Recent Commentary on U.S. Catholic Bishops as Political Players

Commentary in recent days about the overtly partisan political role the U.S. Catholic bishops are choosing to take in advance of the 2012 elections, under the leadership of His Eminence Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan:

At Huffington Post, United Church of Christ minister Chuck Currie publishes an open letter to His Eminence--and here's an excerpt: 

It seems obvious there is a double standard where the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is concerned: you'll start a nuclear political war with a pro-choice Democrat but allow a pro-life Republican to get away with anything -- from starting real wars to supporting the death penalty to having an open marriage and repeatedly divorcing. 

More and more the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sounds like the Catholic League, a right-wing political group. This is a terrible tragedy.

And in the Houston Chronicle, a Catholic layman in Austin, James C. Harrington, concludes that the bishops' undisguised partisan politicking is causing the Catholic church to bleed members as Catholics who no longer see the bishops as morally credible teachers walk away in droves.  Harrington writes, 

After all, the bishops have never raised their collective voice with the same vehemence against the unjust economic structures in our country. Nor did they exert their moral leadership before the country embarked on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that clearly (and in the eyes of the late John Paul II) did not meet the Catholic criteria for "just war." Their strong outspoken opposition might have prevented the wars and untold deaths of innocent people, and the awful squandering of national resources that could have fed the hungry, educated the poor and healed the sick. 

The bishops' leadership dissipated long ago, not only in the public forum, but within the church itself. The hemorrhage of members leaving the church is offset only by the increasing numbers of Catholic Hispanics in the country, but even that group is experiencing attrition. 

Part of the problem is that the bishops are too comfortable and isolated in their lives. 

If they are to reclaim the mantle of leadership, they must live in Gospel poverty and speak out for Gospel values in a way they have not done for decades.

As he notes, ironically, though the U.S. bishops claim that their dirty little war against the Obama administration is all about safeguarding religious freedom and the right of believers to make their religious and moral views known without reprisal, Harrington would never in a million years have been permitted to write these statements in any Catholic diocesan newspaper anywhere in the U.S.

And he's absolutely right about that.  And that speaks volumes about precisely what the U.S. bishops mean by "religious freedom."