Our teachings against procuring abortion, a practice condemned in the first century of the Church, make no unscientific claims and are morally clear. No one may interfere with the development process from embryo to fetus to human child. The encyclical Evangelium vitae is accessible to all: ...we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception......It is true that the decision to have an abortion is often tragic and painful for the mother, insofar as the decision to rid herself of the fruit of conception is not made for purely selfish reasons or out of convenience, but out of a desire to protect certain important values such as her own health or a decent standard of living for the other members of the family. Sometimes it is feared that the child to be born would live in such conditions that it would be better if the birth did not take place. Nevertheless, these reasons and others like them, however serious and tragic, can never justify the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.
I don't know any pro-choice Catholics who reject this teaching. Despite the opinion of those who have appointed themselves my judge and jury, I certainly don't. When I was pregnant, I avoided all tests whose purpose was 'to help me make an informed decision' about continuing the pregnancy, I instructed my non-Catholic husband about the importance of saving the child instead of me in case of health emergency, and I fought my doctors' unwarranted interference whenever I deemed it morally appropriate. I have been active in the Gabriel Ministry, donate cash and goods to Providence House and Sunlight Home, and give regularly to CRS and to the American Friends relief service who goes freely where we cannot.
Where the Curia insults the sensus fidelium and undermines their own moral authority on this and other issues throughout the world is in the hypocrisy of their political position. As Joseph Cardinal Bernadin said so well "...the Church's understanding of the gospel defies conventional political and ideological lines," but a few of our U.S. Catholic Bishops have led a very vocal minority to believe otherwise. Should any Catholics not embrace their stringent insistence that overturning Roe vs Wade claims our highest allegiance, our orthodoxy is suspect. Exactly which mortal sin we Democrats are guilty of is unclear; I can only guess they mean scandal. What I consider far more scandalous is that the Bishops are repeating the same mistake that they made in Germany in the 1930s of believing the lip service of criminals.
These nasty accusations by the ultramontane, including the position paper of the USCCB for Catholics in Political Life that anyone who doesn't work to correct the abortion laws is "guilty of cooperating in evil and sinning against the common good" are pretty hard to justify on any rational ground. While a particle physicist is the one to ask about atomic structure, one consults an engineer to apply that knowledge; similarly, the Church has always recognized that the laity have an important role in the application of our Christian ethic in the secular sphere. Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Katharine Townsend Kennedy, et al., have said little that anyone but the most rigidly dogmatic crazies can claim contradicts the Magisterium's teachings. In some cases, public apologies have been given them, but they have not gone far to repair the damage to reputations nor cover the stink raised by veiled accusations. Most recently Cherie Blair, a human rights attorney married to the former British PM, was libeled this way; to his credit, one of our Catholic moral theologians called the claims of her critics "rash and outright calumnious" in Catholic News Service. I doubt any of her critics were denied communion for their mortal sin.
My sympathy for our vocal pro-life vicars of Jesus Christ is tainted by despair that their actions are mostly public pillories of desperate women that contradict Our Lord's words and actions towards sinners. The question is not whether abortion is an evil, it certainly is; however, it is also a fact that some pregnant women will even risk their lives to avoid bearing a child they do not want. Where abortion is illegal, the main result is not a low abortion rate but a very high maternal death rate accompanied by dead fetuses in dumpsters. How should Catholic Christians respond to the fear and moral confusion of these mostly poor women?
The political question is whether or not the state should throw people in prison. The only thing that passing laws does is make criminals of more sinners and interject the government into these decision. In the United States, our penal system is already the disgrace of the free world in its emphasis on revenge, nearly total lack of rehabilitation, outrageously long sentences for relatively minor infractions, and unequal punishment of wealthy over poor and white over people of color. Is prison the appropriate place to send these women, who often have other children at home? When the Catholic principle of subsidiarity is ignored, governments often overstep their bounds; Americans in general and American Catholics specifically believe that issues at the very beginning and at the very end of life should be made without government interference. The bishops and priests may intervene if they are so called; however, we prefer you not call the police.
In our relations with our governments and within the secular world, the laity who have the expertise needed to form appropriate public policy. Listening to the opinions of the faithful isn't a matter of putting fingers in the wind, but of heeding the voice of well-formed consciences of the Church itself active in the world. The Catholic faithful in the U.S.A. mostly agree with Roe vs Wade's ruling that the state "has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life" and very few Americans favor re-criminalizing medical procedures in general. From Europe to Melbourne, Australia to even very Catholic areas like Uruguay, Mexico City, and the Philippines, the laity disagrees with a legalistic approach to these sins. My own opinion is that insistence on this particular political approach is a grievous sin against women, indefensible in an age where we imprison neither adulterers nor sodomists. That those women murdering their children are often drawn from the poorest and least educated compounds my pain at the grave consequences of their lack of charity.
A better approach than the recent postcard campaign against legislation that doesn't really exist yet would be to help to write a strong, pro-life half of FOCA. Our bishops should lobby to provide the support that poor women need to bear their children: paid maternity leave rather than unpaid, prison sentences for those who fire pregnant women, free universal health care for childbirth and childhood innoculations, etc. Put your money where your mouths are, Excellencies, and put the resources you now waste on making noise to work caring for people. Give pro-life budgets to our Catholic hospitals instead of insisting that people lift burdens they cannot financially bear.
A similar problem haunts Catholic teachings against forms of contraception. Some positions don't make much sense at all, particularly if you happen to be female rather than male. We respect 'natural law' when it suits the purposes of the husband, and ignore the way that women's libidos and biology work. Desperate to continue to defend the 1968 Humanae vitae that is rarely accepted in practice by the faithful, Cardinal Ratzinger himself tried a 1987 follow-up Donum vitae that was barely coherent, and bishops tout the "Theology of the Body" by our dear philosopher-mystic Pope John Paul II, a man so steeped in Marian devotion that he doesn't seem to know any real women. The Curia is neurotic with worry that people will confuse abortifacients with contraceptives, and then compound the error by confusing the two themselves in public pronouncements.
The recent Dignitas Personae continues this trend of shooting Catholicism's credibility in the foot. The document exhibits little moral clarity and some of its claims are false. Anglican bishop Dr. Lee Rayfield, spokesman for the Church of England on ethics, put it very diplomatically: “... It worries me that there are assertions in it, for example about IVF and intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, which simply do not bear the weight of theological or ethical scrutiny, even from within the absolutist standpoint taken by the Roman Catholic Church.” The Episcopalians in the U.S. were less charitable, with one headline reading "Pseudo-science from the Vatican". A deputy chair of the Italian Society of Contraception was widely quoted as calling Dignitas Personae a work of science fiction, and even those who wrote it seem to have problems with it. On top of this, we have the Vatican making claims about the Pill and the water supply (see here here here here here ...well, you get the idea) that really make them look--well, stupid.
Where's a leader like our dear 'brother Joe' when we need him? I pray for his intercession from heaven: perhaps it's time for a new Common Ground.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment