c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Supposedly secular America has had no lack of moral advice and no small appetite for it during the election campaign.

Catholics have been told by bishops and theologians that it is immoral to vote for candidates who support the pro-choice position on abortion; and they also have been told they can vote with a clear conscience for such a candidate if he or she otherwise supports overall Catholic social teaching.

Catholic bishops backed uneasily away from their denial of the Eucharist to pro-choice candidates and those who vote for them. They have continued to insist, however, that, so central is this teaching, that “abortion trumps everything,” and that Catholics should apply this in their moral estimation and electoral endorsement of the candidates.

Perhaps, as we stare at this soon-to-be-interred monster of a campaign, the bishops and other moralists could have been more help to the country in general, and believers in particular, with a notion rooted in the Commandments themselves: “Truth Trumps Everything.”

Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor is about as basic a moral prescription as we are likely to find and, despite all the attention given to commandments concerning sex, it is the one most in need of rediscovery and restoration in both church and state. Indeed, American political campaigns, and other venues of American life, are now based at least as much on bearing false witness as on telling the truth.

Bearing false witness has been so domesticated by the advertising/public relations complex that runs political campaigns as well as other large aspects of American culture that we hardly notice the practice, much less object. Lying in public about products, services and politicians has been given the less electrically charged name of “spin,” and Americans have been conditioned to accept it as a high art rather than a low practice. Thus, after the presidential debates, correspondents identified their location without apology or blush as “Spin Alley,” a baptized venue for transforming, hiding or glossing the truth of what candidates either said or intended to say.

The highly paid reverse alchemists of our time those who turn the gold of truth into the base metal of distortion are true figures in the great chorus of sellers, entertainers and con men who understand that, as philosopher William James once observed, Americans are ready to believe anything and would believe everything, if only they could.

“Hello, Sucker,” the Prohibition era greeting of New York nightclub hostess Texas Guinan, is the slogan of the packagers and publicists who intend to shade if not obscure the real state of things. As a public relations expert once told me, “The art is to take the apartment building that collapsed because of negligence and call it `urban renewal.”’

Maybe your father taught you what mine taught me, “Tell the truth because it is the right thing to do and it is also easier to remember.” It is very hard to remember a lie because it is cut free of any connections to reality. That is why politicians so often contradict themselves or try to make a virtue out of taking several stands on the same subject.

As we know from knocking on a solid wall, nothing sounds like the truth. The chief architects of popular morality scratch a public relations man and you discover the quintessential moralist for the American culture have so conditioned us to the shadings and spin that were once known as lies and distortions that as we head for the polling place we need to remember that in this campaign, as in life itself, Truth should trump everything else.

MO/RB END RNS