Le Moyne College Calendar

The most important feature of the moral agenda advanced by the Catholic hierarchy in the context of US politics is that it contains deep disagreements with the platforms and emphases of both major American political parties. Those disagreements pose real challenges to Catholic citizens wishing to be faithful to their Church’s teaching when they step into the voting booth. But those disagreements also represent real potential pitfalls for Catholic bishops hoping to prevent their multi-faceted agenda from being manipulated and exploited by partisan political operatives who do not share either the breadth or depth of the bishops policy concerns. Le Moyne alumnus Tim Byrnes '80, Ph.D., will review the complex history of the relationship between Catholic teaching and US electoral politics, and explore the ways in which that relationship is being defined in the contemporary era both by prelates and by politicos. The title of his talk is Bishops, Parties, and Competing Agendas: The Struggle for the Political Soul of American Catholicism.

Byrnes is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. He is the author of a number of books on the role of the Catholic Church in politics, among them Catholic Bishops in American Politics, Transnational Catholicism in Post Communist Europe, and most recently, Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy. He has held visiting faculty appointments at The Graduate Institute for International Affairs in Switzerland and Nicolas Copernicus University in Poland, and he is a past winner of Colgate’s Alumni Corporation’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. He has been a weekly panelist on WCNY-TV’s Ivory Tower for the last ten years, and he also currently serves as co-host on News Channel 9’s Newsmakers with Dan Cummings.

Sponsored by the Office of Mission Integration and Development, Sanzone Center for Catholic Studies and Theological Reflection, and the Department of Political Science Department. For more information, call (315) 445-4120.