You miss the point. The point is
not to start a thread about torture, but to raise a smokescreen – pretending waterboarding terrorists is morally equivallent to killing the unborn. So it’s okay to vote pro-abortion.
Actually, according to the CCC, it is morally equivelent. Torture of prisoners is strictly prohibited under the doctrine of Just War. If the war is not just, then the pregnant woman and their infants killed so far are murder and forced abortion.
As the Church points out (via the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith), “limiting the harm” as explained by JPII is not an excuse to twist the faith:
“In this context [limiting the harm], it must be noted also that a well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals. The Christian faith is an integral unity, and thus it is incoherent to isolate some particular element to the detriment of the whole of Catholic doctrine. A political commitment to a single isolated aspect of the Church’s social doctrine does not exhaust one’s responsibility towards the common good. Nor can a Catholic think of delegating his Christian responsibility to others; rather, the Gospel of Jesus Christ gives him this task, so that the truth about man and the world might be proclaimed and put into action.”
So pointing out that there are multiple, important, and cohesively connected teachings that
should be considered by voters is the official position of the Church.
The Church describes the opposite, voting on a single, narrow interpretation of an isolated teaching not only “incoherent” but even a “detriment”. So there is no “smoke screen”, only Catholicism.
In fact, the Pope himself has framed torture and secret detention as a “pro life” issue, speaking in his official capacity. That is, the ultimate authority on morality for the Church sees the issues as connected. Similiarly, the Pope raised concerns about the fate of Christians in Iraq as an issue of the inalienable rights of the human person (as explained by the Second Vatican Council). That is the foundation (according to the Church’s DECLARATION ON PROCURED ABORTION) of our teaching on abortion as well.
So when a poster like estesbob talks about “the truth” and being “legitimately” pro-life in a Catholic context, we are using a different definition than the apostolic authority of the Church. To me, presenting an alternate ideology as the lone acceptable expression of Catholicism is more than a “smoke screen”. It is anathema, seperate from the Body of Christ:
“If anyone should say that the Roman Pontiff has merely the function of inspection or direction but not full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, not only in matters pertaining to faith and morals, but also in matters pertaining to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the entire world, or that he has only the principal share, but not the full plenitutde of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate over all Churches and over each individual Church, over all shepherds and all the faithful, and over each individual one of these: let him be anathema” - Vatican Council I, Dogmatic Constitution of the Church of Christ, #3
I find it sad how often we fail to connect our Sunday obligation to our lives at large. A central feature of Mass is that we repeatedly acknowledge our unworthiness. We are all sinners, yet we are all welcome at God’s Table. Yet, here we are, all sinners, all making moral compromises, and so much energy being expended into not only presenting one’s own choices as the one truth path to enlightenment, but deriding even disagreement as intellectual dishonesty.
We are all, to some degree or another, Cafeteria Catholics. Rather it is turning the other cheek or selling all our posessions to give to the poor, Jesus sets a standard that none of us can fully meet. But claiming moral authority in excess of Rome’s or that one is in posession of the one true path to salvation is not Cafeteria Catholicism, it is heresy, schism, and anathema. There is no Catholicism without Christ and the lines in our profession of faith (the Nicene Creed) are not optional.
