Archbishop Chaput has a fascinating and hard hitting article on the First Things blog. The Archbishop relay a little of his own history with supporting pro-choice candidates.
After Robert Kennedy died, the meaning of the 1968 election seemed to evaporate. I lost interest in politics. I didn’t get involved again until the rise of Jimmy Carter. Carter fascinated me because he seemed like an untypical politician. He was plain spoken, honest, a serious Christian and a Washington outsider. So I supported him during his 1976 campaign when I was a young priest working in Pennsylvania. After his election as president, I came to Denver as pastor of Holy Cross Parish in Thornton in 1977. I eventually got involved with the 1980 Colorado campaign for Carter’s re-election on the invitation of a parishioner and Democratic party activist—Polly Baca, who was and remains a good friend.
Carter had one serious strike against him. The U.S. Supreme Court had legalized abortion on demand in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and Carter the candidate waffled about restricting it. At the time, I knew Carter was wrong in his views about Roe and soft toward permissive abortion. But even as a priest, I justified working for him because he wasn’t aggressively “pro-choice.” True, he held a bad position on a vital issue, but I believed he was right on so many more of the “Catholic” issues than his opponent seemed to be. The moral calculus looked easy. I thought we could remedy the abortion problem after Carter was safely returned to office.
Since then, the Archbishop gradually learned that not being aggressively “pro-choice” or the personally opposed prevarication is not much different than active support of abortion.
In the years after the Carter loss, I began to notice that very few of the people, including Catholics, who claimed to be “personally opposed” to abortion really did anything about it. Nor did they intend to. For most, their personal opposition was little more than pious hand-wringing and a convenient excuse—exactly as it is today. In fact, I can’t name any pro-choice Catholic politician who has been active, in a sustained public way, in trying to discourage abortion and to protect unborn human life—not one. Some talk about it, and some may mean well, but there’s very little action. In the United States in 2008, abortion is an acceptable form of homicide. And it will remain that way until Catholics force their political parties and elected officials to act differently.
Th Archbishop takes issue with a group called Roman Catholics for Obama ’08. The group selectively quotes the Archbishop to support their position pointing out that they left out the following:
But [Catholics who support pro-choice candidates] also need a compelling proportionate reason to justify it. What is a “proportionate” reason when it comes to the abortion issue? It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life—which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.
I don’t think that this is a case that any Obama supporter can honestly make. The Archbishop finishes by pointing out the obvious:
Changing the views of “pro-choice” candidates takes a lot more than verbal gymnastics, good alibis, and pious talk about “personal opposition” to killing unborn children. I’m sure Roman Catholics for Obama know that, and I wish them good luck. They’ll need it.
May 21, 2008 at 2:56 pm
You have to admire him for making so public his interior mind shift and the changing of his stance. It mirrors my own. Thanks for making this letter available.
May 21, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I don’t think that this is a case that any Obama supporter can honestly make.
I am certainly not an Obama supporter, but I think there is a case to be made, namely that more troops and civilians will die in the continued occupation of Iraq than babies will be saved by a GOP administration. Of course, I don’t trust the Democrats to end the occupation any more than I trust the GOP to end abortion.
May 21, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Nice selective editing. Who do they think they are, NBC News?
May 23, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Some politicians see things in terms of reality. In countries where abortions are illegal, they still happen illegally quite often. In consequence to this, unsanitary and unsafe methods are used and women choosing to have abortions die in the process. Now, the opposing side could say, “The consequence of a mother of the aborted dying during the opporation is just, since is is she that chose to have an illegal abortion. Because this woman chose to have an abortion illegally, she should have to suffer.” However, there are those of us that disagree.
There are those of us who understand that one cannot stop abortion from happening even if it is illegal in a society. There is a portion of us who think about the complex nature of it. People find other ways. It happens in the news all the time. They will wait until birth and drown the baby. Or pay someone to do it under the table. There are cases of pregnancy after rape where women drug themselves. Lots and lots of news stories.
Presidents do not even have that much say in the issue. In my opinion, they should not have say in issues like these. Let the public duke it out. A president’s concern should be serious priorities such as war and the economy.
Personally, I don’t understand how those who call themselves Christian can be behind Bush, Cheney and his war. He has murdered our own as well as those abroad as well as opened a floodgate that he cannot stop. The sad thing is he was elected in the first place because people were so preoocupied with issues like abortion. They’ve gotten their wish. A Republican president who will do whatever it takes to stop abortion. Has he? Nope… he’s preoccupied with a little war on his hands. A war he perpetrated without approval of congress, and the United Nations for that matter. The United States helped form the United Nations. It used to have more say than any other countries. Does it now?
He sure has succeeded in one thing, and that is getting people angry. An angry world is not a peaceful world. I was once taught Christianity was peaceful. Then I was taught that I was wrong. While Jesus Christ himself was believed to be a peaceful man, many of his followers throughout the years have been anything but peaceful. Such as his politician followers.
May 24, 2008 at 5:12 am
“There are those of us who understand that one cannot stop abortion from happening even if it is illegal in a society.”
Hmmm. We cannot stop murder in this country even though it is illegal…we cannot stop rape in this country even though it is illegal…we cannot stop terrorism in this country even though it is illegal…see a pattern here. When a nation legalizes an action, it becomes a de facto supporter of said action.
Slavery was legal in this country. By not making it illegal, the US unofficially sanctioned it. The abolitionists not only placed pressure on the government, but in the hearts of the public. Without this paradigm shift, do you really think that slavery would have ended on it’s own accord? Would slavery have become “legal, but rare”?
“There is a portion of us who think about the complex nature of it.”
So are you suggesting that those of us who oppose abortion do not think about the complex nature of abortion? Believe me, those of us like myself who were formerly Democrats have agonized over the issue, but eventually our faith won out. And most of us felt that we didn’t leave the party, the party left us.
“People find other ways. It happens in the news all the time. They will wait until birth and drown the baby. Or pay someone to do it under the table. There are cases of pregnancy after rape where women drug themselves. Lots and lots of news stories.”
I guess I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Abortion currently is “safe and legal”…through all three trimesters of a pregnancy. Yet, in spite of all this, people still commit infanticide. So what would change if abortion was illegal?
What would change is the perception among the citizenry that abortion is wrong. I never understood why “pro choice” activists would say that they would want to keep abortions rare. Why, if abortion isn’t an evil act, would they want to keep abortions rare? If abortion is morally neutral, why not have as many abortions as are needed?
-Rich