Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics

James Hitchcock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351534246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Throughout its history the Catholic Church has taken positions on many subjects that are in one sense political, but in another sense are primarily moral, such as contraception, homosexuality, and divorce. One such issue, abortion, has split not only the United States, but Catholics as well. Catholics had to confront these issues within the framework of a democratic society that had no official religion. Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics is a study of opposing American Catholic approaches to abortion, especially in terms of laws and government policies. After the ruling of Roe vs. Wade, many pro-life advocates no longer felt their sentiments and moral code aligned with Democrats. For the first time, Catholics, as an entire group, became involved in U.S. politics. Abortion became one of the principal points of division in American Catholicism: a widening split between liberal Catholic Democrats who sought to minimize the issue and other Catholics, many of them politically liberal, whose pro-life commitments caused them to support Republicans. James Hitchcock discusses the 2016 presidential campaign and how it altered an already changed political landscape. He also examines the Affordable Care Act, LGBT rights, and the questions they raise about religious liberty.

1
The Catholic Left

A majority of Catholics voted for Democratic presidential candidates from 1960 through 1976, shifted to Ronald Reagan for two terms, shifted back to the Democrats in 1992, and again voted Republican from 1996 through 2004.

More than anything else, abortion was probably the principal issue impelling Catholics toward the Republicans. But many liberal Catholics remained committed to the Democrats and they became alarmed as the abortion issue contributed significantly to Republican victories in 1980 and 1982.

In 1983 Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, then the most influential member of the American hierarchy, addressed this concern by proposing a “consistent ethic of life issues,” thereafter dubbed “the seamless garment.”¹

Liberal Catholics embraced his proposal enthusiastically, as manifesting a heightened seriousness—the recognition that not just abortion but a broad range of issues involved the sanctity of human life. Not only was Bernardin’s formula considered a moral advance on the “single-issue” agenda, but liberal Catholics predicted that it would make the anti-abortion stance itself more credible, by showing that Catholics genuinely revered human life in all its stages.

But many pro-lifers were skeptical of, even dismayed by, Bernardin’s proposal, fearing that it was an attempt to distract them from the primacy of the abortion issue, even to lend legitimacy to the pro-abortion stance by broadening the definition of “pro-life” to include, for example, someone who was pro-abortion but opposed to capital punishment.

Confirming these suspicions, various bishops, as well as the chief attorney for the United States Catholic Conference (later the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [USCCB]), warned against partisanship on the abortion issue. Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee went so far as to express sympathy for pro-abortion feminist women and dismay at the “extremism” of the pro-life movement.²

As its critics pointed out, the key fallacy of the seamless garment argument was the simple fact that there was no political home for those who believed in it. As a guide to voting, it was useless, since there were few candidates for office who espoused the consistency that Bernardin insisted was morally imperative.

If Bernardin hoped to inspire a new coalition around all the life issues — including abortion, war, capital punishment, and other things — it would have to be bipartisan, but it soon became apparent that neither liberals nor conservatives were going to change their positions in such a way as to fit his definition.

Realistically the only possible solution lay with the Democrats. It was unrealistic to demand that the conservative Protestant Senator Jesse Helms, for example, should embrace liberal economic principles against his lifelong convictions, but it was not unreasonable to ask that the Catholic Senator Edward Kennedy, who claimed to be “personally opposed” to abortion, should adopt the pro-life position. (Among other things such a conversion would have deprived Republicans of an issue.)

Instead, under the rhetoric of the seamless garment, Catholic liberals condemned Republicans for adhering to their conservative social and economic principles — in effect for not becoming liberal Democrats — while the same Catholic liberals expended little energy in persuading liberal Democrats to become pro-life.

Instead most of the Catholic politicians who might have been pro-life—Kennedy, Congressman (and Jesuit priest) Robert Drinan of Massachusetts, Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Vice-President Joseph Biden, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi—all lined up on the other side.

In insisting that they were personally opposed, these Democrats justified their stand by saying that they felt constrained to uphold the constitutional right announced by the Supreme Court in 1973, a claim that implied the absurd assumption that it is never appropriate to oppose a Supreme Court decision.

Michael Sean Winters, a leading liberal Catholic journalist, once said that the pro-abortion organization Catholics for Choice was “evil,” for “trying to confuse people and undermine the Church” (Reporter [online], Mar. 25, 2015). Logically the same could be said about all the leading Catholic Democrats, but Winters never wavered in his support of the party.

The pro-life movement took a significant turn within the Church with the appointment in 1984 of Archbishop John J. O’Connor of New York, who was not affected by the timidity of some of his fellow bishops and was seen as reaffirming the pro-life movement’s single-issue idea, in contrast to Bernardin’s seamless garment. O’Connor spoke boldly on the issue, including forthright criticism of Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro of New York, a pro-abortion Catholic who was the Democratic candidate for vice-president in 1984 (New York Times, Sept. 9, 1984).

Accepting in practice something believed to be wrong in principle is morally debilitating over time and, while liberal Catholics continued to extol the seamless garment, their response to the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 2003 revealed that abortion was a moral issue they could no longer face in a forthright manner.

The Reporter is the principal organ of American liberal Catholicism, and it devoted a good part of its January 17 issue to an assessment of the pro-life movement.

John Cavanaugh O’Keefe, a rare anti-abortion activist with a connection to the political left, pronounced the movement a failure, his point being not to urge pro-lifers to a renewed commitment but precisely to sound a retreat. In ostensibly friendly fashion, the paper itself warned pro-lifers that they were wasting their energies and ought to turn to other things.

The warning was obviously fallacious, since the movement had, among other things, successfully blocked most kinds of public funding of abortion and had enacted legislation to prohibit very late term abortions. Under the administration of President George W. Bush (the Mexico City Policy) the United States was practically the only Western nation opposed in principle to governments and international agencies promoting abortion throughout the world.

Above all, the pro-life movement kept the issue alive in the United States, in contrast to most other Western countries. Thirty years of officially sanctioned abortion, as well as unrelenting pro-abortion propaganda in the media, had not moved the public to a full acceptance of the practice.

Calling the movement a failure, however, relieved liberal Catholics of any lingering burdens of conscience, allowing them to affirm their commitment to the cause while excusing themselves from combat.

For O’Keefe the pro-life movement failed because it had not been radical enough—he had expected thousands of people to go to jail for civil disobedience, among them cardinals and bishops. Having shirked such moral witness, pro-lifers had lost the war.

But the Reporter’s publisher, Thomas W. Roberts, offered a contrary explanation—pro-lifers tried too hard. Roberts said he had witnessed an abortion demonstration in which both sides were “screaming maniacs,” something he characterized as a fitting image of the whole abortion debate. Those who cared about abortion were so extreme and irrational that responsible people could not be associated with their cause.

The leadership of American Catholicism, Roberts charged, had allowed itself “to be sucked into this political faceoff, this national screaming match.” The bishops encouraged the extremists among the faithful, which discredited the entire movement.

Roberts’ diatribe implied that debates over other issues—war, race, welfare, immigration—were carried on in a spirit of the highest rational civility. But in reality all such issues, in all times and places, have been debated with often uncivil passion. American history shows that aggressive movements—independence from Britain, the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, prohibition, racial justice—alone achieve success.

Ostensibly friendly liberal advice to the pro-life movement to become most moderate was thus at best misguided, and in most cases disingenuous, since in reality the movement had been remarkably successful in galvanizing effective political action. The purpose of Roberts’ disdain was to excuse liberal Catholics from participating in a democratic process that he alleged was beneath their dignity.

The pro-life movement was also denigrated in the pages of the Reporter by a theologian-lawyer, M. Kathleen Kaveny of the University of Notre Dame, who said that “Pro-life groups have increasingly realized that they can’t just say don’t kill. They have to provide assistance.”

The false charge that pro-lifers care only about the unborn is one that pro-abortionists have long made, and Catholic liberals who wanted to defuse the issue now joined the chorus. (In fact, since long before abortion became legal, both religious organizations and groups of volunteers have provided most of the support available to pregnant women in need of help.)

Roberts lamented that “many of the candidates the bishops implicitly endorsed had no inclination towards any of the other elements in the bishops’ social agenda,” an admission on Roberts’ part that abortion itself was not a crucial issue and should be sacrificed to others. Seemingly without intending it, the editors and readers of the Reporter confirmed that the seamless garment idea had become inimical to the pro-life cause.

The bishops’ alleged alliance with the Republican Party amounted to a kind of immorality, according to Roberts, who quoted two anonymous sources—one a bishop—as saying that the movement has been badly used by the Republicans. The Reporter reminded its readers that it was the Republican Justice Harry Blackmun who wrote the Roe decision and that other Republican appointees to the Court had helped block attempts to diminish the authority of that decision.

But Roberts’ argument was hypocritical, implying as it did that Catholic liberals wanted pro-life justices on the Court, when in fact it had been precisely such Catholic liberals, notably Kennedy and Leahy, who had systematically blocked or impeded such appointments.

One of the Reporter’s regular stable of writers, Tim Unsworth (Jan. 24, 2003), illustrated this hypocrisy as he contemplated the prospect of yet another Catholic’s being named to the Court. Unsworth counted off the list of seamless garment issues, including abortion, then regretted that the three Catholics currently on the Court, along with a man rumored to be the next nominee, were too conservative, dismissing Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas with the liberal cliché that they were “to the right of Attila the Hun.”

Drinan, who as a Congressman was implacably pro-abortion and often castigated the pro-life movement, criticized the “judicial activism” of the Rehnquist Court, charging that it threatened, among other things, “women’s rights” (Reporter, Feb. 7, 2003), a phrase that had come to be used to cosmetize the stark reality of abortion among people too fastidious to name it explicitly.

A week after its 2003 abortion issue, the Reporter published a lengthy interview with Pelosi, the newly elected Democratic majority leader of the House of Representatives. It was a unique opportunity to press her on her abortion stand, but instead she was given a series of friendly questions which allowed her to present herself as a person of extraordinary integrity and moral sensitivity who lamented that the bishops, in giving priority to the abortion issue, hampered the overall liberal agenda.

A nun, Regina Gniot (Reporter, Jan. 31), professed her support of the seamless garment but lowered the dialogue to a new level of crudity by characterizing pro-lifers as “people out there who long for the good old days when you could keep your women barefoot and pregnant and under male domination in a carefully regulated patriarchal society.” Another reader (Feb. 7) faulted the Reporter itself for being too cautious on an issue where in fact the Church had no right to speak at all.

Most revealing was a letter from a Trappist monk, James Connor (Feb. 21). Conspicuously using the pro-abortionists’ evasive phrase “freedom of choice,” the cloistered monk openly affirmed the partisan Democratic agenda, complaining that “If Catholics act on the single issue of abortion, then we will never get rid of President Bush.” (Somehow Connor also managed to blame Republicans for President William J. Clinton’s veto of an anti-abortion bill.)

Of necessity the Reporter’s approach to abortion had to be evasive, focusing on the extreme fringe of the pro-life movement or on allegedly mistaken political tactics and nowhere squarely confronting the moral issue itself. Searches for common ground always ended on the pro-abortion side.

Thus having characterized both sides in the debate as screaming maniacs, Roberts (Jan. 17) found one hopeful development from thirty years of conflict—a group of women in Boston, comprising both pro-abortion and pro-life people, who had been engaged in dialogue for some time, had thereby achieved a new level of respect and civility toward each other.

But the Reporter cited no concrete result from that dialogue, except that it may have prevented “another shooting” at an abortion clinic, when pro-lifers allegedly warned pro-abortionists that such an act was being planned. Roberts reported no instance of pro-abortionists doing anything to help the pro-life movement...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Catholic Left
• 2 The Catholic Left: The Donkey’s Makeover
• 3 The Catholic Right
• 4 The Catholic Right: Wars and Rumors of Wars
• 5 The Catholic Right: The Root of All Evil
• 6 The Catholic Right: Strangers in the Land
• 7 A Reckoning
• 8 Descent into Chaos
• Conclusion
• Identifications
• Index