It has been fascinating to watch the U.S. elections in East Africa. Since last fall I have been teaching at Uganda Martyrs University and living with our Holy Cross community of young men and women from Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. Until the election, it has been hard for us Americans to watch the Al Jazeera evening news whenever our president was on the screen. In another way, though, it is a special treat for any Westerner living in Asia or Africa to be able to watch the evening news from the vantage point of these two continents—for that vantage point provides the “bias” of Al Jazeera’s coverage of world news. We who belong to international religious communities can also learn from our African and Asian sisters and brothers what we Americans look like to the rest of the world. One surprising feature of their perception became clear during the recent election: As thrilled as east Africans were to welcome their compatriot, Barack Obama, to the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, it was the generous concession speech of John McCain that notably impressed them: “We wish our politicians knew how to concede so gracefully.” Imagine that: American behavior help up by the rest of the world for emulation!
As any glance at a foreign newspaper or news program will tell you, this election brought about a new wave of sympathy for the United States. So it was especially disheartening for me to overhear snatches from the U.S. bishops’ meeting a week after the elections. While the rest of the world was upbeat, the tone we picked up from brief reports of the meeting in Baltimore was one of grumbling dismay at the election results. Perhaps the dismay came from the news that Catholics had voted for Obama in about the same proportion as the rest of the electorate, thus disregarding the insistent warnings of at least some bishops. Perhaps this fact will the bishops as a group to face up to what some of them have already acknowledged: that the hierarchy lost much of its credibility in the pedophilia scandal. And while Pope Benedict’s contrite statements about the scandal during his trip to the United States last summer doubtless helped a great deal, it could hardly undo all the damage that’s been done. Yet the voices we heard from the meeting in Baltimore were so out of tune with those of the rest of the nation and of the world that one’s pride at being American at that momet was somehow diminished by one’s being a Catholic American. During the campaign and at the meeting in Baltimore, there was nary a hint of contrition at this bishops’ silence in the face of some of the Bush administration’s worst abuses of power, which were nicely cataloged by Garry Wills in the November 6 issue of the New York Review of Books. The Bush White House has clung to a theory of executive power that affects “not only the right of the president to wage undeclared wars,” but his right to create military courts, to authorize extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, more severely coercive interrogation, trials with undisclosed evidence, domestic surveillance, and the overriding of congressional oversight in every aspect of government from energy policy to health services.
Certainly anyone familiar with the U.S. Constitution and Catholic social teaching would recognize these policies as a radical power grab and a threat to American democracy.
It should be clear to any impartial observer that some bishops’ fixation on abortion has allowed them to be manipulated by shrewd politicians who, once elected, have pushed through the policies that so many of us deplore. Four years ago then-Cardinal Ratzinger had to tutor some over-zealous American bishops who wanted to deny communion to anyone who voted for a prochoice politician. His distinction between material and formal cooperation in evil was incorporated in the new guide for Catholic voters the bishops released before this election. The guide reminded us that, while it would be wrong to vote for such candidates because of their support for legal abortion, it would not necessarily be wrong to vote for them for other reasons and in spite of their position on abortion. There are of course Catholics, including some bishops, who argue that nothing can “outweigh” abortion in a moral calculus, but this time a clear majority of Catholics disagreed. Among the many good and familiar reasons to have supported candidate Obama, I’d like to add one more from abroad: overcoming American tribalism. A Jesuit friend who works in peacemaking likes to ask groups how many “people we have lost” in Iraq since the beginning of hostilities? The answer he normally gets hovers around three thousand. This gives him the opportunity to retort, “I thought it was closer to a million. Who are ‘we’ and who are ‘people’”? As we become used to prayers for “our troops in Iraq,” without any mention of Iraqis killed in a war that we initiated, his is a salutary reminder of our residual tribalism. How often were we reminded of this by the bishops? While the elation I witnessed following the election of a Kenyan-American to the presidency of the United States might anticipate a reprieve from that tribalism, it is certainly dismaying that the episcopacy in our country seems mostly unaware of the problem.
Whoever is interested in bolstering the authority of the Catholic church will hope that this changes soon. But in the meantime the people have spoken, so the first step for our bishops should be to listen to what the people have said. Were they to do this, they might have a better chance of being listened to.
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David Burrell, C.S.C., Hesburgh Professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, is professor of ethics and development studies at the Uganda Martyrs University in Nkozi.
