Closet Catholic in the White House?

By Laura Lloyd - National Catholic Reporter
Monday, May 05, 2008 - Web Link
Send this news item to a Friend
Sign-up for Daily News Updates

May 2, 2008

As if the chattering classes didn’t already have enough to do, there has been some recent debate about whether George W. Bush is, in fact, America’s most Catholic president. Never mind that he’s a born-again Methodist who attends services at an Episcopal church. That’s beside the point, these alleged experts assert, most notably in a recent article in The Washington Post. They contend Bush is a closet Catholic because he surrounds himself with Catholic speechwriters and advisers. They say he has been been a student of the church’s social justice teachings over the last decade, a tutelage instrumental, perhaps, in his AIDS initiative in Africa. They say the recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the White House was a meeting of kindred spirits, despite the pontiff’s opposition to the war in Iraq.

In addition to offering Benedict a White House welcome consisting of two 21-gun salutes, two rounds of “Happy Birthday” and the Lord’s Prayer sung by Kathleen Battle, President Bush honored the bishop of Rome by mirroring back some of the pope’s own thinking and bits of rhetoric. He emphasized the sacredness of human life and talked about the need to reject the “dictatorship of relativism,” core beliefs of Pope Benedict. To those who subscribe to the notion that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, President Bush is clearly a big fan of the 81-year-old pontiff.

But is a Catholic wannabe who has never received the church’s sacraments the same thing as America’s first truly Catholic president? Such a question can be interesting to ponder, almost a game. (It’s important not to be too literal and get stuck on the fact that John Kennedy, in orthodox terms, is actually America’s only true Catholic president. The proponents of the Catholic-Bush theory point out that Kennedy, the politician, sought to distance himself from his Catholicism.)

Some people, when faced with the question of President Bush’s inner Catholicity, can only be described as alarmed. “Mother of God, save us!” exclaimed Paul Wilkes, author of 20 books on Catholic topics, when introduced to the idea that George W. Bush may be our most Catholic president. Regaining his composure, Wilkes said he believed President Bush fails the Catholic litmus test because he has allowed America “to be a bully in the world. We have to have a military but we can’t go swaggering around the world with our military. That’s not a Catholic position.”