There must actually be a merciful God, because the sloppy, angry, ambiguous religion mess that came out of the General Assembly this month has simply gone away. Parting the Red Sea wasn’t this much of a miracle.
For reasons as mysterious as transcendence itself, the legislative proposal to fiddle with Catholic Church finances at the parish level almost made it to a public hearing, before the sponsors realized that, unlike many legislative hearings, the public was actually going to come and tell them they were morons.
It was almost, sort of, kind of, acceptable to feel sorry for the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Michael Lawlor of East Haven and Sen. Andrew McDonald of Stamford, for about 15 seconds. The idea that the folks in the pews should have more of a say on how the money gets spent and the church gets governed has been around for decades, especially in sort of artsy, intellectual, university-town Catholic parishes.
In fact, as long ago as the early 1800s, the Catholic First Provincial Council of Baltimore saw the threat from free-spirited parishioners, and directed that church property should be consigned to the bishop, to avoid “abuses of lay trustees …”
Lawlor and McDonald thought they could jump on a bit of a bandwagon, prompted by several instances of dubious and/or criminal financial behavior at several Catholic churches.
Where the boys had a tin ear in a political sense was the hilarious idea that the overseers of the Catholic purse should be empowered by the Connecticut General Assembly. Even after the boys canceled the hearing and killed the bill, Catholics marched on the Capitol to tell them to mind their own business.
And that is really the heart of the matter, once you get past the political theater. The “separation of church and state” principle that sort of referees spats between government and religion is neither as clear-cut nor as firm as some of the rhetoric might suggest.
The U.S. Supreme Court had it about right in a 1970s religious school financing case, Lemon v. Kurtzman, when it opined that the church-state stuff “is a blurred, indistinct and variable barrier, depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship.”
In fact, the state does have legal-regulatory apparatus on the books governing religious corporations, but as any poor IRS auditor can tell you, don’t mess with the church unless you want to experience hell on Earth.
Both for reasons of good-old-fashioned Catholic baiting; and because Catholic governance is a bit more hierarchical and top-down that your average, mainline Protestant church on the corner, government has often come sniffing around, looking to pester the priests a bit.
The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico took some very broad consumer-protection language in the 1970s to demand detailed financial and governance information about the Catholic schools on the island. The church said, in your dreams, and the case eventually staggered on up to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, which told the Commonwealth to find a different hobby, because it had “failed to shoulder its substantial burden of justifying that encroachment.”
To be sure, there is a substantial legal history in which government and God squabble over “business” — that is, the subsidiary operations of a religious organization that may be or may not be too commercial to justify the tax breaks and other good times cherished by God stuff. But whether the local parish priest spends too much of the petty cash on imported beer seems insufficient to justify government jumping over the wall that separates church and state.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
