Wednesday's Washington Post reports (a bit late, actually--it happened in July) that Cardinal Ratzinger has somewhat softened an earlier statement widely interpreted as prohibiting Catholics from voting for politicians who favor abortion rights. Ratzinger's original statement and the recent clarification raise an interesting issue about the implications of the now long standing discussion of the extent to which political argument in modern democracies can and should be informed by religious views. The issue involves but also transcends the recent intra-Catholic controversy about Catholic politicians and issues like abortion, since it raises the question whether the internal deliberations and discipline of religious communions itself has effects in the wider political order, a heretofore unnoticed problem for those who wish to keep political democratic political debate largely secular.

The softening came in a June memorandum to Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, the Archbishop of Washington. In the clarification Ratzinger wrote: "A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia." However, Ratzinger continued, "When a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons." The categories of formal and material cooperation are traditional ones used to analyze one's moral relationship to actions that are in themselves evil. "Formal" cooperation takes place when one not only helps another to commit an evil act, but also shares in the evil intention, and can thus never be justified. Mere "material" cooperation occurs when one helps another perform an evil act by an action of one's own not itself evil and does not approve of the other's evil act.

The distinction is a helpful one given the fact that in many American jurisdictions the candidates of both major parties support abortion rights (this is often the case in Maryland, where I live). The initial statement could be interpreted to suggest that in such cases one could not vote at all in good conscience, despite the fact that (a) the office in question may not have even had any jurisdiction over the abortion (in particular) question; and (b) there may well be other important issues in the election about which Catholic voters might have an interest to protect or a contribution to make.

Beyond this, however, Cardinal Ratzinger's clarification and the original statement itself raise an additional interesting issue. Much of the debate between academic political philosophers in recent years has focused on the place of specifically religious or even moral argument in political debate. The late John Rawls argued in his 1993 book, Political Liberalism, that a condition (empirical and moral) of stable liberal democratic political institutions in conditions of deep pluralism about religion and morality was that participants in political debate exercise a kind of restraint in their public arguments. In particular, Rawls argued that in debates concerning what he called "constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice," political officials, judges, and candidates for public office should deploy what he called "public reason." In public reason one appeals to arguments that are generally available in the political culture of modern liberal democracies and not to notions particular to one "comprehensive doctrine." Comprehensive doctrines are systematic accounts usually associated with religion or even philosophy: Orthodox Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Kantianism, and civic republicanism would all count as comprehensive doctrines.

There seem to be two major reasons for the proposals about public reason. A basic presumption of this notion is that religious and moral or metaphysical beliefs are particularly resistant to agreement and so threaten the stability of political communities when argument over them becomes central. Rawls was evidently moved to propose these ideas in part after reflection on the seventeenth-century wars of religion and the destructive character of later ideological conflicts. Second, there is a question about the justice of imposing coercive legislation on people for reasons that they could not accept or perhaps even understand.

A number of other philosophers have endorsed slightly different versions of Rawls's proposal and certainly accepted the logic of his views about the particularly divisive character of religious and philosophical argument in politics. Some have suggested that the same principle should discourage (all of this restraint is understood to be voluntary self-restraint) clerics from intervening in political debate as clerics. And many others have criticized the notion of public reason as overly restrictive and unreasonable (Christopher Eberle's book, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2002, is among the best such critiques). These notions have even made their way to some extent into the popular press.

One interesting implication of Cardinal Ratzinger's recent statements and the related controversy over whether or not Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be denied Holy Communion is that just this situation seems to have gone unanticipated in the debate over the role of religious argument in political discourse. So far as I can tell, the argument has always assumed that the main problem is citizens or politicians deploying religious argument in political debate. That important political implications could follow from explicitly internal discussion within religious groups seems to have been unanticipated. But certainly Cardinal Ratzinger's statements and the statements of several U.S. Bishops about just what the moral responsibilities of individual Catholic citizens and politicians are as matters of conscience carry with them important political effects. This, of course, assumes that the views of cardinals and bishops carry some weight with Catholic voters and politicians, a complicated matter indeed. Nevertheless, the possibility that such pronouncements could alter the voting behavior of citizens and encourage politicians to change their views seems important if one has the kinds of concerns that advocates of public reason have. But should the strictures of public reason cause cardinals and bishops to refrain from instructing the faithful in matters they believe to be of the greatest ethical importance? Should they be understood to influence the internal deliberations of any religious community? This was evidently the conclusion of one of former California governor Gray Davis's spokesman, who complained last year that Bishop William Weigand, who had criticized Davis for his pro-abortion record, was "telling the faithful how to practice their faith."

It seems to me that this problem in fact reinforces the problematic character of the various proposals for religious self-restraint in political debate. Certainly no one I know advocates any kind of self-restraint in religious authorities telling the faithful how to practice their faith when such instructions happen to carry political implications (and maybe very important ones in cases like abortion, euthanasia and, now, same-sex marriage). But the logic of the position? The problem that the public reason proposals forces to the surface is not, I think, a problem about religion as such, but a problem about conscience and how it informs one's interventions in political debate. And it's hard to see how restraints there, even self-restraint, can be liberal, much less democratic. Nor does it seem likely that any formal theory of self-restraint will mitigate the conflicts over moral life that are increasingly at the center of political life in pluralist democracies.