'Congress Shall Make No Law...'

With a new regime installed, perhaps politics and religion can be discussed, and perhaps the inanely tolerant American public can recognize that religion really does matter. The popular myth that organized religion is just an organized piety works fine so long as one avoids consideration of specific issues. But a good many political questions could not be settled without reference to the Church, even if it were willing.

Parochial schools, for example, cannot receive public support. But, because the Court-defined religion of the public schools is agnosticism and no religious instruction can be offered by them, anyone who believes that instruction in religion is an essential part of all education finds himself effectively barred from the schools he is taxed for. It is merely word-chopping to say that he bars himself by his own religion; freedom of religion assumes that he will incur no such penalty for his piety.

When clergy demand laws against gambling in a state where it is legal, or withhold communion to prevent discrimination, it becomes ludicrous to pretend that religion and government are absolutely divisible. American religious freedom rose out of such a notion, but it is only valid compared to states with established churches.

The little incidents are the most disturbing, because they suggest the abuses that deep faith so blindly perpetrates. The dicta of the Puerto Rican bishops were a mere public scandal, for they didn't manage to unseat Munoz Marin, and de Gaulle's proposal to subsidize parochial schools (a sharp break with French secular tradition) is mostly fodder for hard shell baptists. But the Bakimore YMCA, which denied space for a birth control clinic because the Church threatened to boycott the United Fund Appeal, like the Santa Fe Mexican who was threatened with excommunication if her son attended a non-parochial school, suggest the perpetual abuses of an authoritarian church.

Birth control is the finest example of the narrow line between the church and state. For while the hierarchy from Rome has said that it is not the task of Catholics to impose their beliefs on others (apparently this was not clearly heard in San Juan), there is no easy line. Birth control, like the drug traffic and pornography, easily becomes a public issue and the moral outlook, rather than just the position of the moment, is circumscribed for a Catholic. One of the self-defined functions of American government has been the prevention of public immorality.

Historically, the Church has associated itself with dictatorships so often that a slightly unfair association has grown, one enforced by the situation in Franco's Spain. But any international church which does believe religion a foundation for good behavior has the same inevitable authoritarian tendencies as a political Internationale.

This is not, of course, a tocsin for bigoted anti-Catholicism (opposing Catholics more than necessary). But Americans would be unusually wise to recognize that mentioning religion, or measuring the anti-Catholic vote, is more than stirring bias. Commentary on religion can be sheer blind paranoia, but it can also be a realistic acknowledgement that belief matters in politics: less, perhaps than allegiance to Moscow, but quite a lot more than commitment to Barry Goldwater or Eleanor Roosevelt.