Yet more clarity on the life issues

In the latest issue of the Texas Catholic Herald, Cardinal DiNardo summarizes the mood, both optimistic and very, very guarded, of the Catholic community, as it manifested itself in the recent (post-election) meetings of the U.S. bishops:

After much discussion, the Bishops also asked the President of the Episcopal Conference, Francis Cardinal George, to issue a statement concerning the recent national elections. I believe Cardinal George’s remarks are clear and helpful in dealing with some important matters that may come before us in the months ahead. He first recognizes the historical importance of the election of the first African-American President of the United States, and he writes that the bishops look forward to working together with President-elect Obama and the new members of Congress. The Church always looks to cooperate in bringing about the common good and the various goods that underlie it.

The Cardinal then writes:

“The fundamental good is life itself, a gift from God and our parents. A good state protects the lives of all. Legal protection for those members of the human family waiting to be born in this country was removed when the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade in 1973. This was bad law. The danger the bishops see at this moment is that a bad court decision will be enshrined in bad legislation that is more radical than the 1973 Supreme Court decision itself.”

I share in Cardinal George’s recognition of a present danger. As the statement says, in the last Congress, a Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) was introduced that, if repeated in the next Congress, would outlaw any law that limited providing abortion at will. Any moderate restraints by the States would be annulled. FOCA would coerce all Americans into subsidizing and promoting abortions with their tax dollars. Parental notification and informed consent precautions would be outlawed, as would be laws banning procedures such as partial birth abortion and protecting infants born alive after a failed abortion. FOCA would be disastrous for prenatal human life. FOCA would also have a disastrous effect on the freedom of conscience of doctors and nurses and health care workers whose convictions do not permit them to cooperate in the private killing of unborn children. Further, the passage of FOCA would threaten our Catholic health care institutions and Catholic Charities.

The bishops are of a single mind on opposing evil, the evil of abortion and those laws and statutes that promote abortion. I am in complete agreement with the Bishops on this and will, no doubt, be asking the commitment and active voice of our Catholic faithful in witnessing publicly to this basic commitment of our faith in the public square. We must all

watch carefully in the next few months to see how this pro-life issue is addressed and be ready to respond clearly and instantaneously.

Cardinal Francis George spoke for all the bishops in his formal statement, delivered upon the close of the conference. His words are even more stark than Cardinal DiNardo's:

FOCA would have an equally destructive effect on the freedom of conscience of doctors, nurses and health care workers whose personal convictions do not permit them to cooperate in the private killing of unborn children. It would threaten Catholic health care institutions and Catholic Charities. It would be an evil law that would further divide our country, and the Church should be intent on opposing evil.

On this issue, the legal protection of the unborn, the bishops are of one mind with Catholics and others of good will. They are also pastors who have listened to women whose lives have been diminished because they believed they had no choice but to abort a baby. Abortion is a medical procedure that kills, and the psychological and spiritual consequences are written in the sorrow and depression of many women and men. The bishops are single-minded because they are, first of all, single-hearted.

The recent election was principally decided out of concern for the economy, for the loss of jobs and homes and financial security for families, here and around the world. If the election is misinterpreted ideologically as a referendum on abortion, the unity desired by President-elect Obama and all Americans at this moment of crisis will be impossible to achieve. Abortion kills not only unborn children; it destroys constitutional order and the common good, which is assured only when the life of every human being is legally protected. Aggressively pro-abortion policies, legislation and executive orders will permanently alienate tens of millions of Americans, and would be seen by many as an attack on the free exercise of their religion.

This statement is written at the request and direction of all the Bishops, who also want to thank all those in politics who work with good will to protect the lives of the most vulnerable among us. Those in public life do so, sometimes, at the cost of great sacrifice to themselves and their families; and we are grateful. We express again our great desire to work with all those who cherish the common good of our nation. The common good is not the sum total of individual desires and interests; it is achieved in the working out of a common life based upon good reason and good will for all.

If these words aren't a clear message to the new administration and its supporters about who-owes-what, I don't know what is. There needs now to be a national drive to educate the Catholic public and Catholic politicians about the signal role of the life issues in the Seamless Garment doctrine. Certainly there are many types of advocacy collected under this general heading. However, we are ending the era when Catholic spokespersons, politicians, clergy and educators can draw a type of "moral equivalence" that levels out the issues and allows those who would cover their abortion-favoring agendas with this blanket.

Pro-Life's Next Step is Visibility

Now the secret is out: The Church teaches that both abortion AND the death penalty are immoral:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6129597.html

If the battle is to be joined on the life issues, now is the time. Newly-elected public officials ought to take notice that the Church is working to educate its own members, giving witness so that all will know, and acting in order to achieve genuine change. This is a genuine first step, especially considering the willingness of the Chronicle to play the action on page one. Good work all around.

I also note that congregations of other denominations aided in the prayer vigil. All it takes is leadership and initiative--they will come to the cause.

Pro-Life: Some self-analysis within the Church

A wonderful analysis of the Church's current predicament by Fr. Schall:

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=810&Itemid=2

And, an outspoken priest who is shown some love by his parishioners:

http://catholiceducation.org/articles/catholic_stories/cs0340.htm

Sermon on the Mount video

Church inaugurated in 2006:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wZzPXuNl1g

Sanity in education.

The president-elect could do a lot worse than consider the advice of two columnists, Meredith Baker and Mike Feinberg, in today's editorial section.

Ms. Baker's point is that the needs of the nation are currently poorly served in several areas of government policy, one of which is education. Our secondary schools, she says, don't produce graduates ready to lead in the world community; other nations far exceed what we ask of our graduates. Only 13 percent have taken Calculus upon graduation; the ratio of students in American schools who have studied Chinese versus students in Chinese schools who study English is 1 to 10,000. Ouch. She concludes:

My generation won't be able to effectively govern and keep the economy running strong (or at least help it recover) if we don't have a well-educated workforce and technically strong citizenry.

Mr. Feinberg, one of the founders of the KIPP academies, covers the familiar basics of education policy, including a strong appeal for freedom of choice:

Pick a secretary of education committed to accountability and public school choice: When Obama picks his Cabinet, he will make a strong statement about the direction of his administration. President-elect Obama should pick a secretary of education who deeply understands the issues of funding and accountability on the federal, state and local levels, and who is passionate about student achievement and growth. Having one national test with one rigorous set of national standards will ensure our children can compete in the global marketplace as well as help parents know how well their children are progressing in school. The secretary of education must also support the growth of public charter schools, which give educators freedom in exchange for increased accountability. Families will benefit from the healthy competition resulting when multiple high-quality public schools serve the same community.

The proportionality argument

In an e-mail conversation the other day, I allowed that I thought the U.S. Church was correct in its teaching that the life issues were to be taken as primary among the public considerations used by one's informed conscience as one votes. My friend and correspondent wrote something like this: "Well, you know that this terrible war in the Middle East is cutting short some lives and futures, too."

He has a certain point--a war may be a bad thing. I was tempted to buy into this informal equivalence argument. Fortunately, I gave it a moment's thought. There is a significant difference between the personal action of abortion and the decision of a government and its responsible parties to order hostile actions to be conducted in the name of their people.

Further, unless one is using nuclear weapons, the loss of life is grossly disproportionate, and that disproportion falls incriminatingly against abortion. The commonly accepted statistic for 2005 (slightly outdated, but one I recall clearly) is that 1.2 million elective abortions were performed in the U.S. By contrast, 4,191 American soldiers have lost their lives in the Iraq conflict--none last month, by the way. Using a ratio of abortions per day in 2005, that number of 4,191 abortions was performed in about 32 hours, 1 1/3 days, in that year. Granted that there would certainly be other arguments about war and about abortion, the sense that "they both take life" doesn't seem anything but a dodge to me.

Moving on...

Some messages of encouragement and clarity on this day:

First, today's meditation passage on DGO is from St. Therese of Lisieux. Consider carefully what the Little Flower says about the search for the great soul, and the conditions for that search:

Dear Sister, how can you ask me if it is possible for you to love God as I love Him? ... My desires of martyrdom are nothing; they are not what give me the unlimited confidence that I feel in my heart. They are, to tell the truth, the spiritual riches that render one unjust, when one rests in them with complacence and when one believes they are something great... Ah! I really feel that... what pleases Him is that He sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope that I have in His mercy .... That is my only treasure...

Oh, dear Sister, I beg you... understand that to love Jesus... the weaker one is, without desires or virtues, the more suited one is for the workings of this consuming and transforming Love. The desire alone to be a victim suffices, but we must consent to remain always poor and without strength, and this is the difficulty, for: "The truly poor in spirit, where do we find him? You must look for him from afar," said the psalmist. He does not say that you must look for him among great souls, but "from afar," that is to say in lowliness, in nothingness.

Ah! let us remain then very far from all that sparkles, let us love our littleness, let us love to feel nothing, then we shall be poor in spirit, and Jesus will come to look for us, and however far we may be, He will transform us in flames of love. Oh! How I would like to be able to make you understand what I feel! It is confidence, and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love. Does not fear lead to Justice? (To the severe justice that people show to sinners but not the justice Jesus will have for those who love him.) Since we see the way, let us run together. Yes, I feel it, Jesus wills to give us the same graces; he wills to give us his Heaven gratuitously.

On a more overt political note, Plato writes in the Republic:

The city where those who are to rule are least anxious to be rulers is of necessity the best managed.

Finally, Victor Davis Hanson, in A War Like No Other, on the character of the most tragic of all conflicts, the Peloponnesian war:

Just think of it: a land versus a maritime power, the starkness of the Dorians contrasted with Ionian liberality. Oligarchy was pitted against democracy, practiced dearth set against ostentatious wealth. A rural hamlet dethroned a majestic imperial city; and a garrison state professed the cause of Greek autonomy abroad even as a humane imperialism killed the innocent.

No one foresaw such carnage in 431. Who believed that in just two years, the majestic Pericles would end up covered with pustules, grasping an amulet as he coughed out his life in the fevers of the plague? [Hanson then discusses the fates of other important figures....] Everything considered wisdom at the beginning of the war would be proven folly at its end.

Circumstances change. Leadership is the critical issue in the search for the better republic, and until great souls emerge the vision of the best polity will continue to take second place to economic revanchism and the moral cynicism that prefers selfish, short-sighted, agenda-driven convenience over the inalienable dignity of life itself.

Work to do.

According to yesterday's Houston Chronicle, "Abortion [is] not main Issue for Catholics." The point of the article is that, according to a recently-commissioned poll, only 44 percent of Catholics consider abortion the main issue when they vote. The piece also notes that

• The Catholic hierarchy is beginning to respond to what has been a pretty laissez-faire sense that there is fundamental moral freedom for Catholics to vote as they please, based on practical political concerns and preferences. A growing number of the bishops, including Houston's Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, have begun to use some definitive language to describe the abortion issue as a genuine and foremost concern, because human life is a foundational right. [The bishops are taking their jobs as shepherds more seriously, responding to the sense of the global Church and a growing segment of the domestic faithful. Other clergy I have seen strong statements from recently are Cardinal Egan of New York City and Archbishop Chaput of Denver.]
• Church-going Catholics are expected to favor Republican candidates, while non-practitioners poll in favor of Democrats. Part of the secret to change, then, appears to be to get the faithful back into the pews on Sunday.
• In the interest of the "choice" position, there are now groups who, with pretense of broad acceptance as well as "legitimacy" within the community of Catholics, promulgate the position that it's OK to place the whole panoply of election issues in an equivalence with abortion. They say that as long as the party or candidate speaks for regulation of abortion access in some fashion (while apparently maintaining a "pro-choice" credibility), it is permissible to vote for that candidate over one who is clearly pro-life. This position purports that the abortion issue is lost anyway, so we should save whatever we can. [Take your pick: is this position venal? disingenuous? manipulated?]
  

Whose funeral are the poll-bearers attending?

Are the outliers the polls showing the 9-point gap in Obama's favor that the cheap--er, free--TV networks are touting or the polls showing the 2- to 3-point difference, with McCain closing intermittently over the last week. On the closer-race end of things, Hewitt's breakdown is here, and Geraghty's is here. If the latter scenario is the one shaping up, then Obama is right where Kerry was in 2004. "Got 'em right where we want 'em," should then be the theme from the McCain campaign.