Church Leaders Worried Over GOP Roster Use...

Republican efforts to obtain church rosters from Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics who support President Bush have alienated some of the very people the GOP campaign is trying to court, as religious leaders worry the outreach could violate limits on politics in church.

This week, the Republican National Committee confirmed it had asked Catholics who back Bush to give parish directories to the RNC as a way to identify and mobilize new voters. The Bush campaign has asked the same of congregants in other denominations.

Republican spokesmen said the directories are public documents available to anyone, and making the request violates no law.

The information will be used for nonpartisan voter-registration drives, they said, stressing that they are not asking clergy for the directories - which could risk a church's tax-exempt status - but instead are asking individual congregants to volunteer their copies.

"We feel strongly that our grass-roots efforts are totally within the law and it's totally appropriate to encourage people of faith to participate," Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said Friday.

While Catholic officials concede the tactic may be legal, they say it is improper - and interferes with the work of the church. The directories are meant to help priests organize their parishes and build support among members, and are not for use by any outside group, they say.

Some parishes distribute directories with pictures of families who belong to the church, but those are put together for the families' use only, officials say.

"It is the 11th commandment in this archdiocese that parish lists will not be given out for any reason whatsoever," said Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. "And I can't imagine that the very same pastors who rely on the sacrosanct nature of those lists would ever allow them to be used for this purpose."

Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has said he is "appalled" by the strategy, which he said "intrudes into the sanctity of the church."

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