Changing Catholic Vote Appears Up For Grabs

Some of the most coveted swing voters in America are about to head out for Sunday brunch. They have exchanged greetings with neighbors, donated money for the good of others and knelt together in silent prayer.

Here, under the graceful dome of St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, they also have been told “not to give up on those Catholic politicians who are not following their faith.”

Sen. John F. Kerry’s name was never uttered; it didn’t have to be. A day earlier, the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer shouted in a headline: “Kerry, cardinal at odds on abortion.”

The Roman Catholic Church’s public battle with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee over whether he should be given Communion looms as a major challenge facing Kerry as he attempts to appeal to his fellow Catholics.

It also has underscored just how important Catholic voters are likely to be in the 2004 presidential race. In two-thirds of the 17 critical battleground states, more people identify themselves as Catholic than any other faith.

Kerry is slated to become the first Catholic to top a major presidential ticket since John F. Kennedy in 1960. But unlike Kennedy, he is far from a shoo- in for the support of the 63.4 million Americans who share his faith.

Nearly 80% of Catholic voters supported Kennedy, who became America’s first Catholic president. Four years later, more than three-quarters of all Catholics backed the presidential run of Lyndon B. Johnson, a Protestant. It was the last time Catholics voted as such a bloc.

“Today, there’s an argument to be made that there’s no such thing as the Catholic vote,” said John Kenneth White, a professor of politics at Catholic University of America. “It looks an awful lot like America.”

To see how politically diverse the Catholic vote is now, step into St. Francis de Sales in Philadelphia’s University City neighborhood.

It is the spiritual home of Nancy Ruane and Robert A. Brothers, where the parish priest reminded them last Sunday, “If we don’t follow [Pope] John Paul II” and his teachings about the evils of abortion, “we don’t follow Jesus.”

The admonition caused Ruane to poke her husband, Joseph, in annoyance. A Democrat and former public health nurse who attends Mass regularly, she has seen enough botched procedures to be solidly in favor of legalized abortion.

Ruane described Kerry as “a Catholic with a conscience.”

Brothers, however, marvels that Kerry calls himself Catholic at all. A retired newspaper editor and Republican, Brothers said he had “spent more time in jail than Martin Luther King” for demonstrating at abortion clinics.

Kerry, he said, should be excommunicated.

The Massachusetts senator is a former altar boy who once considered entering the seminary, a divorced father of two who has since remarried, a regular churchgoer who believes abortion should be rare but legal.

In 1960, voters worried that Kennedy was so Catholic that the Vatican would have undue influence in the White House. The question today is whether Kerry is sufficiently Catholic, whether he hews closely enough to the church’s teachings to be given the sacraments -- or even to align himself publicly with his faith.

“Now the pressure is coming from the bishops, not the suspicious Protestants in Kennedy’s time,” said Edward Sunshine, associate professor of theology at Barry University in Miami Shores, Fla.

The two men’s challenges are not all that have changed. Kennedy was not asked to take a public stand on polarizing issues like abortion, which was legalized in 1973, or same-sex marriage.

Catholics, once heavily Democratic, now are nearly as likely to be Republicans as Democrats. And they have reached economic parity with Protestant voters.

Pennsylvania has a larger Catholic population than any of the other 16 hotly contested states. But it is “a microcosm of the Northeast and Midwest in terms of the Catholic vote,” said Michele Dillon, professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. It has large numbers of urban Catholics who tend to identify with the Democratic Party, and strong pockets of conservative Catholics who lean Republican.

In interviews with a score of Catholic voters in the Philadelphia area, Kerry’s first challenge in wooing them became abundantly clear.

Nearly half of them echoed Eddie Shrieves, a former cemetery caretaker who said, “I didn’t know that he’s a Catholic.”

Even those Catholics aware of Kerry’s faith were unclear about the details of his beliefs. Sister Clare Tjader said she would probably vote for Kerry, but that she found some of his views “troubling.”

“Sometimes I find him too liberal, too quick on the gay and abortion issues,” she said. “Maybe he’s more nuanced than I know.”

When told that Kerry was against gay marriage but supported civil unions for same-sex couples, Tjader acknowledged that his view pretty much mirrored her own.

Many Catholics said that, although their core beliefs influenced many of their actions, they did not bring the church’s teachings into the ballot box with them and they did not take electoral direction from the church hierarchy.

Real estate agent Liz Campion said she would not be swayed by a candidate’s religion, but added that her family “loved” John F. Kennedy.

“We were proud he was Catholic -- intensely proud,” she said. “I still have Kennedy pictures in my house.”

Kerry doesn’t inspire the same kind of adoration. Campion will vote for him in November, she said, but he was her third choice in the Democratic primary season -- after retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

Mark Supple, a banker who attends St. Francis de Sales and said he hadn’t missed Mass more than 10 times in his 48 years, voted for Bush in 2000 and plans to again. He thinks Bush “is more right than wrong on most things international.”

He approves of the way the war in Iraq has been handled. And he agrees with the church leaders who want to deny the sacrament of Communion to Kerry because of his public support for abortion rights.

A survey conducted by Catholics for a Free Choice before the 2000 election concluded that, on a range of social issues, “Catholic voters are more likely to stand with other Americans than with the U.S. Catholic bishops and the Vatican.”

The group found that majorities of Catholic voters supported legal abortion (66%) and the practice of allowing doctors to assist in the suicide of terminally ill patients (56%).

The question, of course, is how to reach out to such a diverse group of Americans. Swing voters in the truest sense of the word, Catholics have backed the man who became president in every election but one since 1972.

They missed in 2000, when they narrowly backed Vice President Al Gore over Bush. But Bush’s strong showing among Catholics was a crucial part of his razor-thin victory.

“There is probably a much larger chunk of Catholics the Democrats could woo that are more likely to be natural allies,” said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice. “But the Democratic Party has either not figured out how or not been sufficiently comfortable with Catholics in order to do this.”

For Kerry, the most difficult Catholic vote seems to lie with those who attend church more faithfully.

A recent survey by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University shows that likely Catholic voters support Kerry by a narrow margin. But among those who attend services regularly, Bush has a small lead.

These voters are key to the Bush campaign’s outreach efforts, just as they were four years ago.

In 2000, “we realized that without the Catholic vote there was no way Bush could get elected,” said Deal Hudson, publisher of a conservative Catholic magazine, Crisis, and an advisor to the Bush campaign on winning Catholic support.

“We got the Bush campaign to focus not on the Catholic vote in general, but on the Mass-attending Catholic vote. That’s the real Catholic vote,” he said.

Bush has met with nearly every American cardinal and many of the bishops; he also is a regular visitor to Catholic colleges. During a recent trip to Pennsylvania, the president was greeted by a Catholic priest on the tarmac, where the two men shared a silent prayer.

The church’s changing demographics, however, offer opportunity for Kerry. Latinos are the fastest-growing sector of the Catholic Church, and only 28% of Latino Catholics voted for Bush in the 2000 election, said White, the professor at Catholic University.

“The shift in Catholic demographics is clearly important,” White said. “Hispanics identify with the Democratic Party in large numbers.”

Dillon, who specializes in religion and Catholicism at the University of New Hampshire, thinks that Kerry’s Catholicism remains a plus for him.

“Whether conservative or liberal, the vast majority of American Catholics are selective with what it means to be Catholic,” she said. “Kerry is no different, and he is on the majority side in terms of Catholic opinion in America.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The Catholic vote

John F. Kerry, the first Roman Catholic to top a major presidential ticket since 1960, probably will not enjoy as strong support among Catholic voters as John F. Kennedy did. In two-thirds of the critical states in 2004, more people identify themselves as Catholic than any other faith.

*--* Electoral % Catholic Votes Catholics* Population Catholic ranking** Arkansas 6 115,967 2,673,400 4.0% 3 Arizona 10 974,883 5,130,632 19.0% 1 Florida 27 2,596,148 15,982,378 16.2% 1 Iowa 7 558,092 2,926,324 19.1% 2 Maine 4 283,024 1,274,923 22.2% 1 Michigan 17 ,019,926 9,938,444 20.3% 1 Minnesota 10 1,260,660 4,919,479 25.6% 1 Missouri 11 856,964 5,595,211 15.3% 2 Nevada 5 331,844 1,998,257 16.6% 1 N.Hampshire 4 431,259 1,235,786 34.9% 1 N.Mexico 5 670,511 1,819,046 36.9% 1 Ohio 20 2,231,832 11,353,140 19.7% 1 Oregon 7 348,239 3,421,399 10.2% 2 Penn. 21 3,802,524 12,281,054 31.0% 1 Washington 11 716,133 5,894,121 12.1% 1 W.Virginia 5 105,363 1,808,344 5.8% 3 Wisconsin 10 1,695,660 5,363,675 31.6% 1

*--*

*Total Catholic adherents, adult and child

** A No. 1 ranking means that in this state, more people identify themselves as Catholics than as any other faith.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The Catholic vote in past elections

Percentage of Catholics who voted for presidential candidates

2000

Al Gore (D)53%

George W. Bush (R)46%+

Ralph Nader (G)1%

1996

Bill Clinton (D)52%+

Bob Dole (R)37%

Ross Perot (Reform)10%

Other1%

1992

Bill Clinton (D)42%+

George H.W. Bush (R)37%

Ross Perot (I)21%

1988

Michael S. Dukakis (D)49%

George H.W. Bush (R)50%+

Other1%

1984

Walter F. Mondale (D)42%

Ronald Reagan (R)57%+

Other1%

1980

Jimmy Carter (D)42%

Ronald Reagan (R)50%+

Other8%

1976

Jimmy Carter (D)54%+

Gerald Ford (R)44%

Other2%

1972

George S. McGovern (D) 44%

Richard M. Nixon (R) 55%+

Other1%

1968*

Hubert H. Humphrey (D) 59%

Richard Nixon (R)33%+

Other8%

1964*

Lyndon B. Johnson (D)76%+

Barry Goldwater (R)24%

1960*

John F. Kennedy (D)78%+

Richard Nixon (R)22%

+ Winner

*These polls were conducted right before these, decisions before exit polls were available. All other polls listed are exit polls.

Sources: American Religion Data Archive, 2000 U.S. Census, Los Angeles Times Poll, Gallup poll, CBS/New York Times Poll