Is Commonweal a political publication of the left or a journal of lay Catholic theological reflection? Political ideology and party loyality are seductive corrupters of honest theology. Commonweal can see this on the 'right,' but is it blind to its own risk of ideological capture?

Take the current front page of their website. The top three listed articles all negatively reference President Bush (see, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/). In itself, there is nothing objectionable about that fact. There is, it seems to me, a fair amount for Catholics to criticize in this (and probably any other) administration. The difficulty is the use of theology in service of politics.

One of the above referenced articles is a June 17, 2005, editorial (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php?id_article=1293) where the editors sneer at a Bush photo-op that is a part of the President's effort to increase political support for the protection of embryonic humans - a position they seem to agree with at least in part. However, the editors feel the need to make an argument for the ''ambiguous moral status of the early embryo'' based primarily on ''the biological fact that 50 percent of all embryos perish as a matter of course. If nature is so profligate with nascent human life, why must science treat as inviolable embryos that would otherwise be discarded?''

Nature is indeed so profligate that all human life ends in death at some point, so 100% of the biological entities that begin as embryos die. So what? Child mortality has been quite high historically. Even today in Sierra Leone 28% of all children born die before they turn five years old. Does this fact make the children of Sierra Leone eligible subjects for deadly experimentation? Does it give them an ''ambiguous moral status''? Is this an example of serious moral reflection by lay Catholics?

Then there is an article on Cardinal George that totally misses the context and meaning of his remarks (see, http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php?id_article=1296). The author conflates the Cardinal's comments with something Bush said after the Cardinal's presentation. They may have used the same words (the President and the Cardinal), but from the context there were two totally different things being said. It is the kind of mistake (as anyone who has taught can attest) that careless undergraduates make on a regular basis, ''Look here, the same phrase used by author A is used here by author B. They must be saying the same thing.'' A good editor should have caught that. As I understand it, the Cardinal was not contacted before the article went to press, which would seem to be basic fact-checking.

Why do I think the author of the above story is using a partisan political lenses rather than a theological one? Because he said so, in the article's first paragraph: ''But when the rhetoric of a cardinal archbishop is indistinguishable from that of a president, I worry a bit. When the rhetoric is that of the rightward fringe of the Republican Party circa 1952, I worry a lot.''

Both the editorial and the article seem shaped and driven by political (anti-Bush) concerns. The important moral and theological issues raised are ill served in this context where theological reflection is captured by an overriding political agenda.