At Political Conventions, Stay Tuned for the Archbishop

By CLYDE HABERMAN

For the politically minded, the focus Thursday night will be on Mitt Romney's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. But you may want to keep watching even after Mr. Romney is done and the last balloon has dropped.

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

New York's archbishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, is up next, to deliver a prayer bringing the convention in Tampa, Fla., to a close. The cardinal will perform the same function at the Democrats' gathering next week in Charlotte, N.C. It will be interesting to hear how political he gets.

Politics? Perish the thought, the New York archdiocese says. No endorsement of any sort will be made at either event, said the archdiocese spokesman, Joseph Zwilling. Cardinal Dolan, he said, is showing up “only to pray.”

That remark ma de me think of a fellow I once knew who was a Playboy subscriber. He, too, used the word “only.” He swore up and down that he bought the magazine only for the Nabokov short stories that it sometimes carried.

The cardinal's very presence in Tampa on Thursday is of itself a political act.

He is not just the leading Roman Catholic clergyman in this country as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Republicans invited him and he accepted knowing full well that they are kindred spirits, outspoken opponents of President Obama on matters like abortion rights, same-sex marriage and health insurance coverage for birth control.

The Democrats - a bunch that is ever-fearful, this time of being outflanked in the chase for Catholic votes - then felt obliged to invite the cardinal themselves.

Cardinal Dolan is certainly not one who sees his mission as purely pastoral. He has been blunt about wantin g the church to be muscular in confronting the president, saying early this year that “we are called to be very active, very informed and very involved in politics.”

When has religion not been political at a convention, Republican or Democratic? The lineup of clerics giving blessings in Tampa reinforces that point. Besides the cardinal, it includes a rabbi, an evangelical Christian, a Greek Orthodox archbishop, a Sikh and two Mormons. There isn't a Muslim in sight.

This is surely not a happenstance. Perhaps the convention organizers worried that some delegates would throw decorum overboard and even heckle an imam, much the way Representative Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, had no compunction about shouting, “You lie!” when Mr. Obama spoke before a joint session of Congress three years ago.

How to slip political commentary into religious supplication was displayed by another New York clergyman, Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, who delivered the opening prayer for the Republicans on Tuesday.

In addition to asking God to “bless and guide” Mr. Romney and his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, Rabbi Soloveichik said in regard to the United States, “You have called us to be a beacon of freedom to the world and an ally of free countries like the state of Israel, an island of liberty, democracy and hope.”

Think of all the other democratic countries he could have mentioned. By singling out this particular one, the rabbi played to the crowd - to both his co-religionists and others among the Republican faithful who have sought, despite the absence of evidence, to cast Mr. Obama as hostile to Israel.

Rabbi Soloveichik was also eager to show solidarity with an audience that believes nothing good comes from government. Prayers are not usually interrupted by applause. This one was when he intoned, “We Americans unite faith and freedom in asserting that our liberties are your gift, God, not that of government, and that we are endowed with these rights by you, our Creator, not by mortal man.”

So it will be interesting to see what sort of political notes Cardinal Dolan may strike in his blessings, however elliptical and nuanced they may be.

Wouldn't it be compelling if he were to be counterintuitive - like sharing with abortion-accepting Democrats his thoughts on the nature of human life and when it begins? Or, more immediately, reminding Republicans that Jesus preached a lot more about assisting the poor and the hungry than he fretted about who marries whom.