Bush Hasn't Won All of Pope's Flock
WASHINGTON — In the fall, President Bush accomplished a feat that eluded him in 2000 by winning the majority of votes cast by Roman Catholics. This week, he is expected to become the first U.S. president in history to attend the funeral of a pope.
Some might read Bush's inclination to fly to Rome as a transparent attempt to court Catholics, a constituency in the cross hairs of strategists seeking to expand the Republican electoral base.
But for all the praise the president has lavished on Pope John Paul II in recent days, the relationship between the two men and their politics was tense and complex. And for all the attention paid to the role of social conservatives in Republican politics, the "Catholic vote" is still up for grabs.
"Both the pope and the president have indeed had an impact on socially conservative Catholics becoming more Republican," said Mark J. Rozell, an expert on religion and politics at George Mason University outside Washington. "But the non-churchgoing or occasionally churchgoing still don't identify with the Republican Party."
In his comments after the pope's death, Bush emphasized the pontiff's support for the "culture of life" -- a phrase the president borrowed from the pope and uses to refer broadly to specific positions on abortion, euthanasia and marriage.
But the president made no mention of other issues on which he and the pope disagreed: the decision to go to war in Iraq, the death penalty and the West's responsibility, in the pope's view, to curb rampant consumerism and combat global poverty.
"The Holy Father's position on issues didn't fit easily into the American political alignment," said James Guth of South Carolina's Furman University, who studies the impact of religion on politics.
However, although John Paul espoused views that both Democrats and Republicans could claim, his promotion of conservative bishops and cardinals had the effect in the U.S. of emphasizing one side of his teachings over the other.
"The indirect result was to give strength to the social-issue conservatives within the church hierarchy, and that led more-traditionalist Catholics to vote for President Bush and Republican candidates on the social conservative issues," said John C. Green, an expert on religion and voting patterns at the University of Akron in Ohio.
