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I believe in a separation of church and state, but I also believe in a person’s right to have devotion to some deeper meaning: faith. Working out in the gym on Tuesday morning, I had the enlightened displeasure of watching Katie Couric and her overpaid smile inform me that Sen. John Kerry attending church on Easter may be a problem for him politically. I was taken aback.
You’d have to be an idiot to not know that President George W. Bush wears his faith on his sleeve. Sure, he has clever speech writers and a boatload of interns telling him when to say “God” and when not to. It is important, however, that you understand this is not another “Bush v. Kerry” column from me. We’re not thinking about the connections between personal faith and being a politician. It may be easier if I boil it down to the facts.
Before Easter, Archbishop of Boston Shawn O’Malley stated that pro-choice Catholics “are in a state of grave sin and cannot properly take communion.” This statement was presumably aimed at politicians – most notably Kerry. Gee thanks O’Malley. You can kindly get off your soapbox now, and stop preaching to the choir because the only people who were listening to him over-value his judgement anyway.
I find religious figures who point the finger at politicians with such ease to be infuriating. What’s that you say O’Mally? Your sex abuse scandal phone is ringing. Better pick it up and continue the deceit of thousands of steadfast Catholics.
All personal jabs aside, O’Mally seemed to be communicating indirectly to Kerry, a Catholic, that he should have voluntarily abstained from Catholic mass due to his political belief. As Kerry has done in the past, he just kept on moving and went to Catholic mass at Boston’s Paulist Center on Sunday.
I think it’s funny when people – Archbishops or lay people – act like they’ve got the faith concept of life figured out. Please, inform us all what it’s like to have unlocked something that has challenged some and plagued others for centuries. O’Malley doesn’t have it figured out, priests certainly don’t have it figured out and neither does Kerry. The amount of backlash that he received, however, seemed a little extreme.
To me, it just looks like fundamentalist Catholics cannot accept the fact that a man of Kerry’s political influence and stature in society may, gasp, disagree with a rule in the Good Book. He must be the first person to go against a moral tenet that the Pope has ordained sacred.
Unfortunately, Kerry doesn’t have the chance to say something like this, so I’ll be his liaison to the world: You stay out of my shit, and I’ll stay out of yours. You may have the legal right to say whatever you want, but it seems like common sense that people shouldn’t be telling others how to live their lives – with faith or without it. It’s clear that being a Catholic is important to Kerry. I presume he figured out his stance on abortion some time ago, and for holier-than-thou figures in the upper echelon of religious society to be spouting fire and brim stone just doesn’t set well with me.
In the end, Kerry considers his support of stem cell research and civil unions for gay and lesbian couples to be “matters of conscience.” There’s one for you, conscience. Kerry’s no saint, but neither is Bush. I don’t see the Pope calling Dubya on the phone, asking him why he sanctioned the death of thousands of Iraqis.
Being a politician, Kerry has come up with a much more diplomatic way of conveying his idea. I guess no one can put it better than the man himself. In a quote to Reuters News Services, Kerry said, “I fully intend to practice my religion separately from what I do with respect to my public life and that’s the way it ought to be in America. There is a separation of church and state in America and we have prided ourselves about that all … of our history.” Amen to that.
Marshall Dury is a senior English major.
