Democracy is not entirely understood by the Catholic Church. During the 2004 presidential election in the United States, certain Catholic bishops intervened to warn Catholic electors not to back Senator John Kerry because, despite his personal opposition to abortion, he refused to impose that view via legislation. They threatened to withhold Holy Communion from him if the opportunity presented itself. That was the template against which recent remarks of Cardinal Keith O'Brien of Edinburgh and St Andrews were measured, when he told Catholic politicians that support for abortion was incompatible with the reception of Holy Communion. But the cardinal stopped short of the position taken by, say, Archbishop Raymond Burke of St Louis, who threatened to withhold Communion and rather grudgingly left receiving it to the conscience of the individual.

Nevertheless the position was clear: such politicians have no discretion in the matter. This has echoes of the Vatican instruction signed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 2003 with respect to the legal recognition of homosexual partnerships. It stated: "the Catholic lawmaker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it".

The premise here is not the same as the principle of freedom of conscience. It is that on certain issues Catholic politicians have a duty to be the voice of the Church in the lawmaking process, and to repeat what the Church tells them to. But that is not the politician's duty as contained in the theory of parliamentary democracy (which would also apply to a presidential system). Politicians, in that theory, stand for election making clear what moral principles they embrace. They then take part in the argument and make an honest judgement. That has to include the possibility, both in the case of abortion and of gay partnerships, that the politician might see reasons why the application of Catholic teaching might be ill advised in the circumstances. For instance, ...

The snatching of a small child from its loving parents is an unfathomable act of evil, which is why the world has been so moved by the plight of the McCann family these last four weeks - moved also by their dignity and faith, and by their utter determination to restore their four-year-old daughter Madeleine to their arms. Any minute their search could end in the joy of her recovery or the grief of finding her dead ...

The very limited progress made by the American troop surge in Iraq means President Bush is fast running out of options. Under pressure in Congress and from public opinion to withdraw, he instead sent in reinforcements, following advice from his army commanders that lack of troops on the ground was the reason that parts of central Iraq, including areas of Baghdad, were slipping out of anybody's control ...

What might be termed the Age of the Military Dictatorship in Latin America is now largely in the past, and the Catholic Church has had to adapt to a new political reality. Instead of a series of right-wing juntas who looked for support from old-fashioned church traditionalists, from rich landowners and from the US, the continental centre of gravity is now left-of-centre. Marxism is not the American bogeyman it was, ...