Over the next two weeks, the two major political parties in the United States will present their competing visions for America in national conventions that will largely be held virtually because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
And with the Democratic National Convention kicking off tonight, and the Republican National Convention set to begin next Monday, the parties’ standard-bearers and featured speakers will be looking to appeal to a polarized electorate with an increasingly diverse Catholic voting population.
“This is going to be a convention that speaks primarily of values and ideals, and a vision of America that, I think, is going to resonate with Catholic sensibilities,” Stephen F. Schneck, executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, said of the Democratic National Convention.
Schneck, a Catholic activist who served as a national co-chair of Catholics for Obama in 2012, told Our Sunday Visitor that the Democrats will speak of national unity amid a challenging year where racial tensions exploded on the streets and a pandemic crippled the nation’s economy and killed nearly 170,000 Americans to date.
“There will be quite a bit of discussion around solidarity, that we need to bring the country together, to overcome polarizations and rediscover a common purpose that unites the country rather than divides the country,” Schneck said.
For Catholics such as Joshua Mercer, the political director of Catholic Vote, a politically conservative advocacy group, the Republican National Convention presents the GOP with an opportunity to make its case that the party’s positions on religious liberty, the right to life and the economy make President Donald Trump the right choice to lead the country for another four years.
“President Trump is known for his wild tweets, but it’s worth recalling that this is a politician who actually delivers on a lot of what he said,” said Mercer, who credits the president with carrying through on campaign promises to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Act, taking the fight to the Islamic State and moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, among others.
“President Trump deserves credit for being willing to disregard previous Republican orthodoxies on economics and place families first,” Mercer told Our Sunday Visitor.
DNC Preview
The Trump administration’s record will be a running thread through both parties’ conventions. But for the Democrats, their quadrennial nominating convention’s theme of “Uniting America” will highlight the turbulent past four years to argue that the “soul of the nation” is at stake.
“It’s going to be about bringing America back to its senses after all the meanness, hostility and political tricks,” Schneck said. “It’s going to be all about turning a page and going back to the America we all know.”
Hearkening back to a civil time in America has been a campaign theme for former Vice President Joe Biden, who outlasted his Democratic opponents during the primaries and is expected to formally clinch his party’s presidential nomination this week.
Biden, who is 77 and Catholic, has presented himself as a steady figure with a religious sensibility and working-class background who can relate to the struggles of ordinary Americans. Ahead of the convention, the Democratic Party released a video showing Biden meeting with Pope Francis and speaking well of nuns who educated him.
“Because he is Catholic, he often uses language and frames things that come out of the Catholic world,” Schneck said. “There’s a part of Catholic culture that’s really evident in the way he talks about things, even in the way he jokes about things.”
Biden, who will accept the Democratic nomination from his home state of Delaware on Thursday, will join other party speakers to address the national primetime audience beginning Monday. They are expected to emphasize various controversies during the Trump years, including the separation of migrant families at the United States’ southern border, the phone calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that resulted in Trump’s impeachment, the president’s reluctance to unequivocally condemn white supremacists at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and concerns that the Trump administration is now tampering with the U.S. Postal Service ahead of the election to suppress votes.
Speakers at the Democratic National Convention are expected to criticize the president for his handling of the pandemic by alleging that he refused to take the virus seriously early on, and that he ignored the scientific advice of infectious disease experts while spreading misinformation about miracle cures.
The Associated Press reported Sunday that two Catholics — Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the advocacy group NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, and Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large of America magazine — were scheduled to offer prayers at the Democratic convention on Thursday.
With a keynote speech that will be delivered by 17 Democrats of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds, the convention will also look to draw a sharp contrast between how the two parties are responding to the growing call for racial justice in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
“Caring for the least among us, that is going to be, I think, a running theme through the convention, that this is the party of compassion,” Schneck said.
RNC Preview
The Democratic National Convention will undoubtedly feature speakers who will strongly defend same-sex marriage and “a woman’s right to choose,” a familiar euphemism for abortion. While Schneck said Democrats will try not to emphasize those social issues, they are still very important moral matters for Catholics that Republicans will look to highlight in their convention.
“In 2016, the Democrats changed their platform and formally called for an end to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion and needs to be renewed every year,” said Mercer of Catholic Vote.
Democrats in recent years have moved further left on abortion and other social issues, such as same-sex marriage. That provides an opening for the lineup of speakers at the Republican National Convention — its theme being “Honoring the Great American Story” — to draw distinctions between their historically center-right party and an opposition party that they will say is becoming too liberal and extreme for most Americans.
Like an earlier generation of Democrats, Biden once supported the Hyde Amendment. However, Biden changed his position last year when he came under fire from primary opponents and party donors.
“In the first week of his presidential campaign, he caved and embraced taxpayer funding of abortion — a total reversal of his 30-plus years in the Senate,” said Mercer, who added that the Republican Party’s platform “remains strongly pro-life.”
Trump, who will formally accept his party’s nomination for a second term on Aug. 27, will likely talk up his administration’s pro-life bona fides, which include nominating federal judges who are said to be pro-life, as well as reinstating and expanding the Mexico City Policy, which blocks federal funding to nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion. In January, he also became the first sitting U.S. president to personally attend the annual March for Life in Washington D.C.
On the religious liberty front, the Republican National Convention will likely point out that the Trump administration implemented freedom of conscience protections for religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, who previously stood to face legal action for refusing to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.
Last month, Biden vowed that if elected, he would restore the Obama administration’s policy of providing a much narrower exemption for houses of worship and religious nonprofits — an exemption some say would not protect the Little Sisters of the Poor from violating their moral beliefs.
“Obama’s notion of religious freedom was so restrictive it didn’t protect the Little Sisters of the Poor. So Trump issued an executive order to ensure they wouldn’t have to pay for abortion pills,” said Mercer, who also commended the president for signing pandemic relief legislation this year that provided direct payments to Americans and generous unemployment benefits.
Mercer also said he expects Trump to tout his record on the economy, which was going strong until the arrival of the coronavirus. With hopes for a recovery, Mercer said he believes most Americans still trust the president over Biden on economic matters.
Said Mercer, “The economy remains the No. 1 issue for most Americans.”
Brian Fraga is a contributing editor for Our Sunday Visitor.
