August 1983 Print

Dr. Malcolm Brennan

In this age of political compromise, our Bishops, men to whom we should be able to look for spiritual guidance in a troubled world, have again failed in their frail "efforts" to protect the innocent unborn.

DESPITE the generally low regard that hindsight is held in, it nevertheless helps to clarify present conditions by explaining how things got to be this way. I would like to try to explain the progress of abortion to its present appalling state by tracing in outline the "leadership" that our bishops have offered in this matter.

Most of us were proud of our bishops in '72, when the Supreme Court handed down (spewed up, that is) its ignominious decision on Roe vs. Wade. The bishops forthrightly denounced this dissolution of restraints on mothers killing their babies. Catholics, they said, not only are not bound by a law of the land so offensive to God, but they are prohibited from obeying it, from cooperating even remotely in the performance of an abortion, and even from voting for public officials who promote abortion. Good stuff, that—and powerful.

I remember speculating with others at the time that abortion was going to save us from disorder, from "the smoke of Satan," which had entered the Church. The bishops are bound to see, we thought, that there are limits to ecumenism, that syrupy persuasion must give way to authoritative pronouncement, that the I'm-ok-you're-ok liturgy would have to re-establish contact with the terrible majesty of an offended God, that sound attitudes toward reproduction would have to be fostered by bringing back devotions to the Virgin Mother, and so on. (Hindsight reveals what fools we were, for the bishops saw nothing of the kind.)

Few of us worried at the time about what the bishops failed to do or about what they might have done. They might have donned their full episcopal regalia, stationed themselves on the steps of the Supreme Court Building, pronounced God's curse on the Justices' wickedness, and instructed the nation on a law higher than the bargains reached between consenting adults. They might have excommunicated any Catholic or nominal Catholic that made apologies for abortion, as some began to do, hesitatingly at first, then boldly. They might have led Catholics in fasts, vigils, and other public and private penances to appease heaven for the outrage.

They could have had millions saying the Rosary daily, offering their Communions, sacrificing their pleasure and comfort in reparation for the sins of abortion—all for the asking, for we were desperate to "do something" about the horror. Besides promoting these spiritual works, the bishops might have lobbied the Congress as strongly about abortion as they were doing for government handouts for parochial schools (all in vain, as it turned out) or they might have established an educational program the size of their justice and peaceniks enterprise.

In fact, after their brilliant outburst, there came ... nothing. Or rather, quibbles. Abortion, they said, is not to be seen as a sectarian Catholic matter, for millions of non-Catholics and non-Christians are also offended by the lawlessness of the law-givers. If Catholic clergymen take too prominent a role in the fight against abortion, the bishops argued, then many non-Catholics might be put off; their opposition to abortion might cool if it entailed following the lead of Romish officials. Well, there seemed to be some sense in that.

But suspicious pro-lifers began to notice some strange consequences of this "sensible" position. In many episcopal statements, the constant and insistent theme was the need to avoid Catholic leadership of the right to life movement, and the wicked nature of abortion received relatively less attention. What started out as a tactical ploy to hasten the end of the killing became, in fact, a distancing of the bishops from the issue, while the slaughter increased.

The care not to let abortion become a merely Catholic issue also took another peculiar turn. Few bishops offered Catholic and religious reasons for opposing abortion; most preferred to rest their cases on secular grounds, like the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution, or the U.N.'s charter on human rights, or the principle of human dignity. Their reasoning seemed to be something like this: If you ask people to oppose abortion because it offends God, then only those with the fear of God will be persuaded; however, if you ask them to oppose it because it is, e.g., contrary to the Constitution, then both believers and non-believers are likely to respond. Well, of course they did not. The bishops failed to consider that, if abortion is not a matter of religion, then it is only a pragmatic question of politics or economics, a question on the order of what a good farm subsidy is.

If few people noted the off-balance stance of the bishops' pronouncements at the time, quite a number became aware of their peculiar politics. The political programs which the bishops were partial to "happened" to be sponsored by people who were, generally, pro-choice. The bishops may have thought it was a piece of bad luck that their favorite politicians were soft on abortion, or even champions of it. In fact, there was no luck about it. The bishops, for example, liked politicians who promised federal funding for day care centers all over the country; they refused to hear those who pointed out that day care centers and abortions were companion pieces of artillery in the battle against the family, that they were both devices which encouraged mothers to forego their motherhood.

On the other hand, they viewed with distaste politicians like Henry Hyde and Jesse Helms, who were almost alone in impeding the abortion juggernaut, because men like these also opposed provisions for the welfare state. Do you remember when the bishops sent their flunkies to congressional committees to explain that legislation proposed to cut off welfare abortions was really a plot by the rich to punish the poor?

By this time, the late 1970's, everyone realized how inept the bishops were, how ineffective, how easily they were tied in knots by liberal politicians, how swiftly they were completely disarmed by transparent socialist/marxist slogans about the rich oppressing the poor. Against all our instincts, we had to admit that they were fools; what we did not realize is that they were knaves too! We thought they were only nincompoops, but they were really treacherous scoundrels.

This last revelation became undeniable in the fall of 1982 when the bishops gave their support to the Hatch Amendment to the constitution and withheld it from proposed legislation by Senator Helms. There were two major crimes in this piece of chicanery. First, the Hatch initiative was beyond the realm of political possibility—when it was finally voted on in June, it was unable to muster a simple majority, much less the two-thirds majority which it required—while the Helms initiative, on the other hand, would certainly have passed except for the bishops' opposition to it. The second crime is even more blatant and (except for the fact that it really happened) unbelievable: while the Helms measure would have done enormous harm to the abortion industry, the Hatch measure would have given to the states the constitutional authority to promote and subsidize abortion.

You think you have read a misprint, so I repeat: the bishops lobbied actively, through their appointed officials, for a constitutional amendment which would guarantee state governments the legal right to promote abortions. This is no strained extrapolation of which the amendment might imply; this is its plain sense and overt purpose.

Anyone who thinks the bishops were only stupid in all this is a fool. Behavior so vile comes not from incompetence but from malice. (Of course we cannot look into their shriveled souls, as only God can, but by their fruits we know them malicious.)

How could it be that these amiable, ambitious, self-congratulatory, lower-middle-class, ecclesiastical potentates could have come to behave in so despicable a manner? It does not figure. They could just as easily have supported the better legislation; no one would have thought the worse of them for it, or indeed have expected anything less. Even the apostates and marxist revolutionaries among them must have thought to themselves, "we must at least keep up appearances." But no, I cannot recall a single bishop disassociating himself from the episcopal bureaucracy on this point. Can anyone explain why they should have opposed restrictions on abortion, and instead have supported constitutional guarantees for abortion?

It has taken me many months to try to frame an explanation for this unspeakable betrayal, and I think it must go something like this. Now that their behavior has reached this vile state of depravity, we can see, through blessed hindsight, that from the beginning the bishops' conduct has led in exactly the direction where it has ended up. When they spoke out bravely on Roe vs. Wade, it was the spontaneous outburst of men who had been raised as Catholics and who were totally surprised that hedonism had advanced so far (Weren't they always telling us how mature and adult the human race had become?), but even then they had their eyes peeled for other matters than the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

Other matters like false ecumenism, for one example—nothing must be permitted to divide Catholics from others, not even the intolerable. The American heresy—for another—nothing must inhibit Catholics from entering fully into "the American way" and from introducing this "American way" into Church affairs. And secularism—Catholic teaching must be presented as plain good sense, as those things which every decent person already agrees upon, not as the oracle of God which it is, often at strife with fallen human opinion. And anti-authoritarianism—nobody can tell anybody else what is right or wrong because each person has the divine right of deciding everything for himself.

I do not pull these principles out of thin air; they are all visibly at work in the liturgy, in catechetics and Catholic education generally, in Biblical studies, in moral theology, in thousands of wimp, trendy clergy. The implementation of these principles is what is generally meant by "renewal."

Now, it is a law of human thought that you cannot replace sound principles with false ones, and still expect to come to valid conclusions. The ignoble experiment with bad principles (whether in the true or the false "spirit of Vatican II—who can tell the difference?) is why we have bad liturgy, bad catechetics, marriage tribunals turned into divorce mills, pornographic moral theology, and the rest. When the abortion question was thrown so rudely into the bland faces of their excellencies, those worthies had already foresworn the sound Catholic principles which alone could cope with the abomination.

Let me digress on "alone." The bishops, we saw (or, we see by hindsight), were anxious to find secular reasons to oppose abortion. (They knew the true, Catholic, reasons in their hearts, we thought, but were appealing to a broad audience.) Now, the secular or irreligious reasons for opposing abortion are numerous and convincing to a degree. Abortion is bad because it encourages self-indulgence among the citizenry and thus weakens the moral fibre of the nation. Or, abortion misdirects scarce medical resources away from serious health problems and into what is essentially cosmetic medicine. Or, I know a biologist who finds abortion to be an unwarranted intrusion into nature's processes—nature being, for him, the only sacred thing. Or, abortion violates the first of our Constitutional rights. Or, abortion is unsafe because of its sometimes severe medical and psychological consequences.

It is easy to see that these reasons, while somewhat persuasive to certain temperaments, are not terribly compelling against a rival difficulty. It all becomes a matter of debatable priorities—like, Does the assignment of medical resources count more or less than the violation of nature's processes?

But there is another irreligious reason for opposing abortion, one that has the ring of the absolute about it, at least superficially. It is that abortion causes death, and nothing is worse than death. When you take this position, happy new vistas open up everywhere, allies turn up all over the place. You can take your place among people against the death penalty, for example, and people against drunk drivers, people against cancer and heart disease, people against killing whales and baby seals, people against endangering endangered species, people against dioxin and acid rain and DDT, people against nuclear weapons—in a word, people against death. Even though Catholics know a good bit about death and about things worse than death, it was with this crowd that the bishops threw in their lot.

Exactly when this happened I'm not sure, but there has been this clear development in the episcopal stance. While formerly the trouble with abortion was that people wanted to make it a purely Catholic matter (according to your typical bishop and his spokesmen), the trouble now is that too many anti-abortionists fail to be anti-war, anti-death penalty, anti-poverty, anti-what-have-you. Try suggesting to one of these people that the trouble with abortion is that it offends God, and you are regarded as some kind of fanatic.

It is not just my peculiar opinion that secular reasons are not strong enough to stop abortion. It is an easily observable fact. Just look at all the people who are "pro-life" on weapons, capital punishment, public health, endangered species, et cetera, and who are at the same time comfortably pro-abortion, even zealously so. Just look at the bishops themselves, who failed so totally to make any headway against abortion that they have shamefully abandoned the cause.

But notice what has happened. The bishops opposed abortion for secular, not religious, reasons. Then they found that the secular reasons could not do the job. Instead of giving religion a chance in the fray, they have now abandoned the abortion question altogether and bet their tithes on a trendier issue, a nuclear freeze. And they have the gall, by the way, to call this a pro-life position.

(Objection: there are those who would argue that the bishops have not abandoned the abortion issue. When the Supreme Court recently struck down laws controlling how abortions were to be performed, they contend, the bishops responded admirably by tolling church bells in protest. Reply to objection: Isn't it strange that the bishops have come to the defense of laws which still authorize abortion, although in restricted circumstances? And isn't it strange that efforts which should have been directed against abortion are now directed only at nuclear weapons? Objection dismissed.)

One cannot help but speculate that, had the bishops opposed abortion on religious grounds, they could have won that battle and could have won thousands of converts in the bargain. At least they would have been teaching the faith—instead of teaching constitutional rights and the like. And perhaps many of those millions of non-Catholics who, for whatever reason, find abortion repulsive would have come to recognize that their healthy instinct was in fact a true religious feeling, and that this authentic religious sentiment was enunciated clearly only by the one true Church. As it is, the Baptist Senator Helms gives the Church's teaching on abortion better than our bishops do.

Well, that is my explanation of how we got in the mess we are in. I'm afraid, though, that I have not finally explained why the bishops chose to defeat the good legislation of Senator Helms and to support the bad and (fortunately) hopeless amendment of Senator Hatch. Perhaps it lies in this: Perhaps the bishops have so fully committed themselves to secular values—adopted initially only as a ploy, we hope—that they feel a natural repugnance for Senator Helms's religious fundamentalism. Or perhaps we must just finally content ourselves with labelling the bishops' behavior as a case of "the mystery of iniquity." But, however obscure their motives in the act of betrayal, we can see how they positioned themselves to commit it.

This abandoning of religion in favor of secular values is a little less incomprehensible if we recognize that it is not confined to the U.S. episcopate or to the abortion question. Bishops around the world (and I do not exclude the See of Peter) have abandoned religious principles of liturgical worship and replaced them with the principles of the advertising and entertainment industries. They have abandoned Catholic education's commitment to the truth, and to Truth, and replaced it with a hodge-podge of secular techniques like behavior modification and self-realization. Instead of teaching the poor how to save their souls, the bishops teach them to hate poverty (a religious value) and to demand their place in the middle class. Instead of promoting that peace which surpasses understanding, they have enslaved themselves to adventurism in international arms control.

That is, they have abandoned religion and religious principles in most things, not in abortion only. In a word, our bishops have become worldlings, enemies of religion.