This Outrageous Election

“How dare the Church tell me what to think!” In this horribly contentious election year, that’s the angry battle cry of some politically-committed Catholics.

An Outrageous Political Debate

[Editor's Note: This article (original title, “From the Heart”) was written by the editor of the Philadelphia diocesan paper to accompany an article by Cardinal Justin Rigali.]

“I always thought there was separation of Church and state,” complained one caller to this newspaper last week after we had published what the National Conference of Catholic Bishops said in 1998 about national priorities and politicians.

I have a lot to say about this.

First, the Catholic Church — and this newspaper — have taken care to avoid endorsing or opposing particular political candidates, but must continue to instruct the faithful on fundamental moral issues when the Church's teachings on those issues are called into question, no matter when that occurs.

Second, the Church has always and forever said that the sanctity of life is the foundational principle of morality. Always. If you don't have the right to life no other right matters. This should not be news to anyone.

Currently, 1.5 million babies are murdered (and there is no other word for it) every year in their mothers' wombs. This is a holocaust of unprecedented proportions. Every moral person is called upon to give voice to the silent screams of these dying children. This also should not be news to anyone.

Third, it is not the Church's fault that some candidates have made fundamental moral matters a topic of widespread debate by choosing to run on a pro-life platform or on a pro-abortion platform. All of us should indeed be outraged about the political debate over whether all life has value, but not [outraged] at the Church. Why aren't such grave concerns directed against those who countenance or enable the practice of murder, or against those who would silence the Church altogether on this subject?

Last week, we published a picture of a little hand reaching out from a mother's womb and clutching the finger of the surgeon who was performing an in-womb procedure. Even people who are pro-abortion admit that life begins in the womb. It's a scientific fact. How then has it come to this? How is it even possible that we are fighting about whether it's okay to support the killing of a baby in the womb?

If someone were to say to you, “I support the killing of people of a particular race or religion,” we wouldn't turn around and say to them, “Well, I disagree with you on that, but what's your position on health care and the environment?”

So, how can any of us say, “Okay, I don't think it's right to pull a baby who is minutes away from being born half-way out of the womb, plunge scissors into its head and suck out its brain (that's partial-birth abortion) — but where do you stand on Social Security?” As TV's John Stossel would say: “Give me a break.”

You know, I've always liked Stossel, but I recently heard him speak to a group of aspiring journalists, and he greatly disappointed me. He told the group that, while he agreed that life began in the womb, he still supported a woman's right to “choose.” Where did this attitude come from?

Ockham’s Switchblade

Interestingly, I know the answer to that question. I am currently taking a course in the history of moral theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. It turns out that there was an English Franciscan named William of Ockham who was thrown out of Oxford, where he was trying to obtain a master's degree in theology, because the chancellor felt his doctrines were so dangerous.

Sadly, Ockham's doctrines gave rise to something called nominalism, which many Americans subscribe to today even though they don't know it. So what were Ockham's dangerous views?

Ockham said that we are only free if we are unconstrained by anything; that freedom lies in our will alone; that virtues and morals and commandments are restraints on our freedom, and that freedom should be our ultimate goal.

That's also what Stossel, a self-proclaimed libertarian, was actually saying. He believes that a woman should have a right to kill the baby in her womb because only then is she truly free. I'm not gleaning this from what he said. He actually said that. Of course, he said “right to choose” rather than “killing the baby.”

St. Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the Middle Ages, had a different view. He said that human actions are guided by both the will and reason; that our minds are naturally inclined to truth and our wills to good — that's our nature.

Aquinas (and centuries of philosophers) also believed we have an ultimate end. They all said that end is happiness, with Aquinas saying that happiness is beatitude, or the loving vision of God. Aquinas said we only become truly free and happy by choosing to act according to our nature. We move toward truth and goodness and our ultimate end by choosing to live a virtuous life.

The truth is that murder is not a good or loving act, it is an outrageous wrong. The truth is that abortion is murder. Therefore, abortion is wrong, period.

But let's move on. Ockham was eventually called to Avignon by Pope John XXII and taken to task. He ended up in the service of Louis of Bavaria, who championed him and used him in his own struggle against the pope.

Not surprisingly, Ockham also “extolled the separation of church and state and denied all temporal power to the pope, thus shattering medieval Christianity's ideal of unity [of church and state],” according to The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers. “He also separated faith and reason.”

The Essential Moral Struggle

The modern Church doesn't make such false distinctions. Never has. Whether it happens to be election season or not, the magisterium is called by doctrinal imperative to proclaim the teaching of Christ on earth to paupers and presidents, the middle class and kings. In speaking out on our front page this week, Cardinal Rigali is following centuries of precedent. It is his duty as the moral and spiritual leader of the archdiocese to provide faithful Catholics with guidance in forming their consciences at a time when moral uncertainty is rife — as have centuries of cardinals and bishops before him. In teaching about fundamental moral subjects, the Church must ask the truly moral person to subordinate mere politics when forming a faith-driven moral conviction.

The Church stands by what she has always said. She bases her judgments on principles of everlasting truth and goodness, not on political urges or prejudices. While the Church has always stood for human rights, she has never said that all rights are of equal moral rank. Never. Who would ever have thought that she would have to defend the right of a child in the womb to live? But Roe v. Wade changed all that.

In the time of Abraham Lincoln, slavery was the most important human-rights issue, whether it was the law of the land or not. In retrospect, no one today could rationally accuse a person of that time whose overriding concern was slavery of being a “one-issue” person.

This year, another 1.5 million babies will be slaughtered. Modern science proves those babies will feel pain as they die. The essential moral struggle of the past 30 years has not been about political parties. It has not been about candidates. It has been about an issue, the issue.

Have we all become so self-centered, so self-interested, that we fail to see abortion as the most important human-rights issue of our own time?

If you are outraged, you should be. Just make sure it's directed at the right target.

Michelle Laque Johnson is the editor of the Catholic Standard and Times, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.