By a slim margin, the majority of Americans have now self-identified as pro-life on the very same week as the perceived leader of the Catholic Academy in America has anointed the most anti-life president in history. What happened?
As a former pro-life state lobbyist working to pass legislation some years ago, I saw first-hand why both Republican, Christian, and specifically Catholic leaders have not only failed the preborn and those susceptible to euthanasia, but have worked against them consistently behind closed doors, even as they have publicly spoken out otherwise. What happened last Sunday is that evil merely showed its face.
To have written these words and published them before last Sunday would have been impossible because we have been so identified with our faith and our party leaders that to hear this idea of what is happening behind the scenes would be an affront. Perhaps now the truth, at least from the perspective of one former pro-life lobbyist working on the ground, might be heard.
There are three ways the betrayal of preborns and the pro-life movement has occurred: through choosing party affiliation or faith institution over principle; through being duped by our leaders into false assumptions; and through especially believing the lie that incrementalism is never compromise. I will give you an example I experienced first-hand.
In my state, a bill had been introduced by the state Catholic Conference called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which would prosecute as a felon anyone attacking a pregnant mother and killing her “viable” fetus. The problem was that this was already common law in the state, and that a law with this lax of a guideline and so late of a date for considering a fetus an injured party had not been passed in thirty years in any state in the nation. The law was basically a straw dog. Why?
A Republican governor had just been elected for the first time in decades. A pro-abortion politician himself, he knew he had to have bipartisan, especially Catholic and Christian consensus to be re-elected. Many Democrats in my Catholic state needed to appear favorable to Catholics. The Catholic Conference needed a win as well and was more than happy to accommodate with this example of “justifiable incrementalism,” especially since it needed Democratic votes for a host of liberal issues it was pushing. The Christian majority, also seeking support for guns and anti-gay legislation, saw this as an easy victory.
That year, my lobbying organization had helped introduce another version of the same bill, which was currently standard fare and passing in many states, including protection for any and all 
fetuses. We also introduced a host of legislation including clinic restrictions and a ban on cloning. We were assaulted from all sides: the Republican “pro-life” minority whip was furious we had worked with more activist pro-life legislators rather than he; the Catholic Conference lobbyist accused me of taking over her territory. A Christian coalition lobbyist was upset that I might ruin his relationship with Republicans because he had other legislation he needed support for. A Democrat and daily communicant charged out of a pro-life caucus meeting, saying to me he had been promised that no pro-life legislation would ever be introduced at the state level.
The one ace we had was that our organization had a board member who was serving as a county assistant district attorney. In a six month period, he had seen four cases of pregnant women attacked. This, in only one county! These kinds of cases are often in the first months before the pregnancy is known, because it is easier to kill the fetus and get away with it. Many of the seriously injured women go to the hospital and are told to abort their child because it is “probably damaged.”
This attorney made a reasoned case with legislators via a letter. In response, one legislator (whom I knew to be doing so only as a show) sponsored our version of the bill. Legislators made sure it was voted against on the floor in favor of the straw dog bill. A Republican junior senator called me from the floor during the vote to apologize for the vote down. He had no idea what had happened. The collusion was at the very top of the party, which was led by faith-filled Catholics.
All three bishops in the archdiocese were given extensive briefs on the absurdity of the bill. Not one responded to our organization. The straw dog law was heralded as a great success from the pulpits.
I will give you one more, sad example of the depth of the lack of discernment on the part of our religious leaders. At about the same time as that bill passed, the issue of denial of communion to politicians had come up. I was friends with a nationally known, very holy and orthodox Roman Catholic priest and academician. He told me he had been appointed to a secret commission to advise a high-level Church leader on what to do about the controversy. He had told me he had advised the leader that the communion rail was not the place to address this issue. I had asked the good father if any lay people were on the commission. He replied, “You know we can’t trust lay people nowadays.” I then asked him a hypothetical question. If he was a pastor at a church next to Auschwitz, would he give communion to the Nazi commandant of the facility every Sunday? He replied that he was worried about me and thought I needed to find some more friends.
Well, friends, last Sunday was a kind of St. Crispin’s Day, when Henry V saw an impossible battle ahead at Agincourt and urged his very few friends on to victory. Yes, we pro-life friends can gain victory, and this is how.
First, we free ourselves of the illusion that all church and state leaders, such good friends with each other, really do as they preach, or have the discernment to even understand the most basic of ethical truths.
Second, we, the laity, take the pro-life movement in hand. The first charge will be to reform the Catholic Academy. The American academy was bought and the protest movement of the ‘60s supported by internationalist funders. In the same way, we lay people need only about $2 billion to establish a strictly lay-led and non-partisan-based foundation to create endowments for pro-life professorships in philosophy, theology and legal studies, scholarships and state-based university-led lobbying and activist centers. (Syracuse University just raised one billion and is starting a second billion dollar campaign. Yes, we CAN do it.)
Third, we must let go of the Catholic ghetto mentality that we need to raise money at church socials, sitting in the pew and believing what glossy political and religious publications tell us is really happening in the legislatures. If a lay-led and permanently well-funded lobbying apparatus held politicians accountable on a close basis, their terms in office would be short if they did not honor the pro-life commitments they made and garnered support for at Knights of Columbus halls across the nation. These state-based and national nodes of activism would publish on the internet blow-by-blow happenings in caucuses, committees and floor votes, as is now the practice at other successful lobbying organizations. The transparency alone would bring the needed pressure to bear on politicians and church leaders alike to place life issues at the top of their legislative priority lists. Catholic conferences would no longer govern lay perceptions through diocesan publications. The power of small underground presses was vital to ending communism and can end the monopoly of current “pro-life” official political and religious communicators as well. We laity may not be able to return to the practice of electing our bishops nor of being allowed to oversee the accounting of funds, as some groups are now promoting, but we cannot waste precious time waiting for reform from that could take decades or even centuries. With over 50 million preborn killed each year, it is only by taking financial responsibility and the lead ourselves that we can champion this, the greatest civil and human rights issue in history, to victory. Indeed, it is well within the call of Vatican II for the laity to take just such actions. On the mount of His ascension, Jesus instucted his disciples to go out and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. It is our duty to spread the mantle of His Word over our precious children as well. The first source of funding can be the millions now being withheld from Notre Dame because of its betrayal.
Fourth, and most important, we take back the education of our youth on the most fundamental level. Young Catholics, educated in public schools with egregiously manipulated textbooks and with Sunday school pabulum, elected this president. In one confirmation class I taught, a teen told me she had chosen St. Valentine for her confirmation name since “she was the goddess of love.” De Tocqueville insisted that the great American democracy he witnessed could only survive if the populace were educated and religious. We are now neither.
How do we take back our children? Too many of our Catholic schools have become mission schools for those wealthy children thrown out of public school for behavioral problems. Christian schools are worthy sanctuaries but I have witnessed how easy it is for the young to leave the Church because the power and witness of the Spirit in these schools is so often combined with subtle or not-so-subtle anti-Catholicism that our children are ill-equipped to resist. The homeschool movement is also not without some serious weaknesses and impracticalities. I would also wager that it will not remain legal for much longer.
Taking back our children will, in part, involve a serious intellectual assault on the powers that govern catechetics. Another 6th grade confirmation class I taught was taken to seminars to be taught sex education according to diocesan guidelines. The “teacher” used every foul word I have ever heard. When the children came back to my classroom after this training, they no longer had the faces of children. One book I was told to use in another confirmation class illustrated the palm of the hand and how each part of it symbolized an aspect of the human person. Palmistry has replaced palms in our faith tradition because there are no more parents at home looking out for their children, the undereducated mission-driven heterodox have the corner on Catholic textbooks, and discernment is not taught in seminary where so few men are found that 30% of parishes are without a full-time pastor.
Lastly, while the pedophile crisis of the ‘90s has been seen to be a closed matter, in fact, the true crisis was and remains one of episcopal conscience and leadership, with two-thirds of the American hierarchy having knowingly allowed children to remain in the care of credibly accused pedophiles, according to the Dallas Morning News . Let’s go ahead and assume a 100% exaggeration rate on the part of the paper. Now we are down to “only” one third. Not one of these bishops has been tried in ecclesial courts. By the time of the French Revolution, almost every bishop in France had become a deist. Should we be so surprised that a similar collapse could have occurred today?
This is our Agincourt. This is our call to action. Who will be brave enough to take up the banner?
