With faith in the spotlight, Candidates battle for Catholic votes

Many years have passed since the Democratic Party was as much a part of American Catholic identity as weekly Mass and parochial school. But it still came as a shock to many Democrats to lose the Catholic vote, a key group in must-win states like Ohio, in the 2004 presidential election.

Skip to next paragraph It is an experience they are determined not to repeat.

The presidential candidates are in the middle of an escalating battle for Catholic voters - most immediately between Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clintonof New York in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, but also between the two parties as they look ahead to the general election.

This struggle is an important part of the backdrop for Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the United States starting Tuesday, which has drawn gestures of respect from all of the presidential contenders.

There is widespread agreement that American Catholic voters are far more diverse than monolithic. Even so, both the Clinton and the Obama campaigns have hired Catholic outreach directors, deployed an army of prominent Catholic surrogates testifying on their behalf and created mailings that highlight their commitment to Catholic social teachings on economic justice and the common good.

Dismayed at losing so many Catholic and other religious voters to the Republicans in 2004, Democrats talk far more often, and more comfortably, about their values and the importance of their own faith these days.

Essentially, they have tried to broaden the definition of “values” issues beyond abortion rights, on which they disagree with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and many religious conservatives.

Mrs. Clinton, for example, spoke recently about the economy and the needs of working families to a crowd of more than 2,000 at Mercyhurst, a Catholic college in Erie, Pa. The college and the candidate went ahead with the event despite the objections of the local bishop, who argued that a Catholic institution should reflect the church’s “pro-life stance” on abortion.

On Sunday, the Democratic candidates appeared separately at a forum at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., for a televised discussion of poverty, health care, energy prices and the rest of the party’s policy agenda as moral and spiritual issues. (The forum also offered Mr. Obama a chance to note that he had once attended Catholic school, and Mrs. Clinton a chance to praise the Vatican as “the first carbon-neutral state in the world.”)

Mrs. Clinton, a Methodist, carried the Catholic vote overwhelmingly in Ohio, Texas and several other major states that have held primaries and caucuses this year, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls; she hopes to do so again in Pennsylvania, which holds its primary next week. (Aides say she is particularly popular among nuns.) In an open letter to Pennsylvania Catholics, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, two children of Robert F.

Kennedy, wrote, “Catholics have a partner in Hillary Clinton, one who will work to advance the common good of all Pennsylvanians and all Americans.”

Burns Strider, senior adviser and director of faith outreach for the Clinton campaign, said: “There’s no grand clandestine or secret message or formula here. It’s just a matter of middle-class and working-class people whose values match up very well with Senator Clinton’s.”

Bill Clinton carried the Catholic vote in 1992 and 1996. Some analysts say that considerable loyalty remains to the “Clinton brand,” notably on bread-and-butter issues like health care.

The Obama campaign is acutely sensitive to the notion that their candidate is vulnerable among these voters; some of Mr. Obama’s allies argue that it makes little sense to even think of Catholics as a voting bloc, given the huge differences among them.

Even so, on Friday, the Obama campaign unveiled its national advisory council of prominent Catholics, including elected officials, theologians, academics, nuns and social advocates.

On a conference call, Representative Patrick J. Murphy - who represents Bucks County, Pa., and prefaced his remarks by noting that he was St. Anselm’s Altar Boy of the Year in 1987 - said that Mr. Obama spoke “to the better angels in all of us.”

Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, another prominent Catholic supporting Mr.

Obama, noted: “I don’t agree with him on some issues.

We disagree on abortion.” But Mr. Casey said he believed that Mr. Obama, as president, would advocate for “the least, the last and the lost.”

Republicans said their party raised its share of Catholic voters from 37 percent in the 1996 presidential election to 52 percent in 2004, part of their overall success in wooing and mobilizing church-going voters. They vow to hold them this time.

“We’re going to devote substantial resources to winning the Catholic vote,” said Frank Donatelli, deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“I think the natural home of Catholics is the Republican Party.”

The campaign of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, recently rolled out his National Catholics for McCain Committee, with Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, as a co-chairman.

Mr. Brownback’s chief of staff, Rob Wasinger, said Mr. McCain was “the full package” for Catholics, with his opposition to abortion and his support for overhauling immigration laws, a major issue for Hispanic Catholics.

Against this backdrop, the pope’s words and gestures will be scrutinized not just by the faithful and the theologians, but also by political professionals in both parties.

“The Republicans are just hoping and praying he’ll say something about abortion and gay marriage, and the Democrats are terrified he will,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow and political scientist at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

“But at the United Nations, he will also say a lot of things to the left of Hillary and Obama.”

In fact, some conservatives worry that the war in Iraq, opposed by the Catholic Church from its inception, is hurting the Republican Party among Catholic voters - just as it is with other independent and swing voters.

“There’s one big question mark hanging over the Catholic vote, and that’s the Iraq war,” said Deal Hudson, an informal adviser to Mr. McCain and a longtime adviser to President Bush on Catholic matters.

Catholic voters are hardly monolithic, either in their demographics or in their political philosophy. They range from upscale suburbanites to first-generation working-class Hispanics.

The church itself has teachings that, taken as a whole, do not fit neatly into either party - often to the left on poverty, health care and economic justice, for example, and to the right on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research.

But Catholics play enough of a role as a swing vote to draw the intense focus of political strategists. Catholics were a reliable part of the urban, New Deal coalition for many years but trended Republican in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming an important element of the so-called Reagan Democrats.

After swinging back to the Democrats in the early 1990s, and then voting 53 percent to 37 percent for Mr. Clinton in 1996, they voted narrowly for Al Gore in 2000 but then returned to the Republicans in 2004.

That was a difficult year for the Democrats in several respects.

Their nominee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, was himself a Catholic, but his support for abortion rights drew the ire of some conservative bishops who challenged his right to receive communion. After that election, Democrats went through soul-searching about the way they approached Catholic and other religious voters.

Whoever ends up with the Democratic nomination, Pennsylvania is proving to be an important testing ground for both candidates’ ability to speak to these voters. G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist and pollster at Franklin & Marshall, estimated that “somewhere between 32 and 36 percent” of the voters in the primary would be Catholic.

Theories abound for why Mr. Obama runs less strongly in that group, including the possibility that he has a evangelical speaking style that, as Mr. Reese put it, is “just not what they hear in their churches.”

But Dr. Madonna noted that there were “overlapping demographics” at work - the group includes a lot of older and blue-collar workers - that tended to explain Mrs. Clinton’s advantage.

-The New York Times