COLUMN RIGHT : Who’s to Blame If Virtue Fails to Flourish? : Religious institutions have not done a good job of warning us away from moral decay.

Poland’s Cardinal Jozef Glemp and the Roman Catholic hierarchy have called for the removal of a clause in the the country’s constitution guaranteeing the separation of church and state. Pope John Paul II’s recent encyclical, much praised by conservatives, also shows a certain ambivalence about church-state matters. With the Pope to visit his native Poland this weekend, the subject is likely to come up again. Let us see, then, how the issue is addressed in the encyclical. It may be more important than the Pope’s disputed fondness, or distaste, for capitalism.

The Pope first reviewed the errors of socialism, pointing out that it regards the individual as “a molecule within the social organism,” and he continued with a qualified defense of private property. Then he suggested several defects of economic liberalism, noting that in a consumer society “people are ensnared in a web of false and superficial gratifications.” Married people sometimes lead their lives “as a series of sensations to be experienced rather than as a work to be accomplished,” and so on.

These criticisms, he continued, were directed “not so much against an economic system as against an ethical and cultural system.” If production and consumption become all-important, he added, this is because the “sociocultural system” has been weakened by ignoring religious and ethical values. The Pope’s warnings about the perils of consumerism in a market economy, and about life as sensation rather than duty, should be heeded, of course. But they cannot very easily be laid at the door of an “ethical and cultural system,” because there is no such system.

In a free society, in which religions enjoy not only the freedom of worship but the privilege of tax exemption and the benefit of tax-deductible contributions, the appropriate institutions for the inculcation of moral virtue should be flourishing. If churches do not seem to be able to get their message across, who is to blame? Let us accept that America is hedonistic (not that the Pope singled out any country). Is this because hedonism is legally permissible, or because religious institutions have not done a good job of warning us against its perils? Clergymen do have access to pulpits and the airwaves, and they have every right to try to persuade us.

If the government were to discriminate against citizens who go to church (as in the Soviet Union), or deny the right of churches to exist at all (Albania), the defect would be systemic, and there would be no doubt about where to place the blame for hedonism. But free-market countries impose no such restrictions. Freedom of worship here is guaranteed by the First Amendment. But it also prevents the “establishment” of religion, and this may be what’s really at stake.

Church and state cannot really be “separated.” Inevitably there’s an overlap. The Seventh Commandment’s injunction against stealing doesn’t make laws against theft unconstitutional. They remain essential. The state must oppose some actions that churches also oppose--primarily assaults on life, liberty and property.

The Catholic Church in Poland wants to outlaw abortion. Here, too, there is a legitimate state interest (as long as life is regarded as beginning at conception). The enduring religious temptation, however, is control of the coercive power of the state. Virtue can then be made compulsory and persuasive sermons are no longer needed. People can be made to be good, made to attend church, made to pay the salaries of clergymen. Islamic states have largely succumbed to this temptation, or perhaps never abandoned it. The Catholic Church only recently repudiated it, in the Vatican II document on religious liberty.

Proclaiming that “in matters religious, no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs,” the document was nearly voted down by the bishops. A hundred years earlier, in an encyclical published in 1864, Pope Pius IX had drawn up a Syllabus of Errors, which included the “error” that “the church ought to be separated from the state.” The conflict between the two documents was “the real sticking point” for Vatican II bishops, John Courtney Murray would later write, but in the end wisdom prevailed.

Institutional memory has proved difficult to erase, however. In seeking to extend the realm of virtue, popes have continued to look to the state. John Paul II’s latest document eloquently addresses the “task of the state,” which is said to have a “duty to sustain business activities,” to guide economic development, and so on. The task of the individual, surely a more important locus of concern and something in which the churches need to become more effective participants, received little attention by comparison.