By Eric Zorn
Chicago Tribune
Washington is asking why U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan recently fired Patrick Conroy, the Roman Catholic Jesuit priest who had been serving as House chaplain since 2011.
The logical inference is Ryan fired him as payback for Conroy beseeching God, in his opening prayer on a key legislative day last November, that there not be “winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”
Balanced benefits? When the GOP tax bill Ryan was shepherding was designed to give more than 80 percent of the benefits to the top 1 percent of earners? Heresy!
Conroy has claimed that Ryan later pulled him aside and said “Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.”
“This was not about politics or prayers,” Ryan countered during an appearance Monday at the Midwest Conservative Summit in Milwaukee. “It was about pastoral services. And a number of our members felt like the pastoral services were not being adequately served, or offered.”
Furious Democrats have failed in an effort to establish a select committee to get to the bottom of the first-ever firing of a congressional chaplain.
What Washington should be asking, however, is why we still have clergymen (they have always been men) on the congressional payroll.
The House chaplain earns $172,500 a year while his Senate counterpart — currently Seventh-day Adventist minister Barry Black — earns $160,787. Adding staff and office expenses, the annual cost of maintaining these largely ceremonial tips of the hat to Christianity approaches $1 million.
Founder James Madison saw the flaw in the idea when it began in 1789: “Is the appointment of chaplains to the two houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom?” he wrote. “In strictness, the answer on both points must be in the negative.”
Let lawmakers “like their constituents, (worship) at their own expense,” wrote Madison. ” How noble in its exemplary sacrifice to the genius of the Constitution and the divine rights of conscience! Why should the expense of a religious worship for the legislature be paid by the public?”
Madison’s words ring even more true today.
In the intervening 229 years, our nation has become far more religiously diverse and secular (this week, four House Democrats announced the formation of the Congressional Freethought Caucus to guard the interested of non-believers). Paying Christian pastors (they have always been Christians) to minister to and offer anodyne invocations for often-wealthy legislators is increasingly indefensible.
Having a rotating cast of volunteer faith leaders and inspirational orators deliver opening messages would be better. And, indeed, for a brief period in the 1850s when controversy over the position raged anew, Congress did exactly that. The practice “avoided any question of financial support of religion while simultaneously dodging some of the potential for denominational favoritism,” according to “The Congressional Chaplaincies,” a 2009 scholarly article by Christopher Lund, a professor at Wayne State University Law School.
But the temptation for majorities to institutionalize favored creeds proved too great. Paid, full-time chaplains returned to Congress. And yes, of course, the practice blows a gaping hole in the wall of separation that ideally stands between church and state, protecting each from the incursions of the other.
The U.S. Supreme Court has chosen to look the other way. In Marsh v. Chambers, a 1983 case, the court upheld public funding of legislative chaplains even though the tradition lacks a secular purpose and amounts to government promotion of religion — the normal no-nos.
A 6-3 majority ruled that, since the practice began with the first Congress, the founders clearly didn’t believe it conflicted with the guarantee of religious freedom. The Marsh opinion added that invoking “divine guidance on a public body entrusted with making the laws is … simply a tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held among the people of this country.”
But we can see from the Ryan-Conroy imbroglio that having salaried clergy in Congress is, in fact, intolerable.
Along with the debate over Conroy’s expression of liberal pieties is a brewing debate over whether a celibate Catholic priest can address the spiritual needs of married legislators.
“I’m looking for somebody who … has adult children (and) can connect with the bulk of the body here,” said Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., a Southern Baptist who is on the committee seeking a replacement for Conroy. Walker alluded to his concern for what lawmakers “are going through, back home, (with) the wife (and) the family.”
There’s so much wrong with that! The anti-Catholicism! The inappropriateness of lawmakers playing pastoral referee! The hint of the sectarian popularity contest ahead! The inevitable subsequent neutering of the new chaplain to render all prayers so theologically bland that they don’t risk injecting controversy into lawmakers’ ostentatious displays of piety!
Where to begin?
How about by ending it?
