In his column, which is published in many Catholic diocesan newspapers around the U.S., this week, George Weigel, who is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., criticizes Catholic candidates who are running for the presidency when they appear to bracket their Christianity "when they put on their hats as public servants." Specifically, Weigel writes, "when a candidate for public office avers that 'membership in the faith community' is deeply personal or a matter of 'my relationship with Jesus' then suggests that being a Catholic Christian is a compartment of life that can be hermetically sealed off from first principles of justice (abortion, euthanasia, and embryo-destructive stem-cell research), we're dealing with a confused camper. One might even say, it's a camper with a severe identity crisis."

Such politicians fail, according to Weigel, to take seriously how certain sacraments change their recipients ontologically, "conferring on him or her a new identity...." In particular, Baptism, which is "a sacrament with what we might call ontological heft..., incorporates a Catholic into the Church." Membership in the Church, moreover, "is not incidental to our identity as new creations in Christ...." Indeed, Weigel notes that becoming a Christian through Baptism "is qualitatively different from becoming a citizen, a member of the Supreme Court bar, a Detroit Tigers fan, a collector of vintage Volvos, a bourbon drinker, a member of the Democratic or Republican parties, a lifelong student of Dante or a trout fisherman."  In other words, "we don't 'join' the Church the way we join the Kiwanis, the American Association of University Women, the AMA, the American Legion," etc. In sum, the problem is "that too many Catholics imagine their Christianity to be the religious variant of their membership in other voluntary organizations."

So far, so good.