Church & State (Contd.)

Time after time, in the debate over his religion, Jack Kennedy has announced that neither bishop nor Pope would tell him what to do as President. Many a Protestant has applauded his forthright words but wanted to hear Kennedy's view of Roman Catholic theology underwritten by an official Catholic spokesman. Last week the Reverend Gustave Weigel, professor of ecclesiology at Maryland's Woodstock College, stepped forward not as an official spokesman but as a distinguished Jesuit theologian to express his views. What emerged from Father Weigel's closely reasoned speech on the church-state relationship is the fact that Jack Kennedy has not been expressing some independent-minded notions of his own but good Catholic theology.

Father Weigel begins with the premise of two orders, sacral and secular, governed by divine and human law. Each is autonomous in its own sphere. Divine law concerns man's relationship to God, human law his relationship to his fellow beings. The secular order is inferior to but not subject to the sacral. Man lives in both orders simultaneously, and when they conflict, it is commonly agreed that the individual abides by the dictates of his conscience whether he be Protestant, Jew or Catholic. With this basis stated. Father Weigel turns to some implied questions by "the thinking Protestant," bluntly posed and candidly answered:

Would a Catholic President be likely to have Mass in the White House? "He knows that this would be displeasing to many of the people in whose name and power he acts."

Would a Catholic statesman be unduly influenced by his confessor? "The confessor's service would be exclusively private, moral and religious. He has no competence in political matters, which belong not to the order of morality and piety but to the order of law."

Would the Pope interfere with a Catholic President? "The Pope does not meddle with the political activity of Adenauer or De Gaulle, nor would either man permit it. The Catholic President's comportment with the clergy of his church would be exactly like the comportment of a Protestant President with the clergy of his church."

What about lands where the church is established by law? "It may be that such laws are good laws for those communities, maybe not. The American Catholic is not concerned. He only knows that the American law of religious freedom for all citizens is excellent law for his land."

Would a Catholic majority seek to restrict the religious rights of others? "Officially and really American Catholics do not want now or in the future a law which would make Catholicism the favored religion of this land. They do not want the religious freedom of American non-Catholics to be curtailed in any way. They sincerely want the present First Amendment to be retained and become ever more effective. With a note of desperation, I ask, what more can we say?"

Twenty-eight prominent North Carolina Baptist laymen and ministers also took the high road on the religious question last week by issuing a "Declaration of Conscience for Baptists to Consider." Key section: "If any organization, including any church, works to defeat the candidate of one political party, it thereby inevitably and automatically makes itself to some extent the ally or agent of the other political party--with all the dangers to its spiritual unity, its prestige, progress and growth which such a definite political alliance could bring for a full generation to come. This is the supreme danger, regardless of party, which we think now confronts us as Baptists."

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