Engaging the Issues: Abortion as Murder, Genetic Evidence about the Beginning of a Human Person

As the posting I just uploaded notes, I’ve fallen behind in recognizing and responding to comments about my postings of the last several days. I appreciate the lively discussion about my weekend comments re: the abortion and health care debate. And I intend to take note of those postings soon, except when they’re part of a discussion between several respondents on which I don’t want to intrude.

For now, I do want to engage several comments in the two weekend threads that, in my view, deserve attention. The first of these has to do with the question of whether abortion is murder.

I brought that topic up in a comment in the thread following Saturday’s posting. And then I said more about it in Sunday’s posting.

As I’ve noted, from early in the period following Roe v. Wade, when the Catholic response to that Supreme Court decision began to develop, I attended public seminars at some Catholic universities at which highly respected theologians questioned the accuracy or wisdom of the tactic of some pro-lifers to call abortion murder.

And then all careful, reasoned discussion of the topic of abortion got shut down in Catholic circles, and anyone working in Catholic institutions and asking for further discussion of this topic (as well as of sexual ethics and women’s ordination) was likely to find himself or herself out of a job and/or silenced. After what happened to Charles Curran, Catholic theologians have trodden very gingerly around these questions.

And, in my view, the result has been disastrous, not just for the church, but for the pro-life movement in general, insofar as it seeks to engage the general public and not merely true believers on the political and religious right. That movement has moved more and more away from reasoned discussion as its primary approach to shifting cultural views of life-oriented issues, and more and more towards what I called shouting and shoving in my weekend postings.

As I noted in those postings, I remember attending a seminar about abortion and the pro-life movement at my alma mater, Loyola University in New Orleans, not very long after Roe v. Wade came down. And as I also noted, I remember several elderly, very traditional, middle-of-the-road Jesuit theologians noting in that seminar that it is inaccurate and dangerous for some pro-lifers to call abortion murder.

Why did they make this assertion? In the first place, in traditional Catholic moral theology, the moral meaning of an act depends not merely on the act itself. It depends as well on what one intends by an act.

If a man backs his car over his wife and kills her without intending to do so, he is guilty of involuntary manslaughter. If he backs his car over his wife and kills her while fully intending to kill his wife, having premeditated the act, he is guilty of murder.

Same act. Two different intentions. And those different intentions radically alter the moral meaning of the act.

As those wise, traditional elderly Jesuit mentors noted in their seminar about abortion more than thirty years ago, when we call abortion murder, we are implying (and assuming) that anyone who chooses an abortion is deliberately, with malice aforethought, choosing to kill another human being.

And yet many of those who choose an abortion do not think about what they are doing in those terms at all. Many of those who choose an abortion in the very early stages of pregnancy (e.g., those who take the “morning-after” pill) are not at all convinced that they are ending a human life.

The decision of many of those who choose to end a pregnancy is anything but a deliberate, premeditated decision to murder a baby. The use of the term “murder” to characterize abortion in general muddies the waters and does not contribute to careful analysis of all that is going on in decisions to end a pregnancy, or all that is going on in the complex moral and civic debates about abortion.

And so, in part because that discussion was decisively shut down in the Catholic church, we have ended up with a pro-life movement that slings around the phrase “baby killer,” without making any distinction between what people believe, based on scientific evidence, is happening at the earliest stages of conception, as opposed to the later stages of pregnancy.

And we’ve ended up with a pro-life movement in which those shouting “baby-killer”are often likely to promote capital punishment, wars against our religious “enemies,” the denial of health care coverage to poor citizens including undocumented immigrants, racist ideologies, and abuse of gay and lesbian citizens. We’ve ended up with Randall Terry showing up at a Human Rights Campaign to wave a picture of a dismembered fetus.

What’s that all about? And how does it promote the pro-life movement and its central claims? How does it do so in any constructive, reasonable way that might bring more thinking, concerned people into the pro-life camp?

The second point I want to address is the claim that contemporary science validates the Catholic magisterial teaching that a human being is fully present at the moment of conception, from the moment sperm and ovum unite. Again, this is a claim that demands much careful, reasonable reflection. It demands discussion between a number of constituencies, including the scientific community.

If this claim means that there is unique genetic matter—DNA uniquely different from that of either the father or the mother—from the moment of conception, then that’s certainly a piece of information that needs to be taken into consideration by those debating abortion from a religious and/or philosophical standpoint.

But to say that there is unique genetic matter in the fertilized ovum is hardly the same thing as saying a human person is fully present in the zygote. As one respondent points out in the weekend threads, if a human person is present when sperm and ovum unite, what are we to make of the phenomenon of twinning—the division of some zygotes to form two and not one person at a point further down the road from conception? And what to make, as this poster also notes, of the fact that the twinned zygote also sometimes recombines into one zygote again?

The genetic and biological evidence is far more complex than the human-being-fully-present-at-conception position would like to have us believe. Given its complexity, if we want to promote an ethic of life and convince others in a pluralistic society, we need to do our homework and sit down with those others at the table and talk—not scream at them about their murderous ways and refusal to recognize that taking the morning-after pill is killing a baby.

The vast majority of fertilized ova do not implant in the womb. Nature is designed so that most concepta naturally abort. If they did not naturally abort, we’d be overrun with so many people in a short time that the resources of the earth would not sustain its population. One could well argue from a theological standpoint that God designs procreation in such a way that the majority of fertilized ova spontaneously abort, because life on this planet would be insupportable otherwise.

And, as other posters have noted, there’s a process, a time-coded one, by which those zygotes that do develop implant themselves in the uterine wall. That process does not occur at the moment of conception. Some of those who think about the morality of abortion nowadays have seen in this contemporary scientific finding evidence to support the very traditional theory of Aristotle and Aquinas following him, that the fetus does not attain the status of a person—does not become “ensouled”—until the moment of uterine implantation.

I have great difficulty imagining Aquinas, or contemporary believers or citizens who see a difference in the ontological status of the conceptus and the implanted zygote, as murderers or advocates of murder. We would have long since been better served, if we want the ethic of life to be taken seriously, to permit reasonable discussion (and education) about these issues.

Finally, it’s important to note that raw scientific data will never resolve complex questions about precisely when a human person is present in the process of conception, or when human life ends. These are both scientific and philosophical decisions. They require both scientists and philosophers at the table.

And yes, they also require religious adherents and theologians around the table. But not as final authorities issuing fiats that shut down the discussion.

Not, that is, if those believers hope to be taken seriously in a pluralistic society where reason and not ecclesial fiat is the path to moral consensus.

Burke Followed By Terry Followed by Scalia: Keeping Track of Current Right-Wing Catholic Attacks on Obama Administration

And speaking of synchronicity, isn’t it interesting that Archbishop Burke has popped back across the Atlantic just at this particular time—right after the 9.12 folderol took place, and right before Congress was expected to begin voting on the health care reform bill?

Just in that significant little window of time, it happens, his right-wing Catholic handlers bring him on the scene to whip up the faithful, lambast his brother bishops who dare to give communion or Christian burial to those who accept gay marriage and don’t kowtow to their version of the pro-life agenda, and pontificate about Senator Kennedy’s funeral.

Oh, and to inform us that the health care reform bill has a “mandate” for abortion and “provides for the provision” of abortion.

We’d be foolish, I think, if we didn’t read these recent utterances of the “de facto pope of the Republican Catholic Church” as purely political—purely politically driven—pontifications. They’re designed to call the faithful to battle—to battle against the Obama administration and against the health care reform bill.

And as an insightful posting of Colleen Kochivar Baker to which I’ve just linked notes (citing a recent piece by David Gibson at Politics Daily), in beating the war drum this past week, Archbishop Burke was beating it against some of his own brother bishops, including Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who chose to give Senator Kennedy a Christian burial.

Burke and his handlers are working very hard to divide the American Catholic church, and to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the pastoral leadership of bishops who do not toe their Republican hard line. Following the dust-up that ensued when Burke gave an interview to Randall Terry this past March—an interview Terry uploaded to his website as if his extremist anti-abortion activities have Burke’s direct support—Burke distanced himself from Terry. Somewhat.

But here’s the thing. Terry works hand in hand with his more sober right-wing Catholic confreres, including Burke’s handlers, who do not want to be out on the front line wheeling baby carriages full of blood-smeared dolls, but who completely endorse Terry’s ideology and its political goals. What drives this movement is its intent to identify being Catholic in the U.S. with being Republican, to silence voices which question that alliance, and to drive religious and political dissidents out of the church.

And so it’s fascinating to see now that, on the heels of Burke’s remarks once again calling into question the pastoral legitimacy of some of his brother bishops who will not endorse his Republican Catholicism in toto, Randall Terry has leapt into action immediately. As Right Wing Watch reports yesterday, his current target is the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

On the heels of recent Burke’s performance in D.C., Terry and his groupies staged a demonstration at the headquarters of the USCCB. Their goal? To suggest that bishops who support health care reform support abortion.

Terry is continuing Burke’s recent work in D.C. This is not about abortion. It’s not about Catholic teaching that health care is a human right, and that moral societies need to provide access to basic quality health care to all citizens.

It’s about overturning the Obama administration, because only a Republican administration suits the wishes of those Catholics spearheading this attempt to split the American Catholic church. Even if said administration chooses to ignore the needs of millions of citizens for access to health care, leads us into war on the basis of lies, further enriches the rich and oppresses the poor, promotes capital punishment, etc. . . . .

Watch the video at the link I just provided reporting on Terry’s recent demonstration at the USCCB headquarters, and think of Burke lying about the “mandate” for abortion in the Baucus health care reform bill. And lambasting Cardinal O’Malley for giving Senator Kennedy a Christian burial.

It’s all of a piece. Synchronicity? I don't think so. Choreography, rather, with lots of money and lots of power determining each step in the process of this relentless attack on any political option for Catholics except the single one these right-wing activists promote.

P.S. Oh, and guess who else came out of the woodwork right on the heels of Burke's D.C. performance? Republican Catholic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who has just given an interview to the Orthodox Jewish publication Hamodia, arguing against the separation of church and state. Look for more and more of these carefully orchestrated right-wing Catholic moves against the current administration to unfold in the near future, and as you do so, keep in mind that it's on September 29 that the Supreme Court is supposed to hear the appeal of the Catholic diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, that Scalia has handed to the court, to permit the diocese to keep its files about clerical sexual abuses cases sealed.

Archbishop Burke on Twin Evils of Gay Marriage and Abortion: The Lamb Continues to Be Only A Lion

Archbishop Raymond Burke is back in the news—the American news. As I’ve noted before, the former archbishop of St. Louis was sent to Rome last summer to head the Vatican’s Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial office in the church beneath the pope himself. Many commentators have suggested that Burke was sent to Rome in accord with the ancient maxim, Promoveatur ut amoveatur: let him be promoted in order to remove him from the scene.

As it follows this maxim, the Catholic church has a history of handing out plum jobs to church officials who make a mess of their pastoral responsibilities. When court documents revealed the extent and longstanding duration of the sexual abuse crisis in American Catholicism in 2002, and when those documents showed the unsavory role that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston had played in hiding and moving around priests abusing children, Law was nudged out of his pastoral responsibilities in Boston. Only to be promoted to the cushy post of Archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome . . . .

The maxim about promoting folks in order to remove them doesn’t apply, unfortunately, to women removed from positions of ministry in the Catholic church. When Ruth Kolpack lost her job as a catechist in Beloit, Wisconsin, earlier this year as a result of her views regarding women’s ordination, church authorities offered her no golden parachute, despite her many years of ministry. Nor has Sister Louise Akers landed a plush job in the Vatican following her recent dismissal by Archbishop Daniel Pilarcyzk from all positions of ministry in the Cincinnati diocese. Akers’s crime? Supporting women’s ordination.

The church is not in the habit of handing out plum jobs to silenced theologians, either—Roger Haight was not given a comfortable sinecure in Rome, with palatial quarters and a handsome salary (both of which Law receives), when the Vatican silenced him at the beginning of 2009. Nor do priests who come out publicly as gay usually receive anything but scorn from the institutional church, in response to their honesty. As Fr. Geoff Farrow reports on his blog, in contravention of canon law, his bishop gave him neither financial support nor health insurance when he came out as gay in 2008 and the bishop booted him. As he notes, a priest accused of pedophilia would have received those benefits.

Unlike what happens to women, lay ministers, and gay priests who have the courage to admit they are gay when they’re unjustly dismissed by Catholic officials, the Burkes and Laws of the Catholic church do well for themselves. The church stands by its men, even (or especially), it seems, when they woefully foul their pastoral nests and damage numerous folks in the process.

Though Cardinal Law has tended to stay in Rome following his promotion-removal, Archbishop Burke now spends his time hopping back and forth across the Atlantic, where he has an important, albeit unofficial, political position in the American Catholic church. He has become something of a darling of the Catholic right in the U.S., where he keeps his hand in by pontificating as frequently as possible about “the” Catholic position on American political matters.

Burke was in the U.S. back in March to attend the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, an event sponsored by Republican political operatives that does all it can to suggest that the Republican party has the endorsement of the Catholic church. This was on the heels of an embarrassing interview Burke gave to American Catholic anti-abortion activist Randall Terry (and here), in which Burke appeared to give official sanction to Terry’s extremist antics, which include skits depicting President Obama ordering doctors to stab babies, and which continue unabated even as I post this piece.

Last November, Burke sought to influence Catholic voters to vote Republican by characterizing the Democratic party as “grievously anti-life” and unworthy of Catholic support. Burke has repeatedly sought to use the Eucharist as a political weapon to try to swing Catholic voters in a Republican direction, as he calls for communion bans on Catholic Democrats running for office. During the last election cycle, he pontificated from Rome about how the Democratic party is in the process of turning itself into the “party of death,” and continued his campaign to encourage bishops to deny communion to selected Democratic candidates like Joe Biden.

And now Burke is back in the U.S. again. Still pontificating. This time about truth and charity. Well, about truth, his version of the truth, the version of truth comfortable to the posh Republican businessfolks who hang onto his pronouncements.

Burke is in the U.S. now to be given an award, the “Service to the Church and Our Nation” award, by the Morley Institute’s InsideCatholic.com news site, headed by the former in-house guru for all things Catholic in the Bush administration, Deal W. Hudson. Predictably, the good archbishop, whom InsideCatholic banquet attendees describe variously as warm, kind, humble, gentle, simple, and quiet—a lion speaking with the voice and face of a lamb—used his platform at the D.C. awards banquet to make a wide range of political observations that play to his Catholic-right audience.

Deal Hudson’s summary of the banquet address (to which the next-to-last link points) says that Burke “returned again and again to the scandal of Catholic politicians who support abortion or same-sex marriage,” insisting that such politicians should be denied communion and Catholic burial—in what Hudson opines was “an obvious reference to the Kennedy funeral.” The lion with the voice and face of a lamb also used his InsideCatholic forum to take a swipe at Catholic supporters of health care reform, noting (Hudson’s summary) that endorsing universal health coverage because it achieves “some desirable outcomes” while it “includes abortion” is “false reasoning.”

The InsideCatholic banquet was not Archbishop Burke’s sole forum on this trip to the U.S. According to Michael Sean Winters at America magazine, he also gave an interview to FOX news, in which he stated that the health care reform bill prepared by Senator Baucus contains a “mandate” for abortion—a claim Winters flatly dismisses. Winters says that Burke told FOX that the Baucus bill “provides for the provision of abortion, so it’s simply not acceptable.”

As Winters notes, the only sense in which that statement might be parsed as true is that the health care reform bill does not outlaw abortion outright, something it cannot do with Roe v. Wade on the books. Winters goes on to discuss the “nettlesome policy issues” created by the interface of health care reform, abortion, and Catholic teaching. In a subsequent posting following up on Winters’s discussion of those issues, I want to discuss the abortion question and health care reform more closely.

For now, though, I want to return to Archbishop Burke’s claim that abortion and same-sex marriage are necessarily linked for Catholic voters, as a kind of diptych of non-negotiable truths on the basis of which “true” Catholics will cast their votes. When I hear the leonine archbishop with the voice and face of the lamb talking about abortion, I have to admit, I have a tendency to stop my ears—just as I do when I hear Mr. Hudson, with his history of sexually assaulting a co-ed student at Fordham University, talking about the sanctity of marriage.

To say that the Catholic church in the U.S. is developing an image problem for its anti-abortion politics—and this problem is growing because of the lamentably unwise, unjust, and uncharitable stance the church has chosen to take regarding gay people—would be an understatement. The church’s draconian anti-gay politics are undercutting its attempt to make a persuasive argument in the public square about the sanctity of life.

The image problem the Catholic church is creating for itself by its anti-gay money laundering in places like Maine and its use of gay people as political cannon fodder to distract attention from mishandling of clerical abuse cases in places like Connecticut, is becoming a substance problem. The homophobic image the church is building for itself in Maine and Connecticut and many other places in the U.S. evacuates its pro-life teachings of any compelling substance, for many Americans, both Catholic and non-Catholic.

And pushing the lion-like Republican archbishop with the voice and face of a lamb center-stage to babble to his rich constituents about the twin evils of gay marriage and abortion is not going to help matters. Not for many of us. I’m surprised, frankly, that my centrist Catholic brothers and sisters continue to listen. I long ago stopped doing so, when I realized that the lion was only a roaring lion seeking to devour. There never has been a lamb there.

Ask the good people of St. Louis who jubilated when the leonine lamb got sent packing to Rome after his pastoral shenanigans in their diocese.

An Archbishop Speaks Out: Archbishop Sheehan on Catholic Isolationism Due to Single-Issue Politics

I wrote yesterday that the monomaniacal focus of key American Catholic leaders on the single issue of abortion is marginalizing the American Catholic church when it comes to important ethical and political discussions. I noted that this monomaniacal focus has issued in tactics of bullying, shouting, and sloganizing that bring the Catholic church into disrepute in the public arena.

And I was happy to read later in the day that at least one U.S. Catholic bishop has recently made statements that seem to parallel my analysis of where American Catholicism has been heading for some time now. This is Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan of Santa Fe.

On 12 August, Archbishop Sheehan gave an interview to National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Roberts. In the interview, the archbishop talks about what he told his brother bishops at the last USCCB meeting, at which the invitation of President Obama to Notre Dame was discussed. Readers will recall that this invitation precipitated a firestorm, with a number of U.S. Catholic bishops denouncing Notre Dame for issuing the invitation.

Roberts reports:

In the Aug. 12 interview, Sheehan said the Catholic community risks isolating itself from the rest of the country and that refusing to talk to a politician or refusing communion because of a difference on a single issue was counterproductive. He described such actions as a “hysterical” reaction.

And Archbishop Sheehan went on to say,

“We’d be like the Amish, you know, kind of isolated from society, if we kept pulling back because of a single issue.”

He acknowledged the loudest voices were creating what appeared to be the Catholic position for the general public.

“Of course. I mean that’s always been the case,” he said. “That’s news, you know.”

Archbishop Sheehan is right, in my view. Meanwhile, if you want evidence of where American Catholicism has headed in some influential sectors—the shouting, sloganizing, and bullying around the single issue of abortion—check out these HuffPo and Joe.My.God videos of Catholic anti-abortion activist Terry Randall at Representative Jim Moran’s recent town-hall meeting about health care reform in Reston, Virginia (and see here).

If that’s the public face of American Catholicism nowadays (and it is, to a large extent), and if that’s what we have to offer to serious public discussions of an important moral issue like health care reform (and it is, to a great extent), then we’re in a heap of trouble.

And we’re in this state because the silent majority of U.S. Catholic bishops about whom Archbishop Sheehan speaks in this article have been unwilling to speak out loudly and clearly against the handful of bishops (Archbishop Chaput of Denver comes immediately to mind) who energize this screaming, belligerent minority. The bishops themselves have let these folks claim the center.

They did so during the campaign when these same activists shouted for blood at Sarah Palin’s rallies. And the bishops remained silent.

They did so when Randall Terry pushed around buggies full of dolls covered in fake blood for weeks before the president came to Notre Dame. And as a body, the bishops kept their silence—except for the loud, war-mongering minority who slammed Notre Dame for issuing an invitation to the president.

And they continue to keep silence, as a body, when Randall Terry and his cohorts disrupt town-hall meetings with screams about baby killers and black-face skits showing Mr. Obama whipping the elderly. This silence is shameful.

And the bishops will one day have to answer for it at the judgment bar of history, as well as of God.

Thugs Are Thugs Are Thugs: Joan Walsh and Tim Rutten on Cardinal Newman Society

Meanwhile, the Cardinal Newman Society (here) remains the gift that keeps on giving—for bloggers like me, at least; for those of us interested in the interface between religion and politics in the U.S., who think it’s important to track the efforts of right-wing pressure groups to keep American churches in a little box owned exclusively by the right.

Two recent articles comment on the connections between the Cardinal Newman Society and the Republican party—connections I have teased out in my own postings about the Cardinal Newman Society. As Joan Walsh notes in a 1 April Salon article entitled “Right-Wing Catholics vs. Obama” (here), what we’re seeing in the attempt of Cardinal Newman Society to force Notre Dame University to rescind its invitation to President Obama next month is not just any old media scrap, but a well-organized and highly-funded right-wing attempt to punish Catholics who voted Democratic in the past election, and to force Catholic voters back into the Republican fold:

But the growing movement to stop Obama's visit isn't your ho-hum sort of Catholic League media dust-up, where Bill Donohue harumphs on television and then goes away. It's part of a well-funded lobbying effort by a group of right-wing Catholics to run liberal Catholics, and dissenting doctrine, out of the church, and to recruit the remainder of the faithful for the GOP.

This is a group of rabid right-wingers who came together to make sure Catholic universities enforce Catholic doctrine. They publish the work of ultra-right Opus Dei member Rev. C. John McCloskey, who has argued that "for a university to be truly Catholic," its faculty must be "exclusively" Catholic. Operation Rescue fanatic Randall Terry, who converted to Catholicism recently, is bringing his special kind of crazy to the movement. "The faithful Catholic world is justly enraged at the treachery of Notre Dame's leadership," Terry rants. "Notre Dame will rue the day they invited this agent of death to speak." Once a thug, always a thug.

Tim Rutten offers a similar analysis in an op-ed piece on 28 March in the Los Angeles Times (here). In Rutten’s view, what Cardinal Newman Society and its allies are trying to do with this protest is “fresh and consequential”:

There are a couple of things about this culture-warfare-as-usual controversy that are fresh and consequential enough to be of interest. The first is the protesters and their connections. Many are part of a vocal, Internet-savvy lobby that has been agitating to coerce the church's prelates into denying Communion to Catholic officeholders who deviate from a rigidly "pro-life" line. Made up of a number of smaller groups, this lobby has campaigned to keep other pro-choice officeholders (of any religion) from speaking at Catholic schools. Its supporters also have been vociferously active in the movement to use abortion as a wedge to lever Catholics into the religious right.

The effort turns on convincing Catholics -- for decades now, the principal swing voters in presidential elections -- that they're obliged to vote on the basis of moral issues important to the right wing of the church, such as abortion, stem cell research and, more recently, marriage equality.

As Rutten notes, this is an effort that has a clear partisan political objective—to convince Catholics and the culture at large that being Catholic and voting Republican are synonymous:

The Newman Society is linked to two organizations -- CatholicVote.org and the Fidelis Center -- whose programs are clearly geared toward bringing Catholics into the Republican Party.

Both Rutten and Walsh note that the Cardinal Newman Society (and the U.S. Catholic bishops who buy into this partisan political agenda) are working against certain odds. Polls indicate a majority of American Catholics satisfied with Obama’s leadership, and they also indicate that on the hot-button issues of abortion, same-sex marriage, and sexual ethics, American Catholics may even be to the left of the American mainstream. The response of Notre Dame students to the attempt to force their school to disinvite the president is also running heavily in favor or the decision to bring President Obama to the campus.

By allying themselves with groups who are using the church for partisan political purposes, some bishops are turning their backs on the majority of American Catholics and the culture in which those Catholics live. One wonders how those bishops justify such a decision on pastoral grounds.

I note one other interesting point in Walsh’s and Rutten’s articles. Both note that, in inviting the new president as its commencement speaker this year, Notre Dame is carrying on a long tradition of inviting the newly elected president to its graduation the spring following each election. Notre Dame invited Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush to speak following their elections, and there was not a whisper of protest—even though Bush opposes abolition of the death penalty, a position contrary to Catholic teaching about the sanctity of life.

I’m interested in this tidbit of news, because several bloggers at centrist Catholic websites that have recently held discussions of the Obama invitation have speculated that Mr. Obama deliberately accepted the Notre Dame invitation in order to consolidate Catholic support. I wonder why that malicious motive would be attributed to him if he is following in the footsteps of predecessors who accepted Notre Dame’s invitation because Notre Dame has a longstanding practice of inviting the new president to its commencement?

Clearly, there is, in some Catholic minds, a Catholic exceptionalism regarding President Obama. I wonder why that is the case? I wonder on what basis we are to conclude that, say, George W. Bush clearly represents Catholic values, whereas Mr. Obama does not do so?

Something about the new president seems to strike fear into the hearts of Catholics of the right and of many Catholic bishops, who appear to have thought that the Republican party had locked up the Catholic vote in perpetuity. What is that something, I wonder?

Readers Write: The Politicization of American Catholicism

I'm slow to blog today for a variety of reasons. Steve had some minor surgery yesterday, and I am in nursing mode, though, as always, even when he's under the weather, he's trying to tend to my needs. Maybe with reason: I'm the world's worst nurse, and by hopping up and down and running to the kitchen for cups of coffee for me, he's avoiding having me experiment on him with my nostrums and potions.

I'm also, frankly, downhearted. The news in the American Catholic church is just so . . . bleak. There's the attempt to punish Notre Dame for inviting President Obama to be its commencement speaker in May, about which I have blogged.

And then there's the bullying of Randall Terry and Archbishop Raymond Burke, about which much is now being written. A good synopsis of the latest on that story, with links to good postings by Michael Sean Winters at America, is on the Whispers in the Loggia blog today (here) in a posting entitled "Burkxploitation?"

I've posted on Randall Terry and his . . . interesting . . . past before (here and here).

And I've blogged about Burke frequently--see, e.g., here. Burke is, of course, yet another of the bishops on the Episcopal Advisory Board of the Cardinal Newman Society--the same Cardinal Newman Society trying to create grief for President Obama by attacking Notre Dame. He is in the country now to pontificate at the upcoming National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, which is yet another of those events/groups founded during the period of neocon dominance to provide a religious gloss to Republican political goals.

As Catholics United for the Common Good noted last year (here),

The National "Catholic" Prayer Breakfast is sponsored by an independent 501(c)(3) of the same name comprised of five Republican political operatives. These partisan activists use the event to foster the false notion that the Catholic Church supports the policies of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party.

As Catholics United for the Common Good also points out, the "Catholic" topics highlighted at this annual event, which welcomes Republican leaders with open arms while turning its back on Democratic ones, contain glaring lacunae. While the prayer breakfast treats participants to a smorgasbord of selections about abortion and same-sex marriage, its agenda somehow fails to examine the war in Iraq, comprehensive immigration reform, poverty, and health care, which, as Catholics United for the Common Good notes, are "all critical issues to the Catholic Church."

Go the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast's website, and look at its announcement regarding this year's event, and you'll see three iconic faces looking out at you: Archbishop Raymond Burke, Antonin Scalia, and George W. Bush. Yes, this year's program features the face of George W. Bush . . . !

Which brings me to the points two good readers made in comments about my last posting yesterday, re: strategies to support Notre Dame (here). Phillip and Colkoch both note that the American Catholic church has been politicized in recent years, to an extent unheard of in its previous history--in particular, to an extent unheard of in the 20th century prior to the period of neoconservative dominance.

And I agree. This is also a point that lifelong Republican and former Ambassador to the Vatican Patrick Thomas Melady makes in an article in National Catholic Reporter today (here). Melady has served in three Republican federal administrations.

He notes that in the past 20 years, the Eucharist has been politicized in American Catholicism in a way that was unthinkable in previous generations. And this is precisely the goal of Randall Terry's crusade right now: he wants the Vatican to pressure American bishops who are not denying Communion to pro-choice politicians, and even remove them from office.

And he has solicited the support of Archbishop Burke, though Burke now professes shock that what he took to be a video of himself giving private entre nous aid and comfort to pro-life activists is now being used as a public weapon by Randall Terry in a crusade to slam bishops who won't use the Eucharist as a political weapon.

Melady states drily, "I fear that the situation is getting out of control." And I would say drily back, "Indeed."

What particularly disturbs him is that Catholics (including some bishops) bitterly opposed to Mr. Obama prior to the election are now unwilling to engage the new administration in any positive way, but are intent only on attacking and destroying--on pursuing a scorched-earth policy. In the name of Christ, they say. He states,

Many had hoped that once the presidential elections took place, Republicans, especially Catholic Republicans, would practice engagement with the Obama administration and those on the other side of the political aisle — that we would present our ideas without the rabid emotionalism that serves only to question the integrity of our opponents. Our role, in the best traditions of a pluralistic democracy, would be that of the loyal opposition.

I agree with Melady, both that the Eucharist should not be used as a political weapon, and that the current situation of scorched-earth politics by some American Catholics is deplorable. I'm surprised, however, that Dr. Melady is only now recognizing that things are getting out of hand.

They've been out of hand. Those now on the attack have been on the attack for some time now. Their agenda is theocratic, and they will not stop until they see that agenda fulfilled--even if its fulfillment requires coercing a majority of Americans and of brother and sister Catholics who do not agree with the agenda.

And that theocratic agenda has made significant inroads in American Catholicism because the American Catholic bishops have, as a body--with a few notable exceptions--willingly permitted theocratic extremists to capture the center of the American church. Their theocratic agenda is a mishmash of ill-considered Catholic theology and American evangelicalism. The bishops know this. They know that many of those promoting a right-wing theocratic agenda are badly educated Catholics. They also know that traditional Catholic values are incompatible with many of the values of right-wing evangelicalism.

And yet they have allowed this mentality to grow, to represent itself as authentic Catholicism, as the only possible Catholicism, and have done next to nothing to correct itself. They have allowed the American Catholic church to become captive to political operatives who promote goals that are antithetical to Catholic values.

They have blessed Bush and Cheney, Gingrich and Erik Prince, while repudiating Obama and Biden, Sebelius and Pelosi. At the same time in which the bishops have deliberately dumbed down their flock, they have also shoved away large numbers of faithful Catholics whose consciences cannot permit us to idolize the Bushes and Cheneys of the world--and their torture, their unjust wars, their callous repudiation of the poor, their shocking lack of concern for the environment.

In the period of neoconservative dominance, a period that Nicholas Cafardi was correct during the election to compare to the Babylonian captivitity of the people of God (here), the leaders of American Catholicism have given spectacularly bad pastoral leadership to their flock. What we are seeing now are the results.

And we are only seeing the beginning. Martino's attack on Biden, the Cardinal Newman Society's attack on Notre Dame, Randall Terry's and Raymond Burke's attack on bishops who give Communion to pro-choice political leaders: these are just the first shots in a bitter war that theocratic right-wing Catholics who are more Republican than Catholic intend to wage against the new administration.

And they do not care who is hurt in this war. Why should they, if they haven't cared about the millions of Catholics who have been hurt up to now, as they seek to impose their theocratic imagination on an entire nation?

The Presidential Campaign and Catholic Chickens Coming Home to Roost

As I noted yesterday, once again, news reports indicate that someone attending a Palin rally has called for Obama to be killed. This happened in Scranton yesterday. And, once again, Sarah Palin allowed the verbal violence to spew forth without a word of reprimand. In response to McCain-Palin's continued playing with fire, Keith Olbermann had this to say last night on MSNBC (www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/14/olbermann-special-comment_n_134714.html):

But on this, you're not only a fraud, Senator but you are tacitly inciting lunatics to violence. If you want to again grand-stand and suspend your campaign here's your big chance. Suspend your campaign now, until you, or somebody else, gets some control over it and it ceases to be a clear and present danger to the peace of this nation.

As these unthinakble scenes unfold, I am not hearing a peep from the U.S. bishops, who have persistently told Catholic voters for decades now to make issues of life central as we cast our votes. The pastoral letter of the Two Kevins came out in the very week in which the shouts of “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” began ranging out.

To my knowledge, that pastoral letter—or any pastoral letter of any U.S. bishop to date—says not a word to condemn the hate rhetoric that could, in the view of numerous commentators now, end in actual violence, if it is allowed to go on.

The silence of the bishops is shameful. It is scandalous. It totally undermines their claims to be pro-life, and to stand aloof from endorsing any slate of candidates. The longer the silence goes on, the longer we must simply assume that the bishops’ real concern with life issues is limited to the womb, and that they have bargained the soul of the American Catholic church for trinkets and empty promises from a political party that does not represent pro-life values in any profound way.

People are not deceived about any of this. Though individual bishops may question the alliance that the bishops, as a body, have made with the Republican party for several decades now, it is clear to most of us that, as a group, the bishops have a definite political penchant. And that they expect Catholics to share that penchant. As a body, the bishops have done nothing to dispel this notion. They have done everthing to bolster it.

And here in my hometown, two days after the Two Kevins issued their pastoral letter that did all but stand on its head to endorse one slate of candidates in the coming election, reports indicate that at least one Catholic pastor followed suit in his sermon this past Sunday (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/10/open_line_75.aspx). According to a report on the blog of the Arkansas Times, this Sunday Msgr. Francis Malone of Christ the King Catholic church in Little Rock offered his parishioners a

a blistering sermon that is basically a "Vote for McCain" speech. Msgr. Malone says he has a duty as the pastor to tell his congregation how to vote. He can't name any names of candidates, but he said that no one will have any trouble determining which candidate is apparently the only moral candidate on presidential ballot. The entire sermon is devoted to the abortion issue and the Supreme Court.

I am, frankly, a bit tired of hearing some commentators suggest that the bishops really stand aloof from politics, and that their finely reasoned and carefully nuanced documents about the obligations of citizens really mean that they do not endorse a particular political party. This is simply not how the majority of Americans today perceive the political stance of the U.S. Catholic bishops. And that perception is hardly likely to be dispelled by sermons such as Msgr. Malone's; it is only going to deepen, in fact, as the bishops continue to hold their tongues while cries ring out at political rallies of a major American party to kill and behead the candidate of the other major party.

We have come to a sorry pass. And as I noted yesterday, the bishops—as a body—have brought American Catholics to this pass. And they are doing nothing to get us out of it. No matter how carefully they and their defenders qualify the finely spun theoretical arguments of documents about voting, people can see the bottom line, the real implication of the political alliance the bishops have made, the practical consequences of their political guidance.

And those practical consequences are what count now, as calls for violence are occurring at political rallies with a regularity that threatens to desensitize us to this unprecedented turn in American culture and politics. What I posted yesterday is an extended reflection on how the pro-life politics of the U.S. bishops have had practical implications that include the current bold assertions of racism and xenophobia (and homophobia) at political rallies of “pro-life” candidates, along with appeals for outright violence. For murder.

All of this is not an aberration from the bishops’ pro-life politics. All of this is part and parcel of the pro-life politics the bishops have crafted for several decades now. It is interwoven with the pro-life stance and the handful of “non-negotiable” issues on which that pro-life stance is fixated because, simultaneous with their development of this hard-line approach to the political sphere, the bishops have also deliberately shut down thoughtful inclusive conversation about the non-negotiable issues, about what the pro-life ethic really means in American culture today, and, yes, about abortion itself.

At the cul-de-sac at the end of the pastoral path the bishops have chosen to lead the American Catholic church down for several decades now, we now see an intellectually impoverished collective of Catholic voters who can shout slogans with the best of 'em, but who lack the intellectual tools to explain or even understand what the pro-life “answers” they’ve been given really mean, in the culture at large. People whose intellectual and religious life revolves around slogans are sitting ducks for hate groups.

When the slogans a hate group chants seem eerily reminiscent of the “values” a religious group claims as its own, it is far too easy for a group of haters (of racists or xenophobes or homophobes, for instance) to pull the religious sloganizers into its camp. This is precisely what see happening in American Catholicism today, and the bishops should have anticipated it. Not to mention, should hve provided American Catholics with intellectual tools to critique and resist such alliances with those who hate.

In light of all that is happening in this presidential election, and in light of the pastoral strategy the U.S. Catholic bishops have been following for some time now, it is not surprising to read that Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue plans to blanket Catholic parishes in swing states next Sunday with brochures arguing that good Catholics have no option except to vote for McCain-Palin (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/2211). The brochure echoes the intellectually insulting approach of the simple questions, simple answers catechesis the bishops have encouraged for American Catholics for some time now.

For instance, it notes that some key Catholic political thinkers including Douglas Kmiec have endorsed Barack Obama, and asks if this is possible for a Catholic to do. It provides the following answer: "No. They are not correct. Endorsing, support, or voting for Obama in the 2008 Presidential election flagrantly violates Catholic teaching."

The bishops may wish to disavow Mr. Terry. They may tut-tut about his divisive (and deceptive) political use of pro-life issues. But they cannot justifiably disassociate themselves from this kind of political activity. Our chickens do come home to roost eventually, and Randall Terry is a Catholic chicken, the bishops' chicken, one whose rhetoric so closely matches that of the bishops that it is difficult to claim he has not been given a place—and a sumptuous one—within the contemporary American Catholic church.

And that’s even with his checkered history, which includes his censure by a previous church when he divorced his wife of 19 years in 2000 and remarried, failing to support his previous wife and his children by her. Or his repudiation of his gay son in 2004, and his statements that he can no longer have an openly gay son in his home. Or the premarital pregnancies of both of his daughters. None of which should matter, except that the rhetoric of the political party we’ve been told to accept as the only pro-life party has been rife with condemnation of premarital pregnancy and of broken families. Family—traditional family, the kind Mr. Terry's life story makes a mockery of—is one of the big non-negotiables of the bishops' pro-life pastoral strategy, is it not?

Randall Terry is a Catholic chicken. And it is hard to deny that he is coming home to a cushy roost the American bishops have created for him, as he blankets Catholic parishes with his leaflets, even if the bishops utter faint cries of protest against this activity.

After all, Mr. Terry has found enough of a home in the Catholic church that he converted to Catholicism not too long ago. For many of us who sit silently through the homilies of the Church of the Two Kevins, and whose conscience leads us to vote differently than we're instructed to vote, that home is less secure.

In fact, we've been politely shown the door.