11/19/00

A funny thing happened on the way to the polls …

Nov. 9, in the Church’s year of grace, is the annual liturgical celebration of the anniversary of the dedication of the Cathedral of Rome, St. John Lateran. So why, one might ask, is this feast cluttering up our calendar? One response is: because it celebrates the freedom of the Church. In 324 A.D., over fourteen hundred years before the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave legal protection to all religions, imperial Rome granted freedom of religion to Christians. The Emperor Constantine allowed Christians to live publicly as Christians in the Roman Empire without fear of persecution. Constantine gave Pope Sylvester I some land on the outskirts of Rome belonging to the Lateran family, and Christians came out of the catacombs and basements where they had celebrated the Eucharist for three hundred years to build for the first time a Church in which to worship God. In the bricks and mortar of St. John Lateran, the faith became public. On its cornerstone is inscribed “omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput” (the mother and head of all churches of the city and the world).

Ancient Rome recognized many religions, including the Jewish faith, although its own form of paganism was the official state cult. Several generations after Constantine called an end to state persecution of Christians, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great (527-565) declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire. In the years to come, the relationship between the Emperor and the Church was much closer in the East than in the West because, as the Western Empire began to dissolve, the Church of Rome converted the tribes that were invading the Empire and cast her lot with them. Inevitably, tensions arose with the Byzantine Emperor as the Church sought protection of her freedom from political and military leaders who were his rivals.

Freedom of religion has had a stormy history; but for Christians, and all other believers as well, freedom of religion must be more than freedom of personal conscience and more than freedom of worship. A religion is truly free only when one can profess it publicly without fear of persecution, when it can exist institutionally and help shape society and when its voice is at least minimally respected even by those who do not adhere to it.

When religion is not free, all freedoms are in jeopardy. Nov. 9 is not only the anniversary of the dedication of St. John Lateran in Rome; it is also the anniversary of Kristallnacht when, in 1938, the Nazis destroyed Jewish property in Germany and then went on to destroy the Jews themselves. Destroyed also in Nazi Germany was freedom itself.

In our form of constitutional democracy, public freedoms are protected by the processes of self-government. Election of those who govern us is the most important of these processes. As I write these lines, the results of the presidential race on Nov. 7 are still uncertain. My own experience of voting in this election was marked by my discovery that there are two people named Francis George registered to vote and giving as their address the Cardinal’s residence but with different social security numbers, different middle initials and different signatures. Was this irregularity a case of voter fraud or a prank? Such questions need to be investigated, because our form of government requires popular trust in the processes by which we choose those who govern us.

Popular trust in the electoral process is eroded when the cost of running for office is so prohibitive that a candidate has to sell his or her soul in order to find the funds necessary to mount a campaign. Campaign finance reform is an issue that seems to garner support until it is translated into concrete proposals, when everyone runs for cover. In 1998, the Board of the Catholic Conference of Illinois, the Church’s public policy arm in our State, asked a working group from the Catholic Political Responsibility Project to write a paper on campaign finance reform. Their draft document says: “People with more money should not be allowed to dominate the political debate or monopolize access to elected officials. Access to money or possession of wealth should not be the prerequisite to conducting a viable campaign for public office.” In 1996, candidates spent 2.7 billion dollars on races for national and state offices. The cost of running for office in 2000 has been even greater. This is an invitation to personal corruption and to distortion of the government’s agenda. The poor and the most disadvantaged take second place to the interests of campaign contributors.

Much of the money raised to finance a campaign is spent on political advertising. Who really benefits? “It is difficult to see that anyone, the public or the candidates, benefits from this method, with the exception of the broadcast industry, which profits greatly from the sale of these ads and is increasingly dependent upon them for revenue.”

Campaign finance reform will have another chance to be explored once the current electoral process is completed. The bishops of Illinois and the Illinois Catholic Conference will return to it in the months to come. Illinois has excellent campaign contribution disclosure laws; but we are one of the few States that place no restriction on the amount of money any one donor, including corporations, labor unions and other large organizations, can contribute to a particular candidate.

Abolishing the electoral college is another reform sure to be discussed again in the months to come. The difficulty of ascertaining the vote in Florida and the possibility of delaying the certification of the winner because of challenges in the courts will give new credence to arguments in favor of choosing the President by direct popular election. It’s worth serious consideration, although abolishing the electoral college would likely increase the need for popular vote recounts.

The possible appeal to the courts brings home a peculiar truth about the American political system. One could argue that the real rulers of the country are judges, most of them unelected. Each spring, at the end of the Supreme Court session, we hold our collective breath and wait to hear how nine unelected jurists tell us we are to live together. There is no dimension of our experience, personal or social, that cannot be laid before the courts, which have the last word on what we must do. Their decisions make headlines and determine the conditions of life in the United States. A reform worth considering, it seems to me, is the direct election of Supreme Court Justices. Pushing this “modest proposal” a bit further, direct election of the Justices would mean we could abolish the Presidency and the Senate, since these now serve mostly as an electoral college to choose judges. Running the federal government with only a House of Representatives and an elected Supreme Court to second guess the legislators would downsize the government and decrease the money needed for salaries. This money could then be given to poor parents who want to send their children to non-government schools.

Real political reform is possible, of course, only if we extend the right to vote to unborn children. There may not be enough of them to guarantee their right to life; minorities are always threatened. With the right to vote, however, unborn babies might be able to have enough influence on public policy to find some protection in law. Especially if they were voting for Supreme Court Justices. (Just to avoid any possible misunderstanding: these last two paragraphs are serious in intent but not literal in their proposals.)

God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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