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Obama Has Dramatically Changed Role of Faith-Based Office
Tweet Share on Facebook August 31, 2009 Comment (7)Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Earlier this month, President Obama's faith-based office marked its six-month anniversary. Although the news media has paid it little mind, the administration has quietly transformed the office from the one that George W. Bush launched in 2001.
Boosters say the Obama office gives religious leaders a real voice in shaping policy while deemphasizing its role under Bush as a matchmaker between religious groups and the national piggybank.
Critics say the office has kept too low a profile and is too focused on faith outreach, which they say is more political than substantive.
Here's the crux of my U.S. News Weekly column sizing up the office at the six-month mark, just posted at usnews.com:
Six months after its rollout, Obama's office has dramatically shifted gears from the one that Bush started from scratch in 2001. Bush's office sought to "level the playing field" for faith-based and community groups seeking federal grants to deliver social services, like counseling drug addicts and mentoring at-risk youth. Obama, by contrast, has tasked his office with four broad policy goals: bringing faith groups into the recovery and fighting poverty, reducing demand for abortion, promoting responsible fatherhood, and facilitating global interfaith dialogue. "We're moving from a sole focus on leveling the playing field," says Joshua DuBois, the office's executive director, "to forming partnerships with faith-based and community groups to help solve specific policy challenges."
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White House Reality Check Site Still Silent on Abortion
Tweet Share on Facebook August 31, 2009 Comment (10)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Since launching three weeks ago, the White House Reality Check Web site on healthcare reform has been updated several times to debunk a growing number of alleged myths about the Democrats' plan.
But the site is still silent on conservatives' charge that the plan will use taxpayer money to cover abortions. It's a stunning omission, given how much the government-funded abortion allegation has dominated this month's congressional town hall meetings on healthcare reform—and given that President Obama himself has called the charge a myth. "You've heard that this is all going to mean government funding of abortion," he said recently. "Not true."
Why does the White House site ignore such a big elephant in the room? I can think of two possible reasons.
The first is obvious: The abortion-in-healthcare-reform debate is one the administration would rather avoid, lest it consume the entire debate over reform. The other is that the White House sees the abortion-in-healthcare question very much as an open one and is still weighing options on exactly how government-controlled healthcare ought to treat abortion.
Have another theory?
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Revealed: Ted Kennedy's Letter to Pope Benedict, Vatican's Response
Tweet Share on Facebook August 31, 2009 Comment (14)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Incredible how much the days since Ted Kennedy's death have been dominated by revelations about his apparently deeply felt Roman Catholicism—from a priest's account of the senator's final hours to the decision to hold his funeral at an out-of-the-way church where Kennedy sought healing to stories of how his faith begat his political passions.
At Kennedy's burial on Saturday came another revelation, as Washington, D.C., Archbishop Emeritus Theodore McCarrick read from a poignant letter that President Obama delivered from Kennedy to Pope Benedict XVI last month, along with portions of the Vatican's reply.
Excerpts of Kennedy's letter to the pope:
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Despite Kennedy's Death, Democrats' Ethnic Catholic Tradition Lives On
Tweet Share on Facebook August 28, 2009 Comment (39)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Ted Kennedy's death is an end to several different eras, but Politics Daily's David Gibson warns against seeing it as the end of an era for the socially minded ethnic Catholic tradition in Democratic politics:
It is tempting to view Ted Kennedy's passing as the end of an era, both politically and culturally, but also religiously—the end of a reform-minded, socially oriented Catholicism that entered the mainstream in the 1960s and brought certain liberal values to the public square while remaining anchored, at times tenuously, to the religious (and ethnic) tradition that nurtured those values...
[But] surveys of young adult Catholics over recent years have shown that, in many respects, the younger generation resembles Kennedy's approach to faith and politics, with social justice and equality for women and gays as public markers of their religion, and devotion to the sacraments the lodestar of their private devotion.
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Readers Skeptical of Kennedy's Catholicism
Tweet Share on Facebook August 28, 2009 Comment (12)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Of the avalanche of comments coming in on Sen. Ted Kennedy's Catholicism, the huge majority fall into the skeptical/critical column. They're a counterpoint to the news media's mostly favorable Kennedy remembrances. Here's a sampling:
Mike of Minnesota:
The only way Ted Kennedy doesn't go to hell is if he had a last minute conversion. He never defended the catholic faith publicly. And he often violently opposed the teachings of the church in the legislation he sponsored and endorsed. He took the easy way out to ensure he maintained his position of power and influence. May God have mercy on his soul.
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Quote of the Week: A Catholic Priest With Ted Kennedy
Tweet Share on Facebook August 27, 2009 Comment (8)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
I'm launching a new quote-of-the-week feature on the blog today. Let me know when you come upon quotes worth featuring in this slot.
"The truth is, he expressed to his family that he did want to go. He did want to go to heaven. He was ready to go. There was a certain amount of peace, actually—in the family get-together last night. I couldn't help but think that the world doesn't know that part of Kennedy at all."
— The Rev. Patrick Tarrant on his final hours with Sen. Ted Kennedy. View an interview with Tarrant here.
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Ted Kennedy's Funeral at Church Where He Sought Healing
Tweet Share on Facebook August 27, 2009 Comment (9)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
The Boston church that will host Sen. Edward Kennedy's funeral mass on Saturday doesn't have air conditioning. It's less grand—and a lot less well known—than Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It lacks parking.
So why is the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help the staging ground for a historic event this weekend? Because Kennedy, like thousands of others, came to the church seeking help for medical ills. Boston Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson explains:
For years, thousands of Bostonians have sought healing by praying before a golden image of the Virgin Mary in a shrine on Mission Hill. They kneel before the painting, leave flowers by the rail, deposit notes in a glass bowl, turn on electronic candles, even drop off crutches or braces as a sign of a miraculous cure.
Many of the petitioners are poor and powerless.
But over the years, Senator Edward M. Kennedy also came to the shrine seeking healing, and now his family has chosen the landmark basilica in which the shrine is located as the site for the senator's funeral Saturday.
Kennedy visited the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help daily in 2002, while his daughter was being treated for lung cancer at the nearby Brigham and Women's Hospital, praying before the icon and meeting with a priest thought to have a healing touch. And the senator again visited the basilica last year, after he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
"The senator wanted to be buried from the basilica because of a deep connection developed here during his daily visits while his daughter, Kara, was going through cancer treatment,'' said Scott Ferson, a former Kennedy staffer who is helping the family with funeral preparations. "Because of her recovery, it remained an especially sacred place for him.''
The choice of the basilica, a puddingstone Romanesque Revival structure that punctuates the cityscape with its high octagonal cupola and twin spires, came as a surprise to many. . . .
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Your Thoughts on Ted Kennedy's Catholicism
Tweet Share on Facebook August 27, 2009 Comment (18)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Did Ted Kennedy's Catholicism really matter to him, as biographer Adam Clymer says?
Duane Lamers of Michigan is skeptical:
Ted Kennedy could have simply stepped outside the abortion battles in Congress. Instead, he was very active in securing abortion "rights" and voting against judicial candidates who were anti- Roe v Wade. That doesn't sound to me much like taking Catholic moral teaching on the subject very seriously.
And so he gets a sendoff from the basilica in Boston! No doubt with Cardinal O'Malley presiding and a host of hierarchs in attendance. And the bishops wonder why Catholics no longer attend Mass! Never a word of warning to Kennedy, but loads of criticism for GW Bush. The irony of it all!
But Bill Curry of Louisiana sees plenty of evidence that Kennedy took his Catholicism seriously:
It is hard to reconcile the senator's views on abortion with Catholic teaching. However, we must not forget that had an abiding concern for the common man (or woman). Those who would vote for a Republican simply because he or she is pro-life might be voting for more death (assuming abortion is killing) than if they voted for a pro-choice liberal such as Ted Kennedy.
Think of the lives that would have been saved if we'd not gone to Iraq and if we had government health care. TK's positions on Iraq and health care would have saved lives. I believe God will judge TK holistically, rather than on the basis of one issue. In any case, TK's position on abortion was probably informed by his ideas on separation of church and state, and his belief that the poor should have the same rights as the rich (i.e., a rich woman can afford to travel to where abortion is legal and safe; a poor woman cannot necessarily do that). If TK's conscience was clear on his position on abortion, then he should be ok w/the Catholic church.
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Q&A: Ted Kennedy Biographer Adam Clymer on Kennedy's Catholicism
Tweet Share on Facebook August 26, 2009 Comment (54)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
I spoke with Ted Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer, former chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, about the influence of Kennedy's Roman Catholicism on his life and career:
Some obituaries today are calling Ted Kennedy a devout Catholic. How important was his faith to him personally?
It meant a great deal to him. A friend of his told me how painful it was for him not to take [Holy Communion] between the time he got divorced and an annulment. He and [second wife] Vicki would often go to noontime mass if things were slow at the Capitol.I once asked him why someone as well off as him was so interested in the poor and the sick, and he said it was his mother's Catholic teaching: the Sermon on the Mount and the passage from Luke that to those who much is given, much is expected.
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Video: Ted Kennedy at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University
Tweet Share on Facebook August 26, 2009 Comment (4)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Nearly 25 years before it became fashionable for Democrats to engage religious right leaders, Ted Kennedy delivered a remarkable speech on faith and politics at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University (then called Liberty Baptist College).
Speaking in 1983, amid the first wave of modern Christian right activism—which Falwell helped unleash—Kennedy pushed back against the fledgling movement but also took on his own party's growing secularist base. The separation of church and state, Kennedy said, "as vital as it is, is not a simplistic and rigid command . . . [it] cannot mean an absolute separation between moral principles and political power."
The senator from Massachusetts outlined four tests for determining a proper religious role in politics. Almost a quarter-century later, Barack Obama struck a strikingly similar tone in his first major address on religion in politics, made to a gathering of Jim Wallis's Sojourners. "To say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates," Obama said," is a practical absurdity."
Video of the Kennedy speech's first few minutes reveals how comfortable he was in the lion's den, racking up laughs and applause:
Despite all that's been written and said about Democrats "getting religion" in recent years and about religion in politics entering a post-religious-right era, it's hard to imagine a liberal Democrat speaking at Liberty University today.
Read Kennedy's full address here. Hat tip to the Church of Jesus Christ blog.
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