Catholics oppose abortion. Good Catholics work to outlaw abortion. We Catholics support the March for Life. Catholics in good standing vote with abortion in mind, first and foremost. Richard Williamson and the Society of St. Pius X are Catholics who deserve communion, regardless of their views about Vatican II, women, gays, Jews, etc. Excommunicate Biden.All of a piece, in my view, the slogans, the hidden assumptions. And they dominate not just the viewpoint of the far right of the American Catholic church. They hold sway at the center. The middle-to-liberal center of American Catholicism, at least in its knowledge class, finds it far easier to welcome to communion Richard Williamson with his lisping vile “faggotth” taunts than it does, say, an openly gay couple living in a committed relationship.
How on earth did we get to this point from Vatican II?
It’s not just about abortion. It’s about an entire ecclesiology that the anti-abortion movement in American Catholicism has necessitated, insofar as we intend to pursue the anti-abortion cause as we have been pursuing it for some decades now. It is about a kind of church, a notion of church, that the American Catholic bishops have worked very hard for some years now to create, with the active or silent complicity of Catholics of the center.
It’s about a betrayal of Vatican II and of the very traditional ecclesiology for which Vatican II stood—in particular, of its sacramental notion of the church that makes it very important to think about how Catholics live in the world, what they say, what they do to each other and to those around them. That is, it’s about a notion of church that would make it impossible for us to rehabilitate a Richard Williamson, under the guise of serving the unity of the church, without first dealing with his hate-filled rhetoric about some of God’s children.
Re: abortion itself, I contest the hidden assumption of Catholics of the middle that we all share zeal for the crusade to outlaw abortion. I contest this assumption for all kinds of reasons. I will say it plainly and without any apology: abortion is, for me, not the central moral issue of all time, or of this period in history.
Catholics of the right and center have failed completely to convince me of its moral priority. And the more they tacitly assume that abortion is the primary moral challenge of our time, and that Catholics who do not share that assumption do not truly belong to the communion of the church, the more they alienate me.
Please note what I’m saying here: I’m not saying that I deny that abortion is a moral issue, or that it is an important moral concern, or that it deserves consideration when one looks at the moral life. I’m rejecting the analysis that pervades American Catholic ecclesiology right now—that abortion is the moral issue. That it holds primacy of place among all moral issues. That true Catholics and good Catholics and faithful Catholics will automatically see the world through the lens of the anti-abortion crusade, and will give top priority to “the” right-to-life issue.
As far as I am concerned, Catholics of the right and center have conspicuously failed to produce an articulate, reasoned defense of the claim that abortion is the overarching moral issue to which all others should be subordinated as Catholics think about and interact with the public sphere. The rhetoric about abortion that Catholics of the middle and right offer in support of this claim is not a reasoned defense of a moral position. It’s rhetoric plain and simple.
It’s slogan-slinging. It cannot convince because it does not, for the most part, advert to reason or to facts. It appeals to emotion and it seeks to force everyone who encounters it to share its emotional repugnance to abortion—and to regard that emotional repugnance as sufficient moral reasoning. Sufficient enough to hang everything on it, including the future of the church.
The Catholic church has worked long and hard, from the top down, to suppress any and all dialogue about abortion, to reduce thinking about the morality of abortion to the level of emotional sloganizing. Just as it has worked long and hard to suppress careful, rational conversations about women’s ordination, sexual ethics (birth control, homosexuality), and a number of other neuralgic theological and moral issues of our period of history.
In suppressing careful, respectful, reasoned, fact-regarding dialogue about these issues, notably abortion, the leaders of American Catholicism have completely undermined the vast, all-encompassing moral claims they want to make regarding these issues—particularly abortion. By choking off theological and ecclesial conversation about these issues, by reducing moral discourse about them to top-down commands that are enforced with severe penalties, the leaders of American Catholicism have produced not moral agents with informed consciences, who are capable of making wise moral and political choices around issues like abortion: they have produced fanatical premoral automatons who do what they are told.
And who cannot, therefore, carry on a rational or convincing conversation about the morality of abortion with the very folks they’re trying to convince, in the public sphere, to take abortion seriously as a moral issue . . . . The issue of abortion has been handled by the leaders of the American Catholic church and the knowledge class of its center in such a way as to suppress the kind of moral reasoning that is precisely necessary if one seeks to convince anyone of either the claim that abortion trumps all other moral issues, or that the practice of abortion is immoral.
This is a problem of communication. It is a problem of the inability of teachers of a church that is totally preoccupied with the abortion issue to communicate convincingly to me, to millions of other contemporary Catholics, and to the public at large about why we ought to share their preoccupation with abortion. It is the kind of communication problem that occurs when one shuts down dialogue, and simply instructs people to think and feel, as an alternative to dialogue. It is a fundamental failure of the contemporary American Catholic church, this failure to develop a coherent language about abortion, a coherent system of thought about abortion, that transcends slogans and punishment for those who will not chant the slogans.
In fact, the louder the shouts about the evil of abortion become, the more many of us begin to wonder what is not being said, as we’re urged to shout, to shut down our minds and consider every act of abortion as murder, whether the person engaging in it shares that moral judgment or not, and to see all acts of abortion as the taking of a human life regardless of the when in the gestation period the abortion takes place. When a moral discussion is reduced to shouting and silencing, one has to wonder about the claims on which those silencing and shouting others down really rest their moral argument. Surely those claims cannot be compelling, when one’s best approach to convincing others of the rightness of a moral position is bullying.
Also to be noted: when one considers that abortion never previously occupied the central place in the consciousness of the Catholic church that it now occupies—notably in American Catholicism—and when one also notes that the preoccupation with abortion as the moral issue primarily worth addressing arose just at the moment in history when, for the first time, women began to have some control over their destinies and their reproductive lives, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that the Catholic crusade against abortion is energized by resistance to women’s rights. Among the discussions being suppressed by those who will not permit abortion to be discussed rationally today is a discussion about the place of women in the world and in the church.
It is clear to many of us that the drive to ban abortion is about far more than that: it is at its heart about placing women back into the social locations of subjugation to male control that women occupied before social and technological changes permitted women relative control over their lives and their biological destinies. It is certainly possible, I believe, to see abortion as an undesirable moral option while also unambiguously affirming the right of women to control their lives and destinies. But to come to that such an understanding, we’d have to talk and think, to reason and critique and listen to many points of view besides those of the true believers who want to control the conversation from the top.
But this is not what we’re being told to do—to think, reason, critique, listen, talk among ourselves and with those outside our fold. We’re being told, instead, to march and shout. And to threaten.
In the eyes of many Catholics who have been implicitly excommunicated because we do not want to take part in such bullying demonstrations, the marches for life such as the one that recently took place in D.C. are not marches for life at all: they are fascist demonstrations designed to bully and to allow the church to flex its muscle. And, though this is often not made explicit in the rhetoric of many pro-life Catholics, among those being bullied are women and men who do not conform to rigid pseudo-natural law expectations about gender roles: that is, gay men.
It is impossible to deny that connection, which is totally glossed over by many centrist American Catholic apologists for the right-to-life movement, when one looks carefully at what many of the evangelical allies of Catholic right-to-lifers believe about the place of women and gay folks in the world and in the church. Indeed, it’s impossible to deny that many Catholics want to link the pro-life movement to opposition to the human rights of gay persons and of women. Witness Bob Dornan, who (as my first posting in this series noted) played a prominent role in this year's March on Life, and who claims to be a pro-life leader while slamming gays and lesbians and taunting Jews.
It has come to seem all of a piece to many of us: the spectacle of Catholics marching for life while marching against women’s rights and gay rights. What the anti-abortion movement has brought to life in the American Catholic church, many of us are finding, is a viciously anti-intellectual, self-righteous, narrow, contra-factual and contra-scientific way of being a church that betrays core values necessary to sustain the very ethic of life it promotes.
For many of, even if we share the concern to protect life (while we may also not share the agenda of many of our pro-life co-religionists, including the push to outlaw abortion for those who do not accept our moral claims), the price of being pro-life seems increasingly and impossibly steep, in the church that has come into being through the pro-life movement. To be pro-life, we are implicitly told, is also to be homophobic and misogynistic.
If that is the case, then to be pro-life is to question some of the moral positions we have come to regard as central to our practice of faith, and on which we have come to base our pro-life ethics. To be pro-life is to join a cadre of true believers with whom we have little in common other than our commitment to respect life—and whose conflation of the pro-life stance with homophobia and misogyny seems to us to undermine the pro-life stance.
The fundamental problem many of us have with the pro-life movement in American Catholicism and its apologists of the center is, therefore, ecclesiological: we do not live in the church in which many of our co-religionists live. We do not want to live in such a church. We believe, in fact, that the understanding of our church that is communicated to the public through the pro-life movement as it now stands is dangerously distorted, a betrayal of what we have come to expect the church to be, following the second Vatican Council.
About which, more later . . . .
