“Faith is not just a membership card you put in your back pocket. It has to form and influence your lives,” Bishop Galante said at an afternoon press conference on the eve of his Installation as seventh bishop of Camden. “Whether you’re a politician, doctor, news reporter,” he said, “if you are a person of faith, your faith has to influence and color your professional life, whatever it is,” he told news media gathered at the Camden Diocesan Center April 29.
Rejecting the position advanced by some Catholic politicians that their faith lives and professional lives must somehow be separate, the incoming Bishop said, “This dichotomy between ‘my private life’ and ‘my professional life’ from a human point of view doesn’t make sense. We’re not schizophrenic. I don’t know how a Catholic politician can say my faith life doesn’t interfere with my political life.”
He said politicians that are Catholic should be honest if they have decided to disregard the values of their faith. “A politician can make a decision and say, I’m going to disregard the values I get from my faith life because they won’t get me elected. Well say it. Don’t pretend [that the views are compatible with the Catholic faith].”
Bishop Galante’s remarks about Catholic politicians came in response to a question from a reporter about whether it is appropriate to deny Communion to Catholic public officials who support positions contrary to Church teaching. He said he would encourage a politician holding views incompatible with Church teaching to take advantage of the sacrament of reconciliation and to conduct an examination of conscience with a confessor. He said that politicians who not only hold positions contrary to Church teaching but actively promote them put themselves in a position where they should disqualify themselves from receiving Communion.
As to whether he would deny a politician Communion, Bishop Galante said before he would take such a step he would first attempt to meet with the politician to explain why it would be inappropriate to present oneself for the sacrament and would work with the politician to develop positions compatible with Church teaching. He said he would also instruct a politician who defies Church teaching not to accept invitations to speak at Catholic functions because “that would create the impression that I’m indifferent to your positions. I’m not indifferent to them,” he said.
A reporter, citing New Jersey Governor James McGreevey’s divorce and remarriage and positions on a range of issues including embryonic stem-cell research, domestic partnerships and abortion, asked if these factors would make the Governor ineligible to receive Communion. “He really can’t go to communion,” Bishop Galante responded. “[To say] I’m for this, this, that and the other thing, but that’s not incompatible with my pos ition as a Catholic, well, it is incompatible.”
Pressed by the reporter as to what would happen if the Governor—who did not attend Friday’s Installation Mass—presented himself for Communion, Bishop Galante said he would give him a blessing. Bishop Galante’s comments came a week after Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Sacraments, stated that, in his view, a politician who is“unambiguously pro-abortion” should be denied communion. He also emphasized that any such decision rests with individual diocesan bishops.
Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, said in an April 23 statement, “Each diocesan bishop has the right and duty to address such issues of serious pastoral concern as he judges best in his local church, in accord with pastoral and canonical norms.”
Bishop Gregory also said he believed that denying Communion to a politician who is proabortion should be a last resort in a process to convince the politician to uphold moral truths when voting. Bishop Gregory noted that the U.S. bishops have established a task force to study the question of Catholics in political life who advocate political positions in opposition to Church teaching in light of the 2002 “Doctrinal Note” published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Acknowledging the “inalienable dignity of the human conscience,” the Doctrinal Note on the Participation of Catholics in Political Life concluded that even in a pluralistic society, a “wellformed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals,” particularly the inviolability of human life. It also said that Catholics have a duty to be “morally coherent.”
“There cannot be two parallel lives in their existence: on the one hand, the so-called ‘spiritual life’, with its values and demands; and on the other, the so-called ‘secular life,’ that is, life in a family, at work, in social responsibilities, in the responsibilities of public life and in culture. The branch, engrafted to the vine which is Christ, bears its fruit in every sphere of existence and activity.”