A Reader Responds to Richard McBrien

[I post this response with permission.]

Dear Professor Perry,

Re your post of Fr. Richard McBrien's "Intrinsic Evil" column to Mirror of Justice yesterday:

-- I'm one of the people whom McBrien would likely dismiss as a "certain type of Catholic," and while I do not doubt that the tribe he rails against does exist, he spends too much of his current NCR column torching straw men of his own making.

McBrien caricatures argument by asserting without evidence that some of us think "only an intrinsic evil is to be held against a public figure."

His choice of adjectives is likewise dishonest-- had he called the war in Iraq "preemptive" in court, he would rightly have been challenged by opposing counsel for "leading the witness."

The nub of McBrien's argument is that "certain types of Catholics" think "capital punishment isn't intrinsically evil," and "therefore, then-Governor Bush deserved a pass" (on executions he permitted while the chief political executive of Texas).

This is half right, in that capital punishment, while morally hazardous, is not intrinsically evil. But that does not mean that Texas under George W. Bush used it appropriately.

I do understand why McBrien refuses to give the judicial system in Texas any benefit of doubt, but he glides right past the questions of guilt and innocence near the root of any comparisons between abortion the death penalty, and then has the temerity to cite a pope whose various initiatives he often did his best to oppose in a transparent attempt to lend an impramatur to his own spleen.

My own essay (from American Spectator Online yesterday) makes (I think) an instructive contrast:

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/05/04/defending-mary-ann-glendon

The bottom line is this: No amount of righteous sophistry will make President Obama's record on life issues better than it is, or Fr. McBrien's prescription reasonable. Supposing GWB had been given a pass-- is it then okay to give President Obama another pass for policy positions that are even more objectionable? Have we stooped so low that Notre Dame's ill-advised choice of honorary degree recipients is excused not on merit, but on the smoking ruin of mutually-cancelling hyprocrisies? Professor Mary Ann Glendon and more than twenty percent of American Catholic bishops seem to think otherwise, and they can hardly be dismissed as having been in thrall to the Bush administration.

Apart from the current contretemps, were we to take Fr. McBrien's advice and "put the intrinsic-evil argument to rest," we'd lose the requisite vocabulary for talking about abominations like abortion, and tiptoe further into the moral relativism that already undercuts a healthy appreciation for the magisterium and the "deposit of faith" handed down to us from the apostles.

Sincerely,

Patrick O'Hannigan
http://paragraphfarmer.blogspot.com/