# Posted 1:38 PM by Patrick Belton  

A BIT OF HUMILITY ON GOOD FRIDAY: I enjoy Joseph Bottum's columns, but I have to take issue with his Weekly Standard piece yesterday where he takes a bit too much pleasure out of a recent churlish, juvenile incident in which Sioux Falls, South Dakota's Catholic bishop wrote to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and attempted to order Senator Daschle to stop identifying himself as a Roman Catholic in his congressional biography.

Both Dashle's office and Bishop Robert Carlson's quickly issued statements downplaying the communication as personal correspondence, intimating that the correspondence had leaked. Carlson, however, has been quoted as crusading publicly against Senator Daschle in the past, urging his flock to vote against the senator, and intimating it was sinful to do otherwise.

As is of course his right, both as a citizen and as a religious leader. Religious leaders, like any other citizens, should be able to apply political pressure to elected representatives to attempt to compel them to act according to their own personal ideas of the good. However, to threaten a legislator with excommunication solely because of a disagreement with his voting record confuses religious and political roles to too great an extent. A bishop taking that step is not acting as a cleric-in-the-polity, applying political pressure within the political sphere to bring about, as a citizen and civic leader, political results in keeping with his own religious aspirations. (Religious leaders who act in this way enrich substantially the political conversations of the republic by contributing viewpoints culled from centuries of ethical and philosophical reflection within their traditions. And it is this latter, commendable, prophetic tradition of American religious leaders which has given us Martin Luther King's beautiful writings about nonviolence not as sterile passivity, but as a powerful moral force for social transformation; stirring Catholic encyclicals on the economic needs of the poor; and important ethical contributions to American politics by America's rabbis and imams.) However, Bishop Robert Carlson is acting along a less American and much more medieval model of the relationship of Church to prince, a model in which excommunications were bandied about lightly to compel officials to submit to Rome's (often quite venal) authority at the peril of losing their souls - a far cry from the much more difficult, and American, route of using religious arguments to convince a majority of your fellow citizens to vote with you.

The bishop of Sioux Falls has if he chooses every canonical right to call on United States Senators to stop identifying themselves as Catholics in their official biographies; however, I might suggest to the Catholic bishop of Sioux Falls that he in turn should revise his official biography to stop calling himself a U.S. citizen. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion