics but merely reminding all parishioners that church discipline will be enforced.

“The audience O’Connor and the others are trying to reach is the Catholic in the pews who, because of the example of these politicians, have internalized the impression that you can be a Catholic and support abortion,” said Michael Schwartz, a resident fellow in social policy at the conservative Free Congress Foundation in Washington.

In his message, O’Connor stated flatly: “Penalties are intended to encourage the faithful as well as to deter wrongdoing.”

But critics of that approach question where to draw the line in meting out punishment. Because most Catholics accept legalized abortion, newly elected California state Sen. Killea noted, “If they move against the politicians, what are they going to do about all those members?”

No less difficult to draw are the lines between permissible religious participation in social debate and direct meddling in partisan politics.

Conservative Catholics note that few of the critics now condemning the church’s anti-abortion efforts complained when the bishops forcefully intervened in the civil rights struggle during the 1960s (to the point of excommunicating three leading Louisiana segregationists) or two decades later produced pastoral letters on the economy and arms control that read like excerpts from a Jesse Jackson speech.

Liberals retort that the conservative bishops have pursued their campaign against abortion with an intolerance for dissent.

“There is no issue they have approached with the . . . authoritarianism of abortion,” said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, a Washington-based abortion rights group. This acrid dispute is a pungent reminder that Americans have never precisely delineated the boundaries of acceptable religious involvement in public life. But the history of American politics--from Prohibition to the rise and retreat of the evangelical right during the 1980s--clearly suggests there is some line that inspires a backlash when crossed.

That means, most analysts agree, that Catholic politicians have little to fear electorally from threats by church leaders. If anything, such threats tend to be counterproductive; Killea’s surprising victory in a strongly Republican state Senate district late last year was widely attributed to distaste for the church’s sanctions against her.

But if Catholic officeholders supporting legalized abortion can shrug off the political consequences of these pressures, it is far more difficult for them to ignore the personal implications of potential chastisement--or even exile--from their faith.

“It is much bigger than anyone can ever imagine,” Ferraro said. When church leaders talk about excommunication, “it is a very, very serious thing. I know I could never change my views (supporting legalized abortion). But it would pain me terribly if I was ever in that position.”

Excommunication is the most serious penalty the church can impose. It does not mean a Catholic ceases to be a Christian, but it does deprive the individual of major sacraments of the church, including baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage and last rites.

The controversy evoked by O’Connor’s suggestion that excommunication may be “the only option” suitable for politicians who stubbornly support the availability of abortion may ensure that none are ever actually placed in that excruciating position. But many observers feel that pressure on dissenting Catholic politicians from some bishops is likely to remain high--and may well sharpen as the debate does.

“I think it has to intensify,” said Schwartz of the Free Congress Foundation, “because what is really at stake from the bishops’ point of view is the teaching authority of the church . . . and that is a battle they cannot lose.”