During a recent visit to Rome, President Bush urged a top Vatican official to encourage U.S. bishops to speak out more on the issue of same-sex marriage and encourage congregants to support the Federal Marriage Amendment, noting, “not all the American bishops are with me,” according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper.

Earlier this week, a couple of weeks after the president’s meeting in Rome with Pope John Paul II, the Massachusetts diocese of the Roman Catholic Church told voters to reject politicians who do not support the state’s effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

And in Colorado, U.S. bishops were meeting this week behind closed doors to determine whether they should sanction Catholic voters and politicians who don’t follow Vatican teaching on abortion rights and gay marriage.

“There is a concerted effort by the bishops to keep a conservative government in place, which means they want to keep a Republican administration,” said Matthew Gallagher, executive director of Dignity USA, a group of gay Catholics. “Since no bishop has yet to speak out on these accusations [of cooperation with GOP campaign efforts], their silence speaks volumes.”

Bush and the Vatican
The president reportedly made his remarks to Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, after meeting with the Pope, who also criticized the U.S. involvement in the Iraq War. National Catholic Reporter reporter John L. Allen Jr., dubbed the “dean of Vatican journalists” by the New York Times, wrote in a June 11 column on the paper’s Web site that Sodano did not respond to the request.

It remained unclear what exactly the president said, but according to Allen, “he did pledge aggressive efforts on the cultural front, especially the battle against gay marriage, and asked for the Vatican’s help in encouraging the U.S. bishops to be more outspoken.”

Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church & State, suggested the president’s actions were unprecedented.

“This is breathtaking in its scope,” he said. “The president is giving marching orders to the Vatican to get on the bishops’ case knowing very well he stands to benefit from such action.”

American University Professor Daniel L. Dreisbach, who specializes in church and state issues, said he did not see much significance in Bush’s remarks, noting that most presidents who have meetings with the pope do so for political reasons.

“It is not as if this is a pilgrimage to one spiritual leader,” Dreisbach said. The Vatican is a political entity. It is a state. It has a status in the international political community.”

A broader agenda?
Many observers see the apparent effort to involve the Vatican in U.S. politics as just one in a series of attempts by the Bush administration to openly court religious voters for the upcoming election. News reports early this month noted that the administration seeks to enlist thousands of U.S. congregations in distributing campaign information and registering voters, possibly jeopardizing the tax-exempt status of churches.

According to the Internal Revenue Code, all non-profit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations, including churches and religious organizations, are prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.

In an e-mail sent by the Bush-Cheney ‘04 national headquarters in Virginia, Luke Bernstein, coalition coordinator for the Bush campaign in Pennsylvania, wrote that the campaign is seeking to identify 1,600 “friendly congregations” in Pennsylvania — a swing state — “where voters friendly to President Bush might gather on a regular basis.”

“In each of these friendly congregations, we would like to identify a volunteer coordinator who can help distribute general information to other supporters. … We plan to undertake activities such as distributing general information/updates or voter registration materials in a place accessible to the congregation,” according to the e-mail.

Earlier this week, the Republican-led House Ways & Means Committee rejected the “Safe Harbor for Churches” section of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (H.R. 4520), a provision that would have allowed religious leaders to “unintentionally” endorse or oppose candidates up to three times per year. Lynn said that under current law, a house of worship could lose its tax-exempt status for intervening in partisan politics.

Cheryl Jacques, president of the Human Rights Campaign, praised Tuesday’s congressional action, saying the “safe harbor for churches” provision was stripped “after significant lobbying by HRC and coalition partners.”

Rep. Nancy Johnson, (R-Conn.), a committee member, offered an amendment to strip the language from the bill.

“We’re proud to have had a hand in ensuring that tax-exempt groups play on a level field,” Jacques said.

It remains to be seen, however, whether or not churchgoers would respond favorably to bishops and pastors urging congregants to vote against political candidates because of their views on social issues.

Lynn said that historically speaking, congregants do not often “take this bait,” noting that the Democratic Party has attempted to reach out with similar efforts in African-American churches.

“They want their pastors to be active on moral issues but they don’t want the pastor to take the step of telling them whom to vote for,” Lynn said.

“Most who are in church are not there as an adjunct to their own political interests. They are there for spiritual sustenance, not partisan political pandering. In the black churches, even when they were the locust for most community activity during the ‘40s and ‘50s, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke in churches all the time but never once endorsed a candidate for office.”

Dreisbach said that for the past 50 years, the Democratic Party has made outreaches to African-American churches but it is uncertain whether those campaign stops to large, urban churches translate into votes.

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