“Politics, though often denigrated, remains a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good. . . . I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor!”
Pope Francis, Evangelli Gaudium, no. 205
James Baldwin agreed with St. Paul’s self-assessment that he was a “wretched” man. Baldwin called that a critique written with “a most unusual and stunning exactness.” I’m beginning to empathize with The Master on this one, perhaps to an unhealthy degree when it comes to a number of prominent Catholic figures these days.
The Catholic Church, as you know, is pro-life. But it’s obvious from reading my Facebook feed, that many of you don’t understand what that means. It means supporting life from conception to natural death. Catechism paragraph 2272 is clear. It doesn’t mean putting all your chips in the anti-abortion pot.
“Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae,” by the very commission of the
offense,” and subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law. The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.”
You may not have an abortion. You may not perform an abortion. You may not pay for an abortion. Note what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say you are required to only support a candidate for office who wants to put people in jail for having an abortion.
Now let’s be clear: this is Church teaching. It cannot be overridden by a priest or a bishop or a cardinal. The pope may do it, but only if he speaks ex cathedra and that’s only happened twice. Neither had anything to do with abortion. So why are are so many people telling me otherwise? It’s bad enough when some evangelical Protestant takes it upon herself to lecture me about my failings as a Catholic. That can be ignored as ignorant rantings. But when a bishop repeats this heresy, it’s something I take far more seriously.
Church teaching requires Catholics to vote pro-life and goes out of its way to point out that pro-life isn’t just anti-abortion. It’s anti-death penalty, pro-healthcare, pro-education, pro-affordable housing, pro-immigrant, pro-environment and anti-racism. It explicitly says no candidate is perfect on life issues. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, not exactly a radical left assembly, is clear in its omnibus pamphlet on voting. “We recognize that the responsibility to make choices in political life rests with each individual in light of a properly formed conscience, and that participation goes well beyond casting a vote in a particular election.”
The Bishop of Tyler, Joseph Strickland, said my cousin’s funeral Mass. We ate together at reception following. He’s a lovely man with very nice
memories of my cousin and I found him charming and comforting. And yet he is by any reasonable definition a heretic. Bishop Strickland has endorsed the remarks of a Wisconsin priest who railed against homosexuals and immigrants and announced “You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat.” This is a direct contradiction of church teaching. And there is a word for that — heresy.
But Strickland, who’s also endorsed a call for his boss to resign, isn’t alone. There is a concentrated effort by the president* and his administration* (thank you Charlie Pierce) make Catholicism a central issue in the election. Or rather, to make the election a central issue in Catholicism. To do that, they must reduce Catholicism to a single issue and it’s a very tight rope they are traversing because it can be abortion and only abortion. If they try to make it the church’s position on life, they lose because the right and the Church only agree on abortion, despite what child-rape enablers like Timothy Dolan say. If they try to to make it the church’s position on sexuality, they’ll get killed, not just because of the Church’s conspiracy to rape children, but because if you talk of banning all birth control, those suburban women you need so badly will buy out all the tiki torches at Home Depot and set fire to everything you love.
By drawing this line in the sand, the Bishops are risking the same fate as William Travis and his followers suffered. Church attendance in America is falling and has been falling for years. Polls show 60 percent of Catholics don’t wan’t abortion outright banned. People who don’t want abortion outright banned aren’t going to vote Republican. Thus, Bishop Strickland just excommunicated three in five Catholics.
I understand why the GOP does it. “Abortion Evil” is a good slogan. It’s easy and doesn’t need much explanation. “Abortion is Evil, but not criminal and I don’t want the government involved in that decision and making it illegal won’t stop it and I’m a man anyway and have neither had nor procured one” doesn’t roll off the tongue. And in politics, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. It’s a simple slogan and that’s what sells (and it’s only a slogan, the GOP has never made a serious attempt to ban it). It’s something Bill Clinton understood when he said he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal and rare.”
But Catholicism isn’t a simple slogan. We have a long intellectual history from St. Augustine to Flanner O’Connor to Massimo Faggioli that delves into the grey areas, that brings out the nuance in our faith. And I’m not even scratching the lint on the surface of Catholic theology and intellectualism. The basic tennent, the Holy Trinity, is an incredibly complex concept that we haven’t solved yet. To act like a political party in a democratic society has a monopoly on morality is, in my eyes, a grave sin. And a politics of hate can’t survive in a democracy, so it must destroy that democracy.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated.
James Baldwin
So don’t insult me. Don’t tell me the candidate who goes to Mass every Sunday, who has suffered grievous loss and used his faith to make sense of it, who is on the right side of racism, healthcare, the environment and the problems of capitalism is a better Catholic choice than a tax-cutting, pro-birth, pussy grabber. It’s not a sin to vote for trump because of your position on life issues. But voting for Biden doesn’t excommunicate you either. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
The world is a beautiful place and simplistic theology threatens it as much as simplistic politics. When Baldwin had dinner with Elijah Muhammed, he writes in “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” he looked at the men, women and children at the table, Nation of Islam members all, and was taken by their beauty as they talked about divine vengeance, which Muhammed’s followers were sure would soon be aimed at the white man. Baldwin wondered if the white world’s ignorance will make that vengeance inevitable. We are almost sixty years down farther down the arc he wrote about then, the same arc Dr. King insisted was long but bent toward justice. But lying about our own teachings, using Jesus to gain power, making the path to God more and more exclusive doesn’t bend that arc.
Oran Today 