On deaf ears?
If a bishops conference releases a document intended to help Catholics with their voting choices but hardly anyone reads it, does it make a difference?
That’s the question U.S. Catholic bishops are asking themselves as they learn the results of a new survey commissioned by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. According to the findings — presented by Peter Steinfels at a Fordham forum on Tuesday — just 16 percent of Catholics remember even hearing about the most recent Faithful Citizenship statement. Three-quarters of those who were aware of the document said it had “no influence at all” on how they voted. And about the same number of respondents who had not heard of the document said it probably would have had the same effect on their political choices. (You can read the full report right here [.pdf]; it will be available on the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture Web site soon, along with the transcript of Tuesday’s forum.)
Every four years since 1976 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has published a statement designed to help Catholics bring their faith to bear on their political choices. In recent election cycles, both the document (most recently called Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship) and the process of putting it together have been the subjects of some criticism. Conservatives accuse the bishops of leaving too much wiggle room for Catholic voters to support candidates who aren’t strong enough on the life issues. Liberals complain that the statement emphasizes abortion, gay marriage, and embryo-destructive research to the near exclusion of other key aspects of Catholic social teaching. Even if 1 percentage point of the whole sample represents about 570,000 Catholic adults, when 84 percent of them say they either were not sure whether they’d heard of Faithful Citizenship or had not heard of it at all, then is the document really worth the effort?
Despite the bishops’ claim that Faithful Citizenship is not intended to tell Catholics how to vote, not everyone agrees. According to the study, 43 percent of Catholics who were aware of the document agreed that “the bishops outlined the moral principles in a way that left little doubt about which party or candidates they thought Catholics should support.” About one-third said they thought the bishops left the final choice to voters. And 23 percent had no impression one way or the other.
So how did respondents hear about FC? A plurality (43 percent) can’t recall. About a quarter heard about it in their parish, 20 percent say they learned of it in the secular media, and just 9 percent heard about it the Catholic media (woe is us).
But there’s hearing about FC and then there’s reading it. Faithful Citizenship comes in two forms — full length and condensed. Less than 1 percent of adult Catholics have read the full statement, and just 2 percent say they’ve read the shorter version. That means 90 percent of adult Catholics did not read the ’08 FC in any form.
Perhaps more troubling for the bishops, 74 percent of Catholics who were aware of FC say it had “no influence at all” on the way they voted. Just 4 percent of Catholics overall say that the document was a major influence on their political choices or that it would have been had they heard of it.
The subgroups within the data set are also revealing, if not terribly surprising:
* Mass attendance: Of course, frequent Mass attenders are more likely to have heard of FC (34 percent), and are more likely to say that the bishops left the final choice up to Catholic voters (33 percent).
* Regional differences: Midwestern Catholics were most aware of FC and least likely to say it had no influence at all.
* Educational background: There was no difference in the responses of those who had gone to Catholic grade school and those who had not. The differences emerge in those who had gone to Catholic high school and Catholic college. Twenty-six percent of respondents who had gone to Catholic high school or college were aware of FC. Just 15 percent of those who had not gone to such schools had heard of FC. Despite that higher level of awareness, however, just 5 percent of those who had gone to Catholic college said FC was a major influence in 2008.
* Language: Eighteen percent of respondents who took the survey in English were aware of FC. Just 5 percent of those who took the survey in Spanish had heard of it.
* Time of initiation: Twenty-three percent of adult converts (using the term loosely) had heard of FC, while 16 percent of those who became Catholic as infants were aware of the document. More interesting, all of the respondents who affirmed that FC was a major influence on them in 2008 became Catholic as infants or children. Maybe cradle Catholics aren’t such bad Catholics after all.
* Age: No one will be shocked to learn that pre-Vatican II Catholics are the most likely to have heard of FC (34 percent), and Millennials (those under the age of thirty this year) are the least likely (10 percent). More interesting, even though Catholics under thirty were least likely to have heard of FC, they were also least likely to affirm that in the document the bishops had stuck to moral principles and left the final choice to voters (9 percent). What does that say about young adult Catholics’ perceptions of the bishops’ interventions in political life? Perhaps that’s a topic for another survey.
This reminds us, yet again, that there is a difference between the Church as defined or described or desired by Church leaders and the actual Church as constituted by its members, 99.99 % of whom are lay people. St. Augustine once wrote that one hasn’t taught unless someone has learned: teaching and learning are correlatives. One might be able to say that one tried to teach but no one learned, but for one person or group to teach someone else has to learn.
Do you think the bishops, some bishops, any bishop – even one…might comment on the display last evening at the Republican debate at Ronald Reagan’s library where the most sustained and loudest applause came from the mention that some 245+ individuals were executed in Texas under Gov. Perry’s leadership and that Mr Perry as well as the audience seemed to revel in that blood lust.
Much like several years ago as the then administration engaged in two wars and an overt policy of government sanctioned torture….where were the bishops, some bishops, any bishop….
Last night I counted at least two candidates for the Republican nomination who make a big deal about their Roman Catholicism but when the topic of poverty and the poor came up – there was little sense that these Catholics knew of or had heard a homily from the bishops on the church’s long and in depth treatment of social justice.
The Catholic Church in American should be a prophetic witness right now in this country especially given the real trouble we are in…. But I fear few will speak or care and even fewer will listen.
So why don’t most Catholics pay attention to the bishops when they try to teach us?
ISTM that it is crystal-clear that either we aren’t sure that they *know* what is true, or we don’t trust them to always tell the truth, or we don’t believe that they really care what we think and need and do.
What can the bishops do about it? First, they can somehow show that they do indeed understand the moral issues that people face. Many would say this is impossible so long as the lives they lead are so very different from the lives of most of their flocks. Yes, celibacy, again, and an attendant lack of understanding of children — not that that a married clergy would solve the whole problem, but it would be a start, or at least a gesture that the bishops’ put the spiritual necessities of their flock over their own attachment to their single life.
That the bishops’ will not allow married priests *shows* us that they put their own life-style and culture above the spiritual needs of the faithful. Even when there are fewer and fewer priests to say Mass (the heart of the Faith to most of us), when push comes to shove, the bishops don’t give a damn. Small wonder we don’t pay attention to them.
Second, they can take seriously the criticisms leveled at them concerning the deficiencies of the hierarchical culture — its code of silence, general lack of transparency,its autocratic structure, the lack of an assured voice for the lower clergy and laity in policy-making, etc. (The latter change would be a sine qua non, I think.) Most of all, the bishops must show that they will no longer tolerate lying, as the scandal has shown it prone to do. Students do no trust, and therefore do not take seriously, people who are known liars or who are know to tolerate lying in important matters.
On the useful quotation from St. Augustine above, it’s worth pointing out also that all teachers worth their salt know that they themselves must be learners as well as teachers, and that among those sources from which they must learn are their own students, the objects of their own teaching. I am sure that there are many churchmen who realize this, but I’d be hard put to find any statement from the episcopacy, from the merest bishop of a merely titular diocese, up to the Bishop of Rome himself, that reflects this view.
How can we help them to grasp this idea, and thus better to carry out their own mission as teachers?
Well, documents have different purposes. FC may not actually affect voters directly. But it gives some prelates a reason to castigate particular candidates and parties–and that may have an effect on the voters’ impressions.
An interesting study, and I’m glad to see polling in this area. I do think that the idea that a report from the national bishops conference would have dramatic impact on how respondents vote is setting a pretty high bar for Faithful Citizenship…most folks who say this had no impact are simply being honest partisans, which puts them in pretty good company across the general population. It would be interesting to know how different partisan subgroups varied on awareness and responsiveness (Dems, Inds, Repubs)…that data must be in there.
All that said, it would be a stretch to take from this polling that these documents don’t matter, or that the USCCB as a whole doesn’t matter, for shaping how Catholics engage with elections. The influence is less direct, channeled through local bishops, priests, and media outlets, but is present nevertheless. The REALLY interesting poll would be to see how Faithful Citizenship impacted those kinds of local elite Catholics…I wonder if CARA has asked their clergy polls about that sort of thing before?
David Buckley:
“The influence is less direct, channeled through local bishops, priests, and media outlets, but is present nevertheless.”
Around election time we just have to view the radio and TV broadcasts of EWTN (which is a major source of church teaching for some Catholics) or see Internet bloggers and websites or, better yet, get forwarded emails from various sources. If truth be told, Catholic though they say they are, they can be vicious and almost slanderous. (I had to tell one of my friends to stop forwarding malicious emails during the 2008 election.)
A MAJOR cause of so few people reading or even hearing about “Faithful Citizenship” is the bishops’ conference itself, with its absurdly extreme insistance on claiming copyrights on its documents, and then going so far as to threaten people with legal action if they dare to disseminate them without getting prior permission from the USCCB. To be sure, the conference even claims a copyright ON THE BIBLE. So, they cannot complain of people ignoring whatever documents come out of there.
That said, another not-so-inconsequential reason for so few people reading or even hearing about “Faithful Citizenship” is the utter failure of so many putatively Catholic outlets — e.g. Commonweal — to explain and promote it.
You’re right, Bender. It’s high time for Commonweal to cover this document. It’s appalling that we’ve been ignoring it for lo these many years–oh, wait a minute. Here’s this editorial I linked to in the post you evidently didn’t spend much time reading:
http://commonwealmagazine.org/intrinsically-complicated-0
You’d think you’d have come up with that piece on your own by using a good Internet search tool like, oh, I don’t know, Lexis Nexis.
Nicholas Clifford writes:
My question is, do church authorities believe this? I ask because of the following quote, from an article in Commonweal (September 25, 1992) by T. Francis Murphy, the (then) auxiliary bishop of Baltimore. The context was the effort – one which met with considerable opposition from the Vatican — by the U.S. bishops to write a pastoral letter on women’s concerns:
What conclusion should be drawn from this quote?
I believe that Cardinal Ratzinger had already said something similar with regard to the method employed in the US Bishops Peace Pastoral. The comment reflects the juridicizing of the teaching office that I mentioned in another thread. Another example can be found in the Acta of the First Vatican Council where a defender of the supreme authority of the pope said of him: Qui docet et non docetur, confirmat et non confirmatur [He teaches and is not taught, strengthens and is not strengthened.] (It’s the old axiom: Maior a minore non benedictur, the argument used to prove the superiority of Melchisedech to Abram, and this on the authority of Heb 7:7: “Without contradiction, what is less is blessed by what is better.”)
It wasn’t always so: Referring to St. Paul’s requirement that a bishop be “teachable” (2 Tim 2:24), St. Cyprian wrote: “Now a man is teachable if he is meek and gentle and patient in learning. For it is a bishop’s duty not only to teach but also to learn since he becomes a better teacher if he makes daily progress and advancement in learning what is better. This lesson the same Apostle Paul also teaches us, forewarning that should anything better be revealed to another who is seated, then the earlier speaker should fall silent” (Cyprian, Epistle 74, 10.1-2).
Citing this passage, St. Augustine, who believed Cyprian to be wrong about rebaptizing, made this comment: “With these words assuredly the holy man, endowed with pious charity, sufficiently points out that we should not hesitate to read his letters in such a way that we should feel no difficulty if the Church should afterwards confirm what had been discovered by further and longer discussions; because, as there were many things which the learned Cyprian might teach, so there was still something which the teachable Cyprian might learn (Augustine, De baptismo, V, 26.37).
Is this study conclusive, regarding the impact of the document itself? I wonder. 3 years is a long time ago, and “I’m not sure I recall” is a huge part of the response.
Joe Komonchak writes:
Ask the people who worked closely with Archbishop Oscar Romero and they’ll tell you: this is precisely the kind of bishop he was.
Bishop Frank Murphy would certainly have disagreed with the Vatican’s opposition to consultation in the preparation of the U.S. bishops’ never-to-be pastoral on women’s concerns. His early death was a great loss to the Church in Baltimore. Many years an auxiliary, he would never have been “promoted.” He was too much a pastor, too large-hearted, too capable, and very unpretentious.
I suppose I’m not surprised. I would guess that very few voters of any stripe do substantial reading on political issues, and very, very few Catholics follow the doings of the bishops’ conference.
It might be worth noting that, if that paltry percentage of Catholics who read the document and take it seriously are opinion leaders in their communities, then the impact of the statement could be magnified at least somewhat beyond what is implied by the study.
Regarding Commonweal’s role: FWIW, my own recollection of 2008 is that I sought out the document and read it specifically because it was mentioned in several posts on dotCom.
I do agree that more is required than putting a 50 page .pdf on a website, three or four levels below the landing page, and patting oneself on the back that he’s thereby contributed to the national dialogue.
This is a pet peeve of mine: clergy are the very, very worst group I know of when it comes to keeping up with new technology. My observation of parish offices is that typewriters and file cabinets still abound. There are a lot of diocesan departments and parishes that are, very tentatively and timorously, dipping their toes into the newfangled technology like email. In twenty years or so, they might be ready for social media. Maybe.
“About one-third said they thought the bishops left the final choice to voters.”
I’m confused–what on earth do the other two-thirds think? That the bishops will enter the voting booth with them and force them to pull the “right” lever? Strange.
My best friend told me “I went into the voting booth with my rosary and…. voted for Obama.”
Must have been a sorrowful mystery…actually, isn’t Tuesday a sorrowful mystery day? I certainly hope it’s glorious the day after the next presidential election.
Perhaps we don’t read when bishops write because we’re too busy talking about what they ought to be saying. Or why they’re the wrong people to be saying it. Or why they don’t deserve to be listened to.
Mark Proska:
I guess it has a lot to do with how you interpret and meditate on the Sorrowful Mysteries.
Whether or not a teacher should be actively learning from her students depends, no doubt, on the nature of the teaching job, of the school, of the subject, of the students, and of the teacher. One size does not fit all.
.
By the way, the link to the document on
http://www.faithfulcitizenship.org/
is broken. It’s particularly hard to read something that’s not there.
I saw an excellent writeup about teaching a few months ago; it was a text about how to give a homily, and it had a section about teaching only having meaning if the intended content is communicated, and about that requiring listening to the intended audience. It was done by some committee and was an old text (possibly thrity years old), but I can’t remember who wrote it.
As to bishops advising us for voting, well, as long as Bp Tobin says, writes and repeats that “Obama is the most ardent pro-abortion advocate we’ve had”, and that “it’s an evil agenda he pursues aggressively at every turn”, that pretty much tells me all I need to know about him: inflamatory rhetoric, disregard of truth, manipulation of facts to make them fit his very biased perspective. And that’s the man we’re supposed to trust?
(Not to mention that his political leanings conflict with mine; but that’s not the source of my contempt of his words.)
“I went into the voting booth with my rosary and…. voted for Obama.”
Helen – what a wonderful little anecdote!
David S – I believe the document is also here: http://www.priestsforlife.org/magisterium/bishops/fcstatement.pdf
Claire, I wonder if the homiletics document you read recently was “Fulfilled in your Hearing”, a wonderful document from the US bishops from about 30 years ago? http://old.usccb.org/plm/fiyh.pdf
Jim, yes, thank you!
At Catholic University, the day after the last presidential election, priests were going up to one another, smiling, and saying, “Would you hear my confession? I voted for Obama.”
How would that go? “Bless me, Father, for arbitrarily limiting my sense of social justice”?
The link to the Faithful Citizenship document at
http://www.faithfulcitizenship.org/
is working now.
At NDU I imagine they were saying, “Would you hear my confession? I did not vote for Obama.”
Claire–
What part of Bishop Tobin’s words did you find so offensive? The “at every turn” part? I don’t see anything else in them that a Catholic might take exception to.
Mark, his description of Obama is wrong. He is repeating lies of Republican propanganda.
Obama is not “the most” pro-abortion advocate ever. He is not pursuing “aggressively” a pro-abortion agenda “at every turn”. Those are slogans invented by Obama’s opponents to try to fixate into the public mind a distorted image of Obama. They are dishonest.
In the mouth of a Republican lobbyist, those qualifications would not be so offensive. They see it as their job to try to destroy Obama’s character in the public mind. Whether their description is accurate or not is irrelevant for them; they only care about whether it’s effective. But in the mouth of a bishop, that dishonesty is disgraceful.
I’m guessing that the main two reasons why the faithful don’t read these documents are 1) that the bishops have got a PR and distribution problem (Bender’s remarks – 09/08/2011 – 2:56 pm – are instructive) and 2) that the bishops have misunderstood their audience. They probably assume a friendly, respectful audience of literate devout Catholics who will make time in busy schedules for reading official ecclesiastical pronouncements, whereas what they’ve got, instead, is literate Catholics for whom “devout” has pejorative connotations and for whom “skeptical” and “critical” are high praise.
The hierarchy today are hindered by their insularity, which may in the past have been of great value to them because it kept them from contamination by direct constant contact with the secular world but now is damaging their effectiveness, because the world has become almost entirely secularized and only slightly inclined to listen to spiritual leaders who don’t speak in a secularized voice.
I suppose the hierarchy consciously resist developing a more worldly attitude and appearance, out of concern that they not lose what’s been learned slowly, painfully, and profoundly over two millenia. Unfortunately, both for the bishops and for the faithful, the pace of change has accelerated so much that the usual waiting for generational adaptation is waiting too long.
Thought. How about passing out at mass CD’s of the document – for travel-time listening? That would be meeting your audience where they live – not where you want them to be living.
Claire 09/09/2011 – 9:19 pm :
I don’t follow the news, Claire, but I’d guess there’s a good argument to be made for the statement that Obama is the most actively pro-abortion president ever.
Ok, I had originally misread *advocate* as president. I do think he’s the most pro-abortion president we’ve had, but I imagine there are advocates who are more pro-abortion. I guess I can see how you might find his words a bit purple and perhaps unbishop-like, but how else does a shepherd effectively warn his sheep of the danger surrounding them?
how else does a shepherd effectively warn his sheep of the danger surrounding them?
Frankly, I think that rhetorical exaggeration and the reach for shocking adjectives, comparisons, and analogies, is counter-productive. It only invites flame wars. Look at the thread about Eichmann and sexual abuse cover-up by clergy!
To help dialogue with people from “the other side”, much, much more effective are understated facts and modest claims. To reach out to them, try to see their perspective, try to shift it a little bit by making them accept one little fact. (With friendly guidance, I could probably be led to admit that Obama is not the most pro-life president in history :) )
This bishop is not trying to reach out to his flock, but pandering to fellow Republicans.
Abortion is the civil rights issue of our time. Nothing comes close, in scale or kind.
If I may, let me expand a bit on a previous comment I made above.
I’m a fan of the notion of opinion leaders. Most of us don’t think very originally or independently; we take our cues from others whom we know, either personally or via the media. I remember, as an earnest and idealistic young adult, being shocked and scandalized when my sisters, who were young adults themselves, but whose interests didn’t include public affairs, told me that, when they bothered to vote, they voted for whomever my father voted for.
By the same token, if some of us “know” that President Obama is the most pro-abortion president ever, it’s an opinion that probably didn’t originate in our own heads; we picked it up from someone else, quite possibly via the media – presumably someone whose views we trust and respect.
We learn from the CARA study to which Grant has pointed us here that a tiny percentage of Catholics have read Faithful Citizenship; and an even tinier sliver can recall it having any impact on their views or voting behavior. Fair enough.
Let me suggest this, though: if, among that minuscule percentage of readers are people like Grant, Mollie, Matthew or David G, then there is decent chance that they will write thoughtfully about it, and their writing will be consumed by folks who read publications like Commonweal – whose circulation is not large but which is thought to wield an influence that exceeds its circulation, because of the profiles of subscribers it boasts. Grant, Mollie, et al are opinion leaders. And so there is a sort of cascade effect: they tell about the document to others who themselves are also influential in their social networks. What is the effect of the process I’m describing? Whatever it is, I’m not certain that CARA’s questionnaire would measure it, but I’m suggesting that the effect is not nothing.
Who else would be likely to actually seek out and read the Faithful Citizenship docs? I would think that those whose job it is to catechize would do so – think high school religion teachers. If, at election time, a Catholic school religion teacher uses the issues highlighted in Faithful Citizenship to lead a classroom discussion about what the Catholic Church teaches about important issues, then the influence of the document is, once again, making itself felt – even though most high school students aren’t old enough to vote. In this scenario, the document may be making an impact in some way, even though that impact may not be what CARA set out to measure.
Cathleen wrote above, “FC may not actually affect voters directly. But it gives some prelates a reason to castigate particular candidates and parties–and that may have an effect on the voters’ impressions.” We definitely saw some examples of that in the last presidential election. But I don’t believe that is the real reason for the quadrennial Faithful Citizenship exercise. In my view, its primary purpose is what it claims to be: to apply Catholic principles to what is going on in public life. It would be great if more Catholics actually sought out the document, read it, and thought about it. As I mentioned in a previous comment, I believe the bishops can do much more to promote the document. But I question the suggestion that the entire exercise of writing the document every four years is a waste of time.
The statement of faithful citizenship was included in our diocesan magazine, and I read it quite carefully and found it helpful–far more helpful than the Bishop’s personal and rather scolding take on these matters.
ANYway, I’m a Bad Catholic, but I try to vote like a Good Catholic (hope that didn’t nauseate anyone), and ISTM that one of the challenges of faithful citizenship is simply trying to separate the fact from fiction, especially in election years.
I recommend factcheck.com as a tool to aid faithful citizenship. Michigan has a similar fact-checking site for state elections and issues. You might check to see if your state has one, too.
factcheck.org
Thanks
Maybe by the time the next election comes around I’ll be a US citizen and will be able to vote. That’d be awesome (as my students say).
Obama the most pro-abortion president.?????? stop it..
Are you all too young to know that R.Reagan signed the first Ca. abortion rights bill, 4 months into his term as Gov Of California 1967 As Ca. goes so does the nation. took the Republican Supreme Court to come out with Roe Wade 6 years latter. Obama was 6 years old..
Ed G. –
Let’s see how much change your bit of history makes in the world views of those on this very blog who keep echoing the Obama slander.
Claire, yes, thanks, it’s a dot org.
And I hope you get to vote, too!
But please don’t start saying “awesome.”
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