Crossroads: Parsing Catholic prayers at the conventions

What did an archbishop and a cardinal teach us about faith issues in the two parties?

During one of the presidential elections during my decade teaching in Washington, D.C., there was more than the usual chatter about the importance of the so-called “Catholic vote” and their impact in swing states.

Now, that fact alone tells you that the election was more than a decade ago, before the national press decided that (#AllTogetherNow) White Evangelical Protestants were the only voters worthy of critical study and reporting. You know, it’s the whole “81% of White Evangelicals just love Donald Trump” thing. The reality, in the crushing vise of a two-party binary system, is more complex than that.

America’s most crucial swing voters, in the battleground states, have almost always been “Catholic voters.” Thus, during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, we looked (quite literally) at two symbolic Catholic acts of prayer during this summer’s Republican and Democratic national conventions.

My questions: Could we learn anything (maybe even in news coverage) about the Catholic swing voters being courted by the Republicans and the Democrats?

Now, at this point I want to flash back to that earlier White House race. I went to the Catholic Information Center near the White House and spent some time talking to a veteran priest. He laughed out loud when I asked about the “Catholic vote” and stressed that there is no such thing. Instead, he described four different Catholic votes. I have tweaked his typology a bit from previous GetReligion.org versions.

* Ex-Catholics. While most ex-Catholics are solid for the Democrats, the large chunk that has joined Evangelical and Pentecostal churches (especially Latinos) lean to GOP.

* Cultural Catholics who may go to church a few times a year. Most are Democrats or perhaps undecided voters, depending on what is happening with the economy, foreign policy, etc.

* Sunday-morning American Catholics. These voters are regulars in the pews and may even fill leadership roles in their parishes. This is the true Catholic “swing vote” and in recent elections has helped the GOP.

* The “sweats the details” Catholic (that’s the retired priest’s phrase) who goes to Confession, is active in the full sacramental life of the parish and almost consistently backs the Catholic Catechism. This is where the GOP has made its biggest gains in recent decades, but this is a very small slice of the American Catholic pie.

Writing at Religion Unplugged, religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling addressed the “Catholic vote” question, while adding some context about crucial voting blocs in the two parties:

Today’s nonreligious and anti-religious voters are crucial for Democrats. Biden did well with atheists (39% negative) but less so with agnostics (48% negative), and with the larger body of other Americans lacking religious affiliation, he posted a surprisingly high 58% negative.

This writer repeatedly asserts that political journalists over-cover evangelicals, who automatically give Republicans lopsided majorities, and under-cover Catholics, classic swing voters who’ve long been trending Republican. Catholicism has by far the largest denominational membership in each of the … [swing] states except Georgia.

Contrast the basic ISSUES at New York Times vs. The Catholic Register

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/18/us/politics/democrats-convention-platform.html 

Abortion and that is that. First Amendment? Religious liberty? Parental rights? 

Then, at the Catholic level:

https://www.ncregister.com/cna/cna-20240820-democratic-platform

https://religionnews.com/2024/08/20/faith-abounds-at-the-democratic-national-convention-but-dont-be-surprised/

Faith abounds at the Democratic National Convention, but don’t be surprised

The faith-fueled messaging may have surprised some conservatives, but it’s hardly news to anyone who kept a close eye on liberals over the past decade or so. The Democratic Party, although home to a growing (and sizable) subset of religiously unaffiliated voters, remains majority religious and majority Christian, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. More to the point: Although people of faith have long been at home among its ranks, religious rhetoric at Democratic Party conventions has garnered more headlines in recent years, with the 2016 gathering featuring a primetime address from a prominent pastor and the 2020 event including an entire section dedicated to faith.

On Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 3:06 PM Terry Mattingly <tmatt@tmatt.net> wrote:

https://www.archchicago.org/en/statement/-/article/2024/08/19/invocation-prayer-opening-the-democratic-national-convention-cardinal-blase-cupich-archbishop-of-chicago

Text of Cardinal Cupich’s invocation at the Democratic National Convention

Aug. 19, 2024

Español | Polski

We praise you, O God of all creation. Quicken in us a resolve to protect your handiwork. You are the source of every blessing that graces our lives and our nation.

We pray that you help us to truly understand and answer the sacred call of citizenship. We are a nation composed of every people and culture, united not by ties of blood, but by the profound aspirations of life, freedom, justice, and unbound hope. These aspirations are why our forebears saw America as a beacon of hope. And, with your steady guidance, Lord, may we remain so today.

In every generation, we are called to renew these aspirations, to re-weave the fabric of America. We do so when we live out the virtues that dwell in our hearts, but also when we confront our failures to root out ongoing injustices in our national life, especially those created by moral blindness and fear of the other.

We pray for peace, especially for people suffering the senselessness of war. But as we pray, we must also act, for building up the common good takes work. It takes love.

And so we pray: May our nation become more fully a builder of peace in our wounded world with the courage to imagine and pursue a loving future together. And may we as individual Americans become more fully the instruments of God’s peace.

Guide us, Lord, in taking up our responsibility to forge this new chapter of our nation’s history. Let it be rooted in the recognition that for us, as for every generation, unity triumphing over division is what advances human dignity and liberty.

Let it be propelled by the women and men elected to serve in public life, who know that service is the mark of true leadership.

And let this new chapter of our nation’s history be filled with overwhelming hope, a hope that refuses to narrow our national vision, but rather, as Pope Francis has said, “to dream dreams and see visions” of what by your grace our world can become.

We ask all of this, trusting in your ever provident care for us. AMEN

---

https://www.ncregister.com/news/archbishop-listecki-rnc-full-prayer-speech

July 16, 2024

Editor's Note: Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki led an opening prayer and invocation at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee July 15. Please find the full text below.


Lord, we thank you for our nation. Our Founding Fathers held the truth self-evident that all are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For 248 years, we have sustained this vision to guard the dignity of every life from conception to natural death, to protect their liberty especially to speak freely and to worship you and to support their pursuit of happiness through this life to the next.

We pray that you assist our elected officials and candidates always to protect our freedoms, to preserve our democracy, and to govern fairly. Grant them the wisdom every day to place the good of our nation above personal interest and to cherish our union. Teach us all to respect justice and our equality before the law.

Lord, protect our military. Teach us gratitude that we may never forget their selfless sacrifice, and protect also our first responders, police, firefighters and EMTs. For their bravery, too, gives us peace. There is a sacrifice that all Americans make to participate in the political process.

We ask that you receive his servant Corey Comperatore and we pray for those who were injured demonstrating their commitment to our democratic process.

Let us offer a moment of silence.

In the words of George Washington: "Almighty God, keep the United States of America in your holy protection and incline the hearts of the citizens to a brotherly affection and love for one another," through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Amen.

GREEK ORTHODOX:

https://www.goarch.org/-/archbishop-elpidophoros-benediction-at-the-democratic-national-convention-august-20

Leading prayers for the culture of death

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/leading-prayers-for-culture-death/ 

Phil Lawler

When Milwaukee’s Archbishop Jerome Listecki delivered the invocation for the Republican National Convention last month, he began with an appropriate challenge to all American politicians, reminding them: “Our Founding Fathers held the truth self-evident that all are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thus, subtly but unmistakably, he put the right to life in the first paragraph of his prayer. He quickly added that “we have sustained this vision to guard the dignity of every life from conception to natural death.”

Unfortunately the Republican convention did not rise to the challenge, and the GOP platform for 2024 is missing the strong right-to-life language that previous conventions had adopted. But at least the archbishop had made an appeal to the consciences of the conventioneers. He had followed up, too, with a prayer for the protection of religious freedom: a prayer that sounds more pointed today, as Congress weighs legislation that would eliminate “conscience clause” protection for religious believers.

In closing his short prayer, Archbishop Listecki made his petitions “through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” To be fair, he was quoting the Inaugural Prayer of George Washington—who, in happier times, did not shy away from invoking the Lord’s name.

This week Cardinal Blase Cupich chose not to mention the name of Jesus in his invocation for the Democratic convention. Evidently fearful of offending against inter-faith sensitivities, he addressed the “God of all creation.”

The first petition in the cardinal’s prayer was that we might “truly understand and answer the sacred call of citizenship.” And what is that sacred call? He went on:

We are a nation composed of every people and culture, united not by ties of blood, but by the profound aspirations of life, freedom, justice, and unbound hope. These aspirations are why our forebears saw America as a beacon of hope. And, with your steady guidance, Lord, may we remain so today.

Hope was the main theme of the cardinal’s invocation. After praying for peace, he concluded with a petition that:

…this new chapter of our nation’s history be filled with overwhelming hope, a hope that refuses to narrow our national vision, but rather, as Pope Francis has said, “to dream dreams and see visions” of what by your grace our world can become.

The “hope” that Cardinal Cupich seeks here is not recognizable as the theological virtue of hope, oriented toward the fulness of life in Jesus Christ. It seems instead to be a vision of what “our world can become”—that is, an encouragement for political leaders to build a better future. And while there is nothing wrong with that aspiration, one expects a religious leader to make at least some passing reference to our eternal destiny: to the City of God, which surpasses any expectations we might set for the City of Man. Thus in his prayer for the Republican convention, Archbishop Listecki referred to the “pursuit of happiness through this life to the next. [emphasis added]

No doubt Archbishop Listecki could have given Republican politicians a stronger reminder that souls as well as votes are at stake when we ponder the meaning of the “pursuit of happiness.” But Cardinal Cupich faced a much greater challenge when he addressed the Democratic crowd in Chicago. He was speaking to a political party poised to make unrestricted abortion the defining issue of its 2024 campaign, a party that had welcomed Planned Parenthood to perform abortions for conventioneers, a party dedicated to eliminating “conscience rights” for doctors who don’t want to perform abortions and taxpayers who don’t want to subsidize them, a party that was pledged to help young people mutilate themselves in conformance with gender ideology, a party whose nominee has questioned whether a practicing Catholic could be qualified as a judicial nominee. On the whole constellation of moral issues that Pope John Paul II associated with the “culture of death,” the Democratic Party was and is squarely in opposition to Catholic teaching.

Yet nowhere in his invocation did Cardinal Cupich offer the slightest challenge to the perverse ideology that ruled the Democratic convention. Quite the contrary; the few passages in his prayer that might have been interpreted as references to current political issues sounded more like encouragement for the Democrats. When the cardinal spoke of “a nation composed of every people and culture,” was he nodding approval for the Democrats’ welcome to immigrants? When he decried “fear of the other,” was that a reference to the diversity-and-equity agenda? Certainly there was nothing in the cardinal’s invocation that could be read as even a hint of disapproval for the Democratic party’s platform.

The history of Christianity shows a steady contest between religious and secular influences: between the guidance of the Church and the power of the State. At their best, Church leaders correct and admonish political leaders. Even a fundamentally healthy state needs those corrections and admonitions, and wise statesmen welcome them. But a corrupt regime, which urgently needs correction, resents them. So weak churchmen become the cheerleaders for degraded ruling regimes.

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