This post on Commonweal magazine’s blog is representative of a peculiar argument that has circulated widely this election cycle.

The argument: That Barack Obama is the most “Catholic” candidate in the presidential race.

Commonweal blogger David Gibson situates his version of this argument in the context of last month’s Al Smith Dinner, the New York archdiocesan fundraiser named in honor of the first Catholic to run for president in the 1928 election.

But why is Obama cited by Catholics like Gibson as closer to being Catholic, in the political context, than Republican rival John McCain? Certainly not because of Obama’s position on what Pope John Paul II characterized in 1987 as the test of America’s “deepest identity and truest character as a nation.”

Said John Paul, “If you want equal justice for all, and true freedom and lasting peace, then, America, defend life!  All the great causes that are yours today will have meaning only to the extent that you guarantee the right to life and protect the human person.”

Casting aside Obama’s anti-life positions as irrelevant, Gibson argues this way: “Obama’s views may certainly be closer to Catholic social justice teachings than McCain’s. … His community-based activism and his views on justice and peace are far more consonant with Catholic social teaching than McCain’s.”

Gibson provides no supporting evidence about why Obama’s “community-based activism and his views on justice and peace” should be assumed to be closer to Catholic social teaching than McCain’s positions. Nor does Gibson see any need to do so, because what’s really being asserted here is that a politician’s Catholicity depends on only one thing — how closely his agendas coincide with the tenets of left-wing politics.

Obama no doubt qualifies spectacularly well on these grounds. But this understanding of the Church reduces the faith merely to a political project, and one that often departs radically from the Church’s authentic social teachings.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this understanding of Catholicism becomes the Marxist “theology of liberation” that was condemned by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the 1984 Vatican instruction he authored in his capacity as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The fundamental problem with such a perspective, Cardinal Ratzinger said, is that it strips away all of the transcendental truth that rests at the heart of an authentically Christian faith.

“An exclusively political interpretation is thus given to the death of Christ,” the future Pope said in the document, entitled “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation.” “In this way, its value for salvation and the whole economy of redemption is denied.”

In sum, Gibson’s blog entry offers little substance to justify his suggestion that Obama is the “real” Catholic presidential candidate in 2008. But the blog does serve as a telling commentary about the flawed notion of Catholicism that continues to circulate among those in the Church who anchor their faith in political agendas, instead of in eternal salvation gained through the redemptive sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

— Tom McFeely