Bush and Kerry: Guess Who's Not Coming to Dinner...and Why

Mark Roberts, Hugh Hewitt, and other bloggers have commented on the decision of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York not to invite the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to this year's Al Smith Dinner.

The dinner is a charitable event sponsored by the Archdiocese which has been around for nearly sixty years. Traditionally, presidential election years have seen both major party nominees leaving the campaign trail, sitting on the same dais, and speaking from the same microphone in a night of good humor and light-hearted fun. Generally, candidates use the evening to poke fun at themselves, making light of their foibles and mistakes. The last year in which the presidential candidates didn't both appear was 1996, when their vice presidential counterparts were present instead.

The Archdiocese explained its decision this way:

The tradition of the Smith dinner is to bring people together. Given that issues in this year's campaign could provoke divisiveness and disagreement and could detract from that spirit, it was felt best to proceed in a different direction while maintaining all of the ideals and values of the dinner.

This is an interesting statement. Can the Archdiocese really believe that the issues in this year's campaign have a greater potential for provoking "divisiveness and disagreement" than in every previous presidential campaign since 1948?

More than in the campaign of 1968, for example? That year, we had a presidential election during one of the most divided, volatile times in US history. The Vietnam War, the struggle for civil rights, and racial strife contributed to the volatility. By the time of the Al Smith dinner that year, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had already happened. Because of the severe division that tore at the country, President Lyndon Johnson abruptly withdrew his candidacy for the Democratic nomination after winning the New Hampshire primary. The major party presidential nominees---Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey---engaged in a bitter race for the White House. But, each showed up for the Al Smith dinner. And guess what? Neither one threw a punch at the other, rhetorical or otherwise.

The Archdiocese's decision to disinvite President Bush and Senator Kerry or their veepmates from this year's dinner and the stated reason for doing so then, could reflect one of three things: ignorance of history, unhealthy nostalgia, or something else. I doubt it's the first two. It's something else.

That something else, pure and simple, is John Kerry and abortion.

Throughout this political season, various Roman Catholic primates in the US and even the Vatican have been making statements about what the Church's proper stance should be toward politicians and voters who favor abortion.

Some have advanced the notion that they should not be allowed to receive Holy Communion. Recently, the Vatican has said that Roman Catholics who vote for candidates who advocate "abortion rights" aren't bad Catholics because candidates speak to more than single issues as they run for office.

But it is clear that many Roman Catholic bishops and theologians are deeply disturbed by John Kerry's candidacy. Kerry is the first Catholic to be nominated for either president or vice president since Geraldine Ferraro was Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984. (You may remember that the Church wrestled with her pro-abortion position then as well.)

Apparently, the New York Archdiocese decided that short of riling up a lot of Roman Catholics and others, they couldn't deny Kerry the bread and wine of Mass. But they would deny him the opportunity to shed his wooden image during an evening of good humor. They would deny him a chance to be seen as President Bush's equal for one evening. They wouldn't acknowledge the ability of their apsostate son to behave himself at a dinner party.

It appears that tacitly, anyway, the Archdiocese is endorsing Kerry's Methodist opponent.

I am opposed to abortion. But it seems to me that the Smith dinner has always been an apolitical affair that humanizes the candidates and made it easier for voters, often disgruntled with the meanness of presidential politics, to look at them with fresh eyes.

The Archdiocese appears to have chosen to itself politicize the event, condemning one of their own under the clever guise of promoting amity in the political process.