I got an email from one of my cousins saying that “Obama and Warren support the rights of working people,” but they are pro-choice. I believe that being pro-life is part of Catholic social justice, but my family members are telling me to “look at the whole picture,” the “seamless garment,” as they say.
I’m a pro-life Democrat, but I am disgusted by the way the Democrats are behaving today. They have helped build social programs that help poor and working families, but they won’t defend the right to life. I try to tell this to my family, but they always beat me down. And when I talk about traditional marraige, I’m always being asked, “Why don’t you want people of the same sex to marry? This is 2012!”
The Republicans won’t help working families, the Democrats won’t defend the right to life. What am I, a pro-life Democrat, to do when I try to defend my views in the face of a family who just doesn’t understand?
The “seamless garment”, as proposed by Cardinal Bernardin, has often been misunderstood and misapplied by many “liberal” Catholics. This is not the late Cardinal’s fault; he had a good idea, but his “followers” took it to absurd lengths.
In the Gospel of St. John, Christ tells us that He came “that we might have life, and have it in all its fullness”. Note the order of terms. Life is a gift from God, and we are not permitted to take innocent life under any circumstances. Those who argue for “social programs” (which have their own flaws; I’ll come to that later if you want) forget what Christ himself said; one must have life before one can have the “fullness” that these “social programs” try to bring.
Put another way: Existence is an absolute good. Even those of us who lack the “fullness” of life, either materially or spiritually, are often loth to give it up. None of us would say that
a mentally retarded child, or a disabled elderly person, should give up his life so that others might enjoy the “fullness” thereof. To place “fullness” before “life” is to deny the intentions of the Creator in giving us the gift of life, and to fly in the face of what Jesus himself taught us.
And as for “same-sex marriage”, it’s perhaps no coincidence that the nature of marriage appears almost at the very beginning of the Bible, in Genesis 2. This is ratified through the laws of Moses, and by the time of Christ, it is clear that marriage is between one man and one woman, that they may become “one flesh”, and that they may have “God-given offspring” (Malachi 2). In Homosexual acts provide physical pleasure, and nothing else. They are a perversion of God’s gift of fertility and of union between a man and a woman. In his greatest epistle, St. Paul mentions homosexuality as one of the first and gravest sins that are consequent on turning away from God. Therefore, they can never be supported by Christ or His Church.
Finally, politics is a messy, real-world field. No political party is ever perfect. But, as I’ve outlined above, some evils (the taking of life) are far graver than others, and are not “negotiable”. As I’ve said earlier, you guys are lucky to have a pro-life party out there; we Indians haven’t had that luxury since the 1970s.
