What role should a Catholic politician's faith play in his or her governing decisions?

Should religious convictions and moral principles be confined to the private realm or should they inform public policy debates? The 1960 landmark address by John F. Kennedy to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association has indelibly influenced the answer to this question. Kennedy's argument amounted to compartmentalization of faith and politics.

He also stated his position in a 1959 Look Magazine interview:

"Whatever one's religion in private may be, for the office-holder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts - including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state."

Kennedy's legacy has become a form of secularism which holds that:

---A person's religion and his decision-making should be kept in two watertight compartments.

---A politician's religious views are "his own private affair."

---Leaves the human person the "measure of all things" and isolates one's faith from making political decisions.

This stance stands in sharp contrast with the traditional Christian ideal of a public servant whose faith guides and informs his political decisions. The consequences of the Kennedy legacy are that:

---Political arguments are unwelcome if they emerge from religious convictions: a vacuum is created between faith and reason and the chasm between private truth and the public ethic becomes absolute and impenetrable.

---Religion is relegated to the private realm and deprived of its important role in American democracy. This amounts to moral relativism which acknowledges no universal truths.

---This separation erases honest debates about right and wrong, good and evil, truth and falsehood.

In this context, disputes over physician-assisted suicide disregard universal truths about the value of human life.

1. The disregard for moral truth is what Pope Benedict XVI calls a "dictatorship of relativism": where all life, not merely public life, is dominated by a rejection of religious belief and any claim to moral truth.

2. Absolute moral values defend the dignity of all human life, including the life of those facing suffering and terminal illness. When religion and faith are removed from the public square, the state assumes the power to define absolute values.

3. A Catholic politician must uphold basic human and universal moral principles. In this way, he is not imposing religious values on others, but permitting religious values to inform the debate.

4. Respect for innocent life, e.g., the dying, is not a peculiarly sectarian or religious value, but rather a precept of the natural law. Catholic politicians have the duty to defend it. Opposition to physician-assisted suicide is at the heart of preventing direct attacks on human life.

5. Catholic teaching holds that a Catholic must inform his conscience in accord with truth as revealed in Scripture and authoritative church teaching. Willfully to dissent from a fundamental moral precept is an act of infidelity, objectively immoral, and a scandal to the faithful. A prophetic witness of courageous Catholics is needed now as never before.

Sulpician Father Gerald D. Coleman is the vice president of Corporate Ethics for the Daughters of Charity Health System.