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Editor's Note: Catholic Bishops in the United States: Church Leadership in the Third Millennium, to be published by Oxford University Press in January 2019, is the first major research-based book to study the bishops of the United States since 1989. It reveals the bishops' individual experiences, their day-to-day activities, their challenges as church leaders and their strategies for managing their dioceses. The following is an excerpt from the book on how U.S. bishops approach the task of publicly commenting on political and social issues.
Catholic leaders, from parish priests to the pope, are bombarded with opinions on whether they should or should not speak out on issues of the day-and if so, on which particular issues. When the U.S. bishops published "Economic Justice for All" in 1986, some thinkers on the political right urged them to leave economics to the economists and focus on the purely "religious" realm. The political lefthas been perhaps equally vociferous in its critiques of the bishops, except the problem in this case is that the church's leaders have remained too silent. In advance of a 2013 assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore, two politically liberal groups, Catholic Democrats and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, called on the assembly attendees to speak out more on issues of poverty. Whether one believes religious leaders should speak out on politics seems to depend less on one's philosophy regarding church and state than on the particular issue at hand.
In conducting our survey of U.S. bishops in 2016, we were interested in the extent to which individual bishops step across the invisible line some people perceive (when it suits them, perhaps) as separating the spiritual and temporal realms. How often do the bishops call for reflection or action regarding politics or vital issues of the day? We asked survey respondents four questions on this topic. (The table at leftsummarizes the results.)
We were particularly interested in how bishops speak out in the context of elections. The criticism they receive for lack of balance or overstepping their bounds often arises as elections approach. Many bishops reported that they have asked Catholics to consider Catholic teaching when voting for candidates, with 38 percent saying they have done so "on a...