Coming up from the land down under: A familiar church-state standoff

"Australian Catholic PM candidate tells Church to 'butt out' of politics" is a headline from http://www.cathnews.com/:

The race has begun to see who will lead Australia as the next Prime Minister, but it seems as if the current government is not only fighting the Opposition, but the country's religious leaders. . . . Tony Abbott, Australia's most prominent Catholic politician, is at war with the churches over their criticisms of the Coalition's industrial relations policy.

Abbott has told Church leaders to butt out of politics and stick to encouraging morality among their flocks, The Age has reported.

"There are no moral problems with the IR laws. A political argument is not transformed into a moral argument simply because it's delivered with an enormous dollop of sanctimony," Abbott said.

"I do think that if church men spent more time encouraging virtue in people and less time demanding virtue from governments we would have ultimately a better society."

Bishop of Parramatta Kevin Manning said the IR policy put business profit before people. Echoing Bishop Manning, Catholic social justice groups have expressed fears that the Government's WorkChoices legislation unfairly affects the vulnerable and cuts the time families can spend together. . . "Mr Abbott sounds like someone who is panicking", Bishop Manning said.

The argument will probably seem familiar to American Catholics who likewise debate the proper role of church leadership in "political" matters. The appropriateness of the church's shout-out on a social or political issue appears to be measured along ideological lines. For instance, the U.S. Bishops' opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been widely criticized by some members of the American church, particularly among conservative Catholic pundits like George Weigel, who wondered aloud if bishops had the proper "charism" for political-ish judgment making about war- and mayhem-making.

From a NY Times piece by Peter Steinfels:

" . . . . [I]n the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Weigel insisted that religious leaders should exercise 'political modesty' in the public debate, recognizing that government officials 'are more fully informed about the relevant facts.' Employing the term 'charism,' usually associated with saints who founded religious orders, he proposed that government officials enjoyed a 'charism of political discernment' that was 'not shared by bishops, stated clerks, rabbis, imams, or ecumenical and interreligious agencies.'"

The thrust of these emphases was of course to undercut the moral objections of many religious leaders about the potential human and political costs of invading Iraq.

In his latest essay [in last April's First Things], Mr. Weigel grapples with the fact that those costs have become painfully evident, and the larger concerns of security, justice and freedom increasingly elusory. Now his case for war scarcely mentions the earlier suspicion of weapons of mass destruction but stresses a need to defeat jihadi terrorism and establish responsible government and peace throughout the Middle East.

He laments "mistakes made by analysts and U.S. policy makers," who remain unidentified except for the "convenient scapegoat," Donald H. Rumsfeld. Finally, he defends the administration's latest strategy against an alternative that he defines simply as "we're out."

In all this, he merely alludes to his earlier critique of the "presumption against war" and makes no mention of the "charism of political discernment." But his animus toward antiwar religious leaders is unabated.

Which is what struck the editors of Commonweal . . . In contrast to the second thoughts of many liberals originally convinced of the Iraq war's necessity, the editors note, "no such admissions of error, or even regret, have been issued by outspoken Catholic neoconservatives." Does Mr. Weigel's long list of American miscalculations, they wonder, "cast doubt on his claim" about the government's "charism of political discernment"? Reviewing the prudential warnings and moral qualms issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "it is hard not to conclude," the editors write, "that the bishops' charism, rather than the president's, has better served the nation."

See that cafeteria-conservative Catholicism can get even a really smart fella like George Weigel into trouble. But welcome to the buffet George, there's plenty enuf room here for everybody!