PREACH TO THE CHOIR

NEW YORK -- On the first Sunday after the Catholic bishops criticized George W. Bush's decision to allow federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, I was curious to hear the follow-up in my parish. But far from talking about stem cells or the preciousness of human life, our priest mentioned his vacation at Cape Cod and then ... nothing. So I called my parents: No word on stem cells there, either. Ditto for a college roommate, though my sister-in-law in Boston did recall hearing something about it at the church they go to at the beach.

Given the way the debate over stem-cell research was ultimately cast -- as a clash mainly between Catholic dogma and scientific necessity -- one might have expected a little more agitation from the altar. Especially if one had read the reaction of the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who had characterized the president's "trade-off" as "morally unacceptable." "We hope and pray," said Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza, "that President Bush will return to a principled stand against treating some lives as nothing more than objects to be manipulated and destroyed for research purposes." As it happens, my druthers are entirely with Bishop Fiorenza. But if the evil here is the destruction of human embryos for research, shouldn't Catholics have been hearing from the bishops all along? After all, Bush is not the pope, and the only issue before him was federal funding: The destruction of embryos has been going on for years.

And by hearing from the bishops, I don't mean issuing statements or allowing their priests to discharge their own teaching obligation with a few paragraphs in the parish bulletin. I don't even mean speaking about politics. What I mean is exercising their authority, as shepherds, to see that the ethic they wish America to practice is preached, regularly, in the one place where the church might still talk to American Catholics: the Mass.

Now, my non-Catholic friends seem to labor under the impression that Catholics spend their Sundays enduring thundering homilies on abortion and the pill. But in four decades of fairly regular church attendance -- including eight years of Catholic grade school and four years of Catholic university -- I can count on one hand the sermons I've heard on abortion. About contraception, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research, barely a peep, much less anything suggesting the linkage they all have to a culture of life.

Informal surveys of acquaintances suggest I am not alone, as do polls such as the recent Harris Interactive survey showing Catholics supporting embryonic stem-cell research by 61 percent to 24 percent, or the ABC/Beliefnet poll showing a majority of Catholics supporting legal abortion.

And then we accuse a Texas Methodist, with almost no political ground to stand on and groping his way toward moral purpose, of having abandoned a "principled stand." What accounts for this curious dynamic? Surely the first is the clergy itself. Far from treating Catholic teaching on life and sexuality as a gift, designed to help their flocks live happy, decent lives, too many priests and bishops groan under what they see as the unpleasant task of presenting to affluent congregations a litany of No's: no abortion, no birth control, not even in vitro fertilization for couples desperate to have a child. Unfortunately, that has fed another temptation, largely among those who have tried to get their churches to be true to their faith but have been rebuffed. Many of them have rightly found their way into the Republican Party, and the danger today is that they forget the GOP is just that: A party, not a church.

This is by no means to argue that the Republican Party should abandon its platform. It is, rather, to recognize that to expect politics to draw bright moral distinctions puts more stress on the system than it can bear. Politics, especially politics in a constitutional democracy, is designed for accommodation, so it puts a premium on compromise. There is a place for prophets, and for making sure that politicians hold to core convictions; politics ought to be more that just a series of compromises. But some compromise is endemic to politics, and this side of the Jordan River that is as it will always be.

Indeed, it's easy to succumb to the temptation to blame everything on politicians blowing with the wind. But how did that wind gather such a head? Forget about the finer points of stem cells. Georgetown University recently saw a huge battle just to get the administration to put crucifixes back up on the walls. In the past, Notre Dame bestowed its highest medal and a visiting professorship, respectively, on Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bill Bradley, both pro-choice senators -- not to mention the platform it provided to then-Gov. Mario Cuomo to launch his "personally-opposed" fudge.

In the aftermath of Bush's televised address, pundits noted that the president went further than even Ronald Reagan in his public tribute to the sacredness of human life. The scandal is that it went further than anything ordinary Catholics hear in their own churches and institutions. On what grounds, I wonder, do we upbraid a president for failing to uphold a line that bishops and priests themselves refuse to draw? Indeed, the dirty secret here is that in American politics, it is pro-choice Catholics who often provide the critical margin against the culture of life that both Pope John Paul II and President Bush have called for. On the Supreme Court, we've had William Brennan and Anthony Kennedy. In the Senate, most of the prominent Catholic names -- Tom Harkin, Tom Daschle, Pat Leahy, Chris Dodd, Teddy Kennedy, Joe Biden, etc. -- are all pro-choice votes. In this company, or on most Catholic campuses, Mr. Bush would be seen as a pro-life reactionary.

The bishops know this, and, to their credit, have tried to clarify their teaching. Starting with their 1999 pastoral letter, "Living the Gospel Life: A Challenge to America," the bishops specifically cited politicians who want to vote pro-choice yet still publicly pass themselves off as good Catholics. More to the point, the letter affirmed the primacy of attending to the culture, noting that "only tireless promotion of the truth about the human person can infuse democracy with the right values. ... We have been changed by our culture too much, and we have changed it not enough." Perhaps the stem-cell controversy will prove to be a watershed. Bishop Fiorenza is right not to trim the bishops' sails. But already we can see that technology is not only creating hitherto undreamt of ethical dilemmas, it increasingly is making it difficult for governments to control even if were they so inclined. In the long run, it would be a losing proposition to look to administrative or judicial fiat to sustain a culture of life: The first appeal must be directed squarely at the human heart. In the here and now, surely that also means we can hardly demand from a president an orthodoxy we've given up requiring from the pulpit.

William McGurn is The Wall Street Journal's chief editorial writer.