At The Globe and Mail, Konrad Yakabuski compares the Catholic Church’s vocal and influential role in American politics, particularly in the current health care debate, with Canada’s politically sidelined Church:

When the House of Representatives passed a health-care reform bill this month that included a watertight prohibition on federal funding for elective abortions, outraged American feminists wondered just how one of their own—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—could have countenanced such a concession.

The answer many came up with lay in a brief encounter between President Barack Obama and Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the Archbishop of Boston, at the funeral of the patriarch of America’s first family of Catholics, Ted Kennedy – who, incidentally, was a strident crusader for abortion rights.

Beantown’s Catholic primate boasted later on his blog that he warned Mr. Obama that “the bishops of the Catholic Church are anxious to support a plan for universal health care, but we will not support a plan that will include a provision for abortion or could open the way to abortions in the future.”

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Tim Craig and Hamil R. Harris claim that in the District of Columbia, the Church’s voice (including that of the black church, in particular) has become increasingly ostracized from political debate, particularly in the City Council’s ongoing discussion of gay rights:

It wasn’t that long ago that “there was no such thing as putting a pastor on hold” when the leader of a D.C. church called city hall, said the Rev. Patrick J. Walker of the New Macedonia Baptist Church in Southeast.

But when Walker, whose church has 2,000 members, asked to sit down with D.C. Council members this summer to discuss same-sex marriage, some of them wouldn’t meet with him, he said.

“This city certainly is no longer church-friendly,” Walker said.

The clout of the local faith community, particularly the black church, in D.C. politics has been declining for decades. But with the council heading for a vote next week on a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, the near-certain passage of the legislation has come to symbolize both political and spiritual changes in the District.

Read the full Globe and Mail article here and the rest of the Washington Post article here.