Special for my dear husband: What the Cardinal really said

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Last night over supper, my husband remarked that the secular papers had picked up on something Cardinal Ratzinger had written that apparently said it was okay for Catholics to vote for pro-choice candidates -- for example, this article from the WaPo: (registration)

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's arbiter of doctrinal orthodoxy, has given Roman Catholic voters leeway under certain circumstances to vote for politicians who support abortion rights, U.S. Catholic officials said yesterday.

I hadn't seen it; I generally only consult the Washington Post to find out what Rex and June are up to. Now that I've read the article, it seems to need a touch of something.... perhaps a dash of fisking? (For starters -- "U.S. Catholic officials"? "Officials"? Is the word he's groping for perhaps... bishops, or perhaps their spokesmen?)

But I'll leave that to someone with more talent, or someone who at least has her dinner menu under control. As hubby and I talked, I had a vague recollection that something the Cardinal had written a little while ago had been seized upon by the dissenters so beloved of the papers, spun like crazy, and was probably trickling down in that spun form to the Post. So we got into talking about "proportionate reasons", and what could possibly be as proportionate as abortion (My suggestion: "What if someone ran who was pro-life, and anti-human cloning, and had the right position on stem cells, but was running on some kind of pro-concentration camp platform?")

My husband was still stuck on why in the world the Cardinal would write such a thing, given the political climate and our poor reporting in this country and dismal catechesis. The only thing I could think of was that perhaps the Cardinal just didn't realize how this would further scandalize many weak Catholics in the US.

It really bothered my husband, in that he has had the impression for a while that to some members of the hierarchy, abortion just isn't really a big deal. They would pay lip service to the sinfulness of abortion, but in practice, treated pro-life concerns as just something to wedge in the schedule between shaking hands with the Youth Baseball League and the charity dinner. Something like the recent Voters' Guide released by the bishops' conference, in which abortion is buried in the middle of a whole list of legislative concerns. Yes, health care is important, but the debate on how to make sure people have access to health care is a matter for prudential judgement -- it's not something on the same level as the legal murder of children in the womb.

So dear husband told me, you know, you and the other bloggers really should get on this and you know, it has taken me almost twenty-four hours to recover from my shock that my husband had actually instructed me to blog!

At the same time, I didn't feel up to the task, because I haven't been blogging or following blogs as much lately, and I had this vague sense that someone smarter than me would probably have already covered this.

Well, I am delighted to report that somebody has, in great detail: Mr Jimmy Akin, on
What Ratzinger Said.

For starters, this carefully worded document wasn't intended for a general audience. It was addressed in confidence to Cardinal McCarrick, and was leaked. I wonder by whom?

2 Comments

"What if someone ran who was pro-life, and anti-human cloning, and had the right position on stem cells, but was running on some kind of pro-concentration camp platform?"

Well, that might be one of those cases in which "anti-abortion" was the only fair term, not "pro-life."

I guess there could be places in the world where that sort of thing is a lot easier to imagine.

What about if a U.S. president/candidate believed in "nuking them all," i.e. directly intending the death of large numbers of innocent civilians as a tactic in war? That would be different from miscalculating the justice of a particular war, and never intending innocent civilian casualties, right? At least, I was under the impression that the use of "weapons of mass destruction" was never justified.

Not meaning to debate the definition of the word "is", but I suppose part of the calculus would be how pro-life or pro-abort the candidate is, as well as other factors in their platform.

I could see voting for an indifferent candidate (functionally pro-abort but not a NARAL style crusader for ever more "reproductive rights") if the alternative was a pro-life candidate who was wrong on every other issue. It is damnably difficult to make headway on abortion in our government. It is intentionally designed to maintain the status quo. See the current flap over the Partial Birth Abortion ban, which three judges so far have overturned. If the reality is that the pro-abort will maintain the status quo but might actually support pro-life policies if they are politically expedient (remember, our fictional candidate here is indifferent and not a rabid crusader), then the likelyhood is that things probably would stay the same under either.

I suppose part of the difficulty here is that in the US, pro-life politicians tend to line up with the political party I typically support, being a fairly staunch conservative republican. I'm a limited government type and dislike the idea of voting for someone who would surely make life worse in economic and foreign policy but had a wisp of a chance of making a dent in abortion.

I think that politics is the art of compromise. The bizarre thing about the Civil War is that Lincoln was not an abolitionist, didn't care about the plight of the slaves. Abolitionist hated him because he wasn't hardcore enought. But he was electable. Preservation of the Union (which neither the Fire Eaters in the South or the Abolitionists in the North wanted) was his campaign platform. Abolition was expedient once the war was in full swing. It was a serendipitous accident that slavery was ended in this country in that particular war.

Immorality enshrined in law by the courts has in the past been overturned (Brown v. Board of Education turning over Plessy v. Ferguson). But Roe v. Wade (and Doe v. Bolton) are at the bottom of a stack of other cases which are much harder to overturn, since several holdings have become part of law. The same logic holding up Roe allows homeschooling. Sick but true. The logic that holds up both is what was put in place to allow Catholic parochial schools, in opposition to anti-catholic politics at the turn of the century. The scary thing about law is that we never know what injustices we are setting up when we correct current ones.

Another example would be the current mess with Terri Schiavo. The reason everyone is hesitant to overturn Judge Greer's decision is because it would mean questioning his finding of facts. Short of Terri standing up one day and having a pleasant conversation with her nurse (May God make it so) in direct and obvious defiance of such findings, it is against the etiquette of the courts to challenge the findings. And to say "damn etiquette and do whats right" is to open up the possibility of good decisions later on being challenged by opportunistic and vicious people. Which why the case is such a mess. Law meant to preserve marital rights are what gave Terri such a diabolical guardian. Processes meant to keep courts from being tied up in endless retrials are enshrining bad legal decisions.

The point of this ramble is that pro-life legislation is a sticky wicket and that it may be the case that sometimes, if that is the only virtue a candidate posseses, it might not be enough to make him the better candidate, taking into consideration the likely good he could do.


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