After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani
is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for
abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews
in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among
some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said
yesterday.
At the same time, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign — seeking to accomplish the unusual task of persuading Republicans
to nominate an abortion rights supporter — is eyeing a path to the
nomination that would try to de-emphasize the early states in which
abortion opponents wield a great deal of influence. Instead they would
focus on the so-called mega-primary of Feb. 5, in which voters in
states like California, New York and New Jersey are likely to be more
receptive to Mr. Giuliani’s social views than voters in Iowa and South
Carolina.
That approach, they said, became more appealing after the
Legislature in Florida, another state they said would be receptive to
Mr. Giuliani, voted last week to move the primary forward to the end of
January.
The shift in emphasis comes as the Giuliani campaign has struggled
to deal with the fallout from the first Republican presidential
candidate debate, in which he gave halting and apparently contradictory
responses to questions about his support for abortion rights.
Mr. Giuliani’s aides were concerned both because the responses
opened him up to a new round of criticism from abortion critics, who
have never been happy with the prospect of a Republican presidential
candidate who supports abortion rights, while threatening to undercut
his image as a tough-talking iconoclast who does not equivocate on
tough issues.
The campaign’s approach would be a sharp departure from the
traditional route to the Republican nomination in the last 20 years, in
which Republicans have highlighted their antiabortion views.
Mr. Giuliani hinted at what aides said would be his uncompromising
position on abortion rights yesterday in Huntsville, Ala., where he was
besieged with questions about abortion and his donations to Planned Parenthood. “Ultimately, there has to be a right to choose,” he said.
Asked if Republicans would accept that, he said, “I guess we are going to find out.”
Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that his stance on abortion alone might
disqualify him with some voters, but he said, “I am at peace with that.”
A mutiny may be brewing at a Roman Catholic law school whose board has
voted to pack it up and move it from Ann Arbor, Mich., to a rural
community in southwestern Florida.
More than half of the professors at the Ave Maria School of Law
are fighting the move to Ave Maria, Fla., the town being created by
Thomas S. Monaghan, the former Domino's Pizza mogul who founded the law
school eight years ago.
Critics, including many alumni and students, say the move to
the Catholic-oriented town between Naples and Immokalee, Fla., would
jeopardize the independent law school's progress. They accuse Mr.
Monaghan of moving a successful law school to prop up a struggling
university in a town that has already attracted controversy. A
spokesman for Ave Maria said Mr. Monaghan was not available for
comment.
Kaveny's discussion as I read it, is more limited than Patrick's summary suggests. She is talking about abortion to protect the health or life of the mother, a point on which most Americans (and most American Catholics) agree with Kaveny. It's an area of the Church's teaching on abortion that I've often struggled with. Kaveny compares requiring a mother to carry a child to term even at the risk (or certainty) of substantial physical harm to other areas of the law in which duties to render assistance are not legally enforced. The Church's views on the morality of abortions in such contexts (as well as abortions to protect the life of the mother) are clear, but I struggle with them. While my wife was pregnant last year, I frequently asked myself what, if her life were in danger from the pregnancy, would be the proper course of action. The decision would be a very painful one, but I for one can say that it's a decision with which I would want the state to have nothing at all to do.
In any event, my question for Patrick is whether he really believes that Kaveny's writing on this subject merits excommunication. Patrick does not come out and say it, but he certainly suggests as much in his post. (The law at issue in Mexico City was far broader than the situations Kaveny discusses, so the relevance of the Pope's comments seems at least questionable.) If Patrick does believe she should be excommunicated, I'd also be curious why he would stop there. Should she, in his view, be permitted to retain her academic position at a Catholic university? And, if not, what would that suggest about the viability of academic freedom at a Catholic university run according to such principles?
It is one of the enduring features of the modern Republican Party: Since the rise of Ronald Reagan
and the empowerment of the social conservatives, the party has formally
stood in firm opposition to the constitutional right to abortion and the Supreme Court decision that established it.
Yes, there have always been Republicans who broke with party
orthodoxy on the issue, from New England moderates like Senator Olympia
Snowe of Maine to pragmatists like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
of California. But the party’s platform, if anything, grew less pliant
on abortion over the years. And the party invariably nominated
presidential candidates who embraced – rather than challenged -- the
full “pro-life” position. (Just as the Democrats did, on the
“pro-choice” side.)
Now, with Rudolph W. Giuliani,
the former mayor of New York, one of the frontrunners for the
Republican nomination, the question inevitably arises: Is the party
moving on this issue, ready for more flexibility? Can a supporter of
abortion rights, even one with caveats and qualifications, make it to
the top of the Republican Party in 2008?
Mr. Giuliani’s position on abortion stood out in stark relief at
last week’s debate, when he alone, among the ten candidates on the
stage, offered an ambivalent response to the prospect of overturning
Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision considered anathema by the
anti-abortion movement.
”It would be O.K. to repeal,” Mr. Giuliani said. ”Or it would be
O.K. also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as a precedent,
and I think a judge has to make that decision.” On his campaign web
site, Mr. Giuliani seeks a middle path, saying he supports “reasonable
restrictions on abortion” but adding, “ultimately, he believes that it
is a decision between a woman, her doctor, her family and her God.”
As Pope Heads to Brazil, Abortion Debate Heats Up By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil, May 9 — Hours before Pope Benedict XVI was scheduled to arrive here on his first pastoral trip to Latin America, a heated dispute broke out today between the Roman Catholic Church and the Brazilian government about abortion policy.
Church officials have said that the pope will reaffirm the
Vatican’s traditional stand on the issue in public pronouncements
during his five-day visit here. But the cordial atmosphere that had
been expected to prevail now appears to be threatened by sharp
exchanges between senior Brazilian government officials and their
counterparts in the church.
The controversy began on Monday, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
the president of Brazil, said in a radio interview with Roman Catholic
radio stations that he was of two minds on abortion. Though personally
opposed, he said, as president he believes that “the state cannot
abdicate from caring for this as a public health question, because to
do so would lead to the death of many young women in this country.”
Except in very limited and specific circumstances, abortion is
against the law in Brazil, which is the most populous Roman Catholic
nation in the world with an estimated 140 million church members. Even
so, abortions are not uncommon: clandestine clinics known in Brazilian
slang as “angel factories” perform an estimated one to two million
abortions a year.
But the Minister of Health, José Gomes Temporão, suggested in March
that a change in the law, which now imposes prison sentences of up to
three years for women convicted of having an illegal abortion, might be
appropriate. He called for a national referendum on abortion, prompting
denunciations from pulpits across the country and a protest march on
Tuesday in Brasilia, the capital.
One recurring theme of our conversations on MoJ is the degree to which Catholic legal education should produce a different sort of lawyer than the mainstream. Well, our graduates are sure making a mark in the case of the racy "Life is Short. Get a Divorce" billboard. The two lawyers who put up the billboard are both DePaul Law School graduates, and they apparently saw this new marketing angle as supportive of authentic human flourishing. One commented, "It promotes happiness and personal integrity." Reporters looked to a John Marshall Law School grad to label the billboard a "disappointment to the profession and to the institution of marriage, which is something our community holds as sacred."
CHICAGO (AP) -- A racy billboard proclaiming ''Life's short. Get a
divorce'' caused enough of an uproar, city workers stripped it from its
downtown perch after a week.
It wasn't so much about the partially clothed man and woman on the
law firm's ad. It was the phrase that lawyers Corri Fetman and Kelly
Garland chose that drew scores of complaints from neighbors and from
other attorneys who said it reflected poorly on their profession.
A city alderman who lives nearby found a technical reason to jettison the sign.
''I called the building inspector and told him to do his job and he
did,'' said Alderman Burton Natarus. ''It has nothing to do with
content or anything else. They did not have a permit and they were
ordered to take it down.''
Fetman and Garland say they're upset the sign was removed.
''They ripped our billboard down without due process,'' Fetman said. ''We own that art. I feel violated.''
Despite its brief run, the sign apparently was good for business.
Since it went up last week, the two women said calls to their law firm
have gone up dramatically.
Anyone giving serious consideration to Cathlen Kaveny's remarkable editorial on Carhart (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1926) will do well to consider at the same time Pope Benedict's recent remarks on the automatic excommunication of the Mexican politicians who supported the legalization of first-trimester abortion (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070509/ap_on_re_ca/pope_mexico_1). Professor Kaveny recommends an American legal regime that "would highlight the humanity of unborn life while recognizing that secular law should not require a woman to sacrifice her fundamental physical integrity to carry her baby to term." In pondering that recommendation in the context of the Church's contrary insistence, I keep coming back to Maritain's acute observation that today "It is no longer the human which takes charge of defending the divine, but the divine which offers itself to defend the human."
If you need a pick-me-up today, there's a heartwarming story in our local paper about a struggling St. Paul Catholic high school that had announced three weeks ago that it was closing, but was rescued in a rather miraculous 3 week grassroots enrollment & fundraising effort.
In the 19 days since St. Agnes' pastor announced that the high school was in danger of closing because of shrinking enrollment and mounting debt, the school has gained 67 new students and raised $3 million. . . .
On April 20, school officials announced that the high school had piled up $1 million in debt, largely by subsidizing a shrinking student body that could not afford to pay the full tuition of about $7,000 annually. More than 80 percent of St. Agnes high school students receive some type of financial aid. And the number of students committed to coming back in the fall did not look good.
Our Vicar-General added these thoughts about the future of urban Catholic schools:
The Rev. Kevin McDonough, vicar general and moderator of the curia for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, said St. Agnes' troubles mirror those facing urban Catholic schools across the country. In 2003, St. Bernard's Catholic School -- another St. Paul parish -- faced closing its grade school until a fundraising drive raised more than $600,000.
"We have, in our urban schools, 1,147 kids this year who qualify for free or reduced lunch," he said. "Ten years ago, the number would have been 20 percent of that. A lot of families are choosing our schools because they want an education for their kids, but they can't afford the tuition."
To survive, McDonough said, urban Catholic schools must do what colleges did before them -- reach out to donors, seek endowments, envision a future less dependent on tuition. Three years ago, a group of urban pastors and principals helped form Friends of the Catholic Urban Schools (FOCUS) to work on joint fund-raising reaching income sources that might not give to an individual school. "People are trying to get upstream on poverty," he said. "There is a lot of sympathy for our story.
3L and MOJ reader Katherine Margaret Gordon writes in response to our discussion of liberation theology:
I’ll be a third year law student and I’ve been reading Mirror of Justice for several months now. . . Liberation theology is what got me interested in human rights and learning Spanish, and then deciding to come back to the United States to work in immigration law.
. . . I wanted to let you know that José María Vigil along with many others has just put together an e-book from about forty or so Latin American theologians (and a few others)—Bajar de la cruz a los pobres: Cristología de la liberación. It is basically a really quick response from a great number of people both as a showing of solidarity for Jon Sobrino, and a way to demonstrate the continued vitality of Latin American theology as the CELAM conference occurs in Brazil.
I’ve actually found myself in the process of translating the epilogue that Jon Sobrino himself has written for the book—-part reflection on his Christology in general, and part a direct response to the “notification.” Hopefully the final revision will be done in about a week on the servicioskoinonia.org website.
Katherine points out that liberation theology is still be written but is just not being translated into English. She passed on a request from Jose Maria Vigil that bilingual scholars offer their services in order to help get what is being written in Spanish translated into English.
