[Dialogue] Kerry and Religion - an article

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

This probably isn't definitive, but it's interesting.

Doris Hahn




NOT A PRODIGAL SON
By Deborah Caldwell (Beliefnet’s Senior Religion
Correspondent)

John Kerry was never a Prodigal Son. His faith journey
contains no leave-taking and triumphant return, no
revival, no conversion on the road to Damascus. Unlike
President Bush--a Protestant who experienced a
profound conversion at age 40 under the Rev. Billy
Graham's tutelage--Kerry has been a steady,
churchgoing Catholic literally since the day he was
born. 
For Americans who have grown accustomed in the last
four years to a certain kind of spiritual biography,
Kerry's will seem starkly different. He uses different
language, has a different connection to ritual, and
most likely a different relationship with Jesus
Christ. His faith life illustrates not only the
stylistic and theological differences between
Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism, but also
the differences between American Catholicism of an
earlier generation and that which has grown in the
last few decades. 
According to those who know him, Kerry is a religious
man. On the campaign trail, he is said to carry a
rosary, a prayer book, and a St. Christopher medal
(the patron saint of travelers). He attends Mass
regularly--complaining when his campaign staff doesn't
leave time in his schedule for it. 
His father, Richard, was a Catholic, and his mother,
Rosemary, was an Episcopalian who raised the four
children as Catholics. Kerry was baptized and reared
in the pre-Second Vatican Council Catholic Church,
with its strict rules and Latin Mass. When he was 10
and the family was living in Berlin, his parents sent
John to a boarding school in Switzerland. The young
boy would sit alone in the chapel's back pew, staring
at the altar or lighting a candle, according to his
biographer, Douglas Brinkley, author of Tour of Duty. 
Although Kerry is descended from John Winthrop, the
first Massachusetts governor, and the prominent
Massachusetts Forbes family, his father was in the
foreign service and was, essentially, a government
worker--not a member of the upper class. John Kerry's
wealthy and childless Aunt Clara paid for his private
schooling. So although Kerry rubbed shoulders with
rich people throughout his childhood, he was a lonely,
not-quite-as-wealthy outsider--a little too serious,
eager, and dorky to fit in to the casual, sarcastic
culture of upper-class New England. 
"I thought of being a priest," Kerry recalled. "I was
very religious while at school in Switzerland. I was
an altar boy and prayed all the time. I was very
centered around the Mass and the church." What Bible
passages moved him most? "The letters of Paul," he
said, "taught me not to feel sorry for myself." 
As a teenager he attended St. Paul's, an Episcopal
boarding school where he was one of the only
Catholics. Kerry took a taxi into town to attend Mass
while the other boys went to the on-campus Episcopal
chapel. 
There, Kerry met his most important spiritual mentor:
the late Rev. Richard Walker, a black Episcopal priest
who went on to become Bishop of Washington. According
to Brinkley, Kerry and his pal Daniel Barbiero spent
evenings listening to Walker discuss civil rights and
faith. Kerry was "always quite religious," Barbiero
told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 
When Kerry and Barbiero later arrived at Yale
together, Barbiero let his religious life slide, while
Kerry still attended Mass. "One of the first things he
did when he got there was to find out where the
Catholic Church was," Barbiero said. 
Kerry has said his religious faith propelled him to
join the Navy and go to Vietnam, because he wanted to
please God. Six of his closest friends died there, and
Kerry received the Silver and Bronze stars for valor
and three Purple Hearts for minor injuries. Barbiero
remembers carrying a Catholic missal into battle;
Kerry carried a rosary and prayed it daily. "We viewed
those things as keeping the good Lord as close to us
as possible during what we knew would be a difficult
time," Barbiero said. 
When Kerry got home from Vietnam, he told Time
Magazine, he went through what he calls a "period of a
little bit of anger and agnosticism, but subsequently,
I did a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and
really came to understand how all those terrible
things fit." 
Indeed, Kerry recently described his Catholicism as
"an important part of getting through tough periods in
my life and remains a bedrock of values--of sureness,
I guess--about who I am, where we all fit, what our
role is on this planet." 
As John Kerry grew older, Catholicism was changing
dramatically. 
Between 1962 and 1965, Catholics worldwide gathered in
Rome for the Second Vatican Council, which brought
sweeping change to the church. Many Catholics at that
time, particularly Americans, felt liberated by new
Vatican encouragement to think for themselves and to
evaluate moral decisions based on Christian
conscience. This is why, for example, so many American
Catholics--upwards of 90 percent--reject church
teaching banning artificial birth control: to them it
seems wrong, and they feel Vatican II gave them
license to make that decision. 
The Rev. John Ardis, director of the Paulist Center in
Boston, where Kerry often worships, believes the
senator typifies Catholics of his generation. "Vatican
II called us to a greater participation in the church.
It called us to greater ownership of the church. For
the Paulists, that would also mean we emphasize taking
our faith into the workplace," Ardis told Beliefnet on
Wednesday. "And that is clearly what he has
done--taken it into his life's work." 
Vatican II also emphasized what is called Catholic
Social Teaching, a body of ideas about how the church
deals with issues in the world. Since the 1960s,
liberal and moderate Catholics inspired by those
teachings have been loosely called "social justice"
Catholics--emphasizing work with the poor, fair wages,
nuclear non-proliferation, environmental concern, and
just immigration practices. In addition, many of these
Catholics emphasize what the late Cardinal Joseph
Bernardin of Chicago coined the seamless garment life
ethic: that all life is sacred, and therefore abortion
and war-mongering and the death penalty are wrong. 
Conservatives argue that Vatican II had some negative
side effects, including an increase in divorce among
Catholics. John Kerry typified his generation of
Catholics in that way, too. In 1970, he married Julia
Thorne, an Episcopalian who is the twin sister of
Kerry's Yale friend, David Thorne. Kerry apparently
didn't insist on a Catholic upbringing for the
children. Kerry and Thorne did, however, have the
marriage recognized by the Catholic Church. "He and
Julia got a priest's blessing on Long Island before
they got married in a more ecumenical ceremony on my
grandmother's lawn," David Thorne said. 
Julia battled depression and chose to end the marriage
in 1982. After six years of formal separation, the
couple finally divorced in 1988. 
In 1992, Kerry met Teresa Heinz while fumbling his way
through a Portuguese hymn at a Catholic Mass in Rio de
Janeiro. They were both attending a United
Nations-sponsored Earth Summit. When they wed three
years later, Kerry's divorce forced them to marry
outside the church, which doesn't officially permit
it. But Heinz Kerry was reportedly uncomfortable in
what is called an "irregular relationship" with
Catholicism. So in 1997 Kerry applied for and was
granted an annulment of his previous marriage--an act
that allowed them to receive communion. 
When Kerry is home, he attends the Paulist Center on
Boston Commons, an easy walk from his house. It is not
a traditional parish, but its members call it an
"intentional community" because they choose to worship
there--many of them driving from all over New England.
Built in 1970 by the Paulists (a religious order like
the Jesuits), it operates with the permission of
Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston, but is financially
independent of the Church. 
The Paulist Center emphazes liturgy, music, and
helping the needy. The center attracts as many as
1,000 worshippers at its four weekend Masses, and has
2,400 families on its mailing list, says Ardis, the
center's director. 
"He worships here regularly when they're in town, but
we've never sat down and had any kind of at-length
conversation about his faith," Ardis says. "In some
ways I probably have the same relationship with him
that priests have with most parishioners--which is
more contact at Sunday mass rather than at other
times. With only about 10 to 15 percent of
parishioners do you have a higher level of
relationship than that." 
The center has a nuts and berries sort of reputation,
with a lot of campus-ministry types in attendance. It
is sometimes picketed by pro-life activists because it
is Kerry's home church. But it isn't all that unusual;
similar intellectual, liberal-leaning Catholic centers
full of pro-choice Catholics dot the American
landscape, especially in university towns. 
Ardis says Kerry is committed to the social justice
work of the center, including a Wednesday night dinner
for 200 homeless people, a food pantry and a tutoring
program for inner-city children. Kerry participated in
a 20-mile walk for hunger sponsored by the church, and
he has served the homeless at least once on a
Wednesday night, Ardis says. "If we look at his track
record, it is reaching out to the most needy of
society," says Ardis. 
A December 2003 interview with the Interfaith Alliance
probably comes closest to reflecting the candidate's
true sensibility. In it, Kerry called his faith "your
guidepost, your sort of moral compass, your sustaining
force if you will, in everything that you do.
But...maybe it's a little bit the New Englander in me
or something--you wear it in your heart and in your
soul, not necessarily on your sleeve....There are all
the lessons of a lifetime of my relationship as a
person of faith, but not something that I think you
ought to push at people every single day in the
secular world." 
Of course that is very different from the obligation
taught to evangelical Christians--such as George W.
Bush--to give a testimony about their conversion
experience. It's not as if Catholics (or even
non-evangelical Protestants) mind talking about their
personal spiritual story when asked. It's just that
spontaneously sharing one's testimony is simply not
done in those circles. The average Catholic of Kerry's
generation, or any other generation, would probably
wince at the thought of talking publicly about a
"personal relationship" with Jesus. 
Yet Catholics (and non-evangelical Protestants) do
have a connection with Jesus. Kerry accesses it
through his relationship with Mary, the mother of
Jesus, when he prays the rosary. Like all Catholics,
he makes an intense physical connection to Jesus' body
and blood during Communion. The liturgy, meanwhile,
binds Catholics to tradition, and through its sacred
beauty allows the worshipper to drift into a
meditative union with God. 
But you won't ever hear Kerry saying he's "feeling
blessed by the Lord" on a particular day or talk about
God using him as an "instrument." 
How has his Catholicism affected his political
approach? Had he been a Catholic raised in, say, the
1940s, it would have likely meant that John Kerry's
positions would reflect those of the Church. But some
think Vatican II unleashed the phenomenon of the
"cafeteria Catholic," people who embrace Catholicism
but not all its teachings. Michele Dillon, a
University of New Hampshire sociologist and
Catholicism expert, says majorities of American
Catholics disagree with church teaching against birth
control (93%), divorce (65%), married priests (60%)
and female priests (60%). Even on abortion, at least
two-thirds of American Catholics are in some sense
pro-choice, Dillon says. 
Teresa Heinz Kerry calls herself pro-choice, but in
June told Barbara Walters that she considers abortion
a "dreadful reality." Perhaps Kerry has been
influenced by his wife. In a July interview in Iowa,
he said, to the surprise of some observers: "I oppose
abortion, personally. I don't like abortion. I believe
life does begin at conception." Still, he remains
pro-choice, the position that has landed him in
trouble with the Catholic Church. Some bishops have
argued that his position on abortion is so immoral he
should be denied Communion. 
All during the spring, bishops in Colorado Springs,
St. Louis, Nebraska, Orlando, Newark, Trenton, and
Camden publicly announced they would deny Communion to
pro-choice Catholic politicians in their
dioceses--most notably, of course, Kerry. Media
coverage was intense. As a result, Kerry has decided
to take Communion in liberal Catholic centers around
the country, with photographers trailing him at every
stop. 
Kerry never publicly commented on the controversy,
though he hasn't shied from criticism of the Vatican
in the past. Last July the Vatican issued another
document opposing legal recognition for gay unions and
urging Catholic politicians to hew to that position.
"To vote in favor of a law so harmful to the common
good is gravely immoral," it said. 
This prompted Kerry to criticize the Vatican. "I
believe in the church and I care about it enormously,"
he said. "But I think that it's important to not have
the church instructing politicians. That is an
inappropriate crossing of the line in America." 
His critics are saying, in effect, he's a "bad
Catholic." But that doesn't mean he'll be viewed that
way by the majority of American Catholics. "John Kerry
is as good a Catholic as other American Catholics are
themselves," Dillon told Beliefnet. "He would be an
outlier if he were pro-life, pro-death penalty and
anti-labor." 
And there are some aspects of Catholic teaching that
Kerry embraces fully. In his autobiography, "A Call to
Service," he writes that "being an American Catholic
at this particular moment in history has three
particular implications...The first two follow
directly from the two great commandments set forth in
the Scriptures: our obligations to love God with all
our hearts, souls, and minds and to love our neighbors
as ourselves. The first commandment means we must
believe that there are absolute standards of right and
wrong. They may not always be that clear, but they
exist, and it is our duty to honor them as best we
can. 
"The second commandment means that our commitment to
equal rights and social justice, here and around the
world, is not simply a matter of political fashion or
economic and social theory but a direct command from
God..." 
The third facet, he said, is the constitutional
principle of the separation of church and state--a
tradition made clear by President Kennedy. "He helped
make religious affiliation a non-issue in American
politics," Kerry wrote. "It should stay that way." 
In an Indianapolis speech in June to members of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church, Kerry talked about
his belief that politicians honor God by helping
others through government policies. "I am running for
president because it's time to turn the words into
deeds and faith into action," Kerry said. "Scripture
tells us there is a time to break down and a time to
build up. This is our time to break down divisions and
build up unity." 
In A Call to Service, Kerry wrote that he believes the
Bible calls for practicing social justice and equal
rights. He also criticized religious opposition to gay
rights. "I believe that this and every other form of
discrimination is opposed to the spirit of the Bible,"
he wrote. 
Though it's not clear what effect it's had on him,
Kerry's spiritual biography added a new chapter during
the campaign when he discovered for the first time
that his grandfather was an Austrian Jew named Fritz
Kohn who converted to Catholicism with his wife, Ida
Lowe, then changed his name to Frederick Kerry and
moved to the United States. Though he was a successful
and well-known businessman in Brookline, Mass.,
Frederick Kerry eventually lost three fortunes--and
committed suicide in 1921. John Kerry apparently knew
none of this history when it was excavated by the
Boston Globe a year ago. 
Kerry has said repeatedly that he draws inspiration
from his family. "My parents helped me understand at
an early age that we are all put on this earth for
something greater than ourselves, and that's something
my mother taught me too," Kerry said on the campaign
trail in early July. 
Kerry will never be the kind of glad-handing guy who
grabs a voter's hand and says he'll pray for them. He
is a typically devout Catholic who has never had a
crisis of faith or a lightning bolt from on high. Yet
a June 2004 Time magazine poll found that only 7
percent of voters described Kerry as a "man of strong
religious faith." A Pew Center poll indicated that
only a quarter knew he's Catholic. Numerous other
polls show that Americans who attend church regularly
are overwhelmingly pro-Bush. 
Kerry is now wrestling with how and when to discuss
his faith. His campaign staff has reluctantly
concluded that remaining silent will merely allow the
Republicans to define him as a secular Democrat out of
the mainstream. About two months ago, Democratic
consultants including Mike McCurry, President
Clinton's former spokesman, met with senior Kerry
officials to press their case that Kerry had to find
his religious voice. McCurry told Beliefnet: "They
said, 'It's very hard for Kerry to do. It's just not a
comfortable thing for him to address." 
He has sympathy for Kerry's discomfort. "If you ask a
Catholic in the Northeast to talk about his faith, he
might say, 'Huh? What is this, Catechism?' Kerry is
exactly in that category." 
But Kerry appears to be trying harder lately. A
campaign ad released on July 26 directly tackled the
faith issue. In it, Kerry says the following: "In
Vietnam I think most of the time I wore a rosary
around my neck when we went into battle. So I believe.
I still believe. And I have great personal faith and I
think the more you learn about the universe; the more
you learn about the unanswered questions, the harder
it is for many people not to, in my judgment." 
And so, after his official nomination for President,
Kerry may have no choice. We may soon witness him
doing something he hasn't done in 40 years: wearing a
rosary around his neck, and his religion on his
sleeve.