s we head toward November, Catholics might profit from recalling a few simple facts.
First, surrounding a bad social policy or party platform plank—for example, permissive abortion—with religious people doesn’t redeem the bad policy or plank. It merely compromises the religious people who try to excuse it. One of the more miraculous, or suspicious, side-effects of the 2004 election was the number of candidates in both political parties who suddenly began talking about their religious faith. There’s no doubt that many public officials, regardless of party, do take their religious beliefs very seriously and do try to live by them. That’s a good thing. So maybe this latest trend implies a new Great Awakening. Or maybe, as one of my skeptical friends says, “it’s just another charm offensive to get the shamans off their backs.” Time will tell. Words are important. Actions are more important. The religious choreography of a campaign doesn’t matter. The content of its ideas does. The religious vocabulary of a candidate doesn’t matter. The content of his record, plans, and promises does.
Second, there’s no way for Catholics to finesse their way around the abortion issue, and if we’re serious about being “Catholic,” we need to stop trying. No such thing as a “right” to kill an unborn child exists. And wriggling past that simple truth by redefining the unborn child as an unperson, a pre-human lump of cells, is the worst sort of Orwellian hypocrisy—especially for Christians. Abortion always involves the deliberate killing of an innocent human life, and it is always, inexcusably, grievously wrong. This fact in no way releases us from the duty to provide ample and compassionate support for unwed or abandoned mothers, women facing unwanted pregnancies, and women struggling with the aftermath of an abortion. But the inadequacy of that support demands that we work to improve it. It does not justify killing the child.
Obviously, we have other important issues facing us this fall: the economy, the war in Iraq, immigration justice. But we can’t build a healthy society while ignoring the routine and very profitable legalized homicide that goes on every day against America’s unborn children. The right to life is foundational. Every other right depends on it. Efforts to reduce abortions, or to create alternatives to abortion, or to foster an environment where more women will choose to keep their unborn child, can have great merit—but not if they serve to cover over or distract from the brutality and fundamental injustice of abortion itself. We should remember that one of the crucial things that set early Christians apart from the pagan culture around them was their rejection of abortion and infanticide. Yet for thirty-five years I’ve watched prominent “pro-choice” Catholics justify themselves with the kind of moral and verbal gymnastics that should qualify as an Olympic event. All they’ve really done is capitulate to Roe v. Wade.
Third and finally, national campaigns—of every political party—always run on the language of hope, change, and the American Dream. This makes sense. Our leaders should inspire us; they should stir our hearts and call us to live the ideals that make America great. But sometimes the answer to the realities we face is not “yes, we can,” but “no, we can’t.” No, we can’t spend money like hedonists and outrun our debts forever. No, we can’t ignore the poor of the Third World and expect to be loved abroad. No, we can’t allow the killing of roughly one million unborn children a year and then posture ourselves as a moral society. No, we can’t make wicked things right by spinning them in a clever way.
Robert D. Kaplan once wrote that “Americans can afford optimism partly because their institutions, including the Constitution, were conceived by men who thought tragically.” The American Founders, most of them Christians, had a hard and unsentimental understanding of the limits of human reason and virtue. The last thing we need in 2008 is the kind of bogus hope rooted in mystical good feeling.
The real world involves hard conflicts and intractable issues that can’t be talked away or smothered under evasive language. Plenty of very good Catholics inhabit both major political parties. It’s our job as Catholic citizens to press our parties and our political leaders to respect the sanctity of human life—all of it, from conception to grave—whether our leaders and party elites like us or not.
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008, 8:11 AM
Did anyone watch The World Over, with Raymond Arroyo on ETWN, last evening?
He had the Bishop of Denver on and this subject was covered well. The Bishop stated the Church’s position and that of the USCCB, which contradicts what this thread is stating.
Even Raymond Arroyo challenged the Bishop in stating that what he was saying, that a Catholic could vote for a pro-choice candidate, was confusing for the average Catholic.
It all came back to, we should not be voting on a single issue, but as Catholics, we must use good moral judgment and consider everything, when voting for a candidate.
The Bishop gave examples of where two candidates are both pro-choice, or one is pro-choice, but the other candidate, supports some other immoral issue. The voter must decide which candidate will bring about more good to society overall, than the other.
What I got from the conversation is, the title of this thread, is misleading and not all of the USCCB’s agree with it.
The bottom line for me is, I won’t vote for incompetence, just because that candidate says he’s pro-life, like I did in the last election.
Jim
If someone states that Bush is our greatest president because he looks good in blue, I’ll point out the flaws in the logical approach, and possibly give contrary evidence from that approach (some sources indicate Clinton looked even better in blue). Is that going down another path from what I believe, or merely helping someone to see the flaw in his logic?
