In her op-ed, “Rambo Catholics and John Kerry,” posted previously on this blog, Professor Cathleen Kaveny argues that the election of John Kerry as President would force his most stalwart Catholic critics either to respond with violent resistance or, as apparently would be her preference, be “reduced to silence,” having been revealed as posers. (While saying she opposes “every inflammatory thing the Rambo Catholics write,” Professor Kaveny’s own response struck me as saturated with petroleum-laced rhetoric, most egregiously by constructing and then indicting the strawman of violent threats or tendencies.) More recently, in another statement posted on this blog, Professor Kaveny qualified her earlier statements to say that she meant only to chastise Rambo Catholics who “bully” others. An appeal to the consciences of faithful Catholics and the argument that voting for Kerry would be a serious sin is thus said to be the verbal equivalent of intimidation.
By highlighting the truly remarkable extremism of Kerry on the foundational question of life and his considered choice over his entire career to affiliate himself with the very people who brutally tear unborn children from their mothers’ wombs, I don’t know whether I too will now count as a nascent violent revolutionary or as an ecclesiastical bully by Professor Kaveny’s lights. If that’s what it takes to be placed alongside Gerard Bradley and Robert George (as well as Archbishop Burke, Bishop Sheridan, Archbishop Meyers, etc.), then I must regard these as terms of endearment and ask where I too can enroll in the Catholic Rambo brigades. But it’s all mere distraction in any event, that is, a distraction from taking a clear and unvarnished look at the prospect of a pro-abortion extremist, professing a Catholic communion, being elected to the nation’s highest office.
Those who say they will hold their nose and vote for Kerry too often seem ready to close their eyes as well. John Kerry is not some misguided reluctant “pro-choice” politician who sincerely (if ineffectually) mourns the ever-growing toll of abortion on humanity. Through his career, Senator Kerry has been a calculating, premeditated pro-abortion warrior who has eagerly and warmly endorsed the abortionists themselves in his legislative votes, in his campaigns, and in his circle of political friends and colleagues.
As I’ve written in an article, Abortion, Bishops, Eucharist, and Politicians: A Question of Communion, shortly to be published in the Catholic Lawyer and available by link on this blog, the case of the Catholic communicant who holds political power but refuses to protect the life of the unborn calls upon the sensitive pastoral role of the bishop. Counseling, dialogue, and gradual formation of conscience ought to follow, with ecclesial sanctions being a last resort. At the same time, the bishop has a continuing duty to instruct the flock and protect it from harm. In that article, we offer the example of the Catholic politician who sincerely opposes abortion but has not yet developed the wisdom or summoned the the courage to stand forcefully against the culture of death. With respect to eligibility for the sacrament of Eucharist, we allowed that, while ultimately unsatisfactory and thus acceptable only as a provisional sign of gradual conversion, profession of personal opposition to abortion by a Catholic politician who combines that easily-made assertion with at least some actions to limit or reduce abortions may satisfy the interim predicates for continued admission to the altar. (Some have accused us of being too “soft” in making such an allowance for human weakness, even if regarded as a preliminary step in the road to conversion.)
However, we also emphasized that such preliminary steps toward the culture of life by a politician must be accompanied by frequent and unequivocal public condemnation of abortion and a refusal to collaborate with those performing such evils. At a minimum, we would expect that any Catholic politician claiming respect for unborn human life would turn away as tainted any political money emanating from the abortion practitioner and would refuse with disgust any invitation to appear at a convocation designed to promote the interests of the abortion industry.
Sadly, even among so-called “pro-choice” politicians, Senator Kerry has been an extreme outlier, given his opposition to even the most modest of limitations on the abortion license, his insistence that public funds be devoted to procuring abortions, his vote to permit minor girls to be taken across state lines for abortions without knowledge of their parents, and his regular, easy, friendly and approving liasons with abortionists. It is not for naught that Kate Michelman, president of the NARAL Pro-Choice America, says that “[e]ven on the most difficult issues, we’ve never had to worry about John Kerry’s position.” John Kerry’s miserable record has earned him the abortionist’s praise.
Has John Kerry ever rebuked his abortionist friends, calling upon them to renounce their daily participation in an intrinsicly evil act? Has he ever refused a single dollar of blood-money from the abortion mills and abortion practitioners? Has he ever declined an opportunity to cheer on the abortion-providers and assure them of his unswerving loyalty? Has he ever refused to participate in a rally to provide moral encouragement to the abortionists and their assistants in plying their deadly craft? Has he ever voted for any minimal restriction on abortion, even when that restriction is supported by the substantial majority of the other legislators of his own party?
The plain fact is that John Kerry is not a “pro-choice” politician. Much worse, John Kerry is the candidate of the abortion industry itself.
It is for these reasons, principled reasons far beyond those flowing from ordinary partisan politics, that I and so many others genuinely tremble at the prospect of a President Kerry. It is difficult even to contemplate the appalling spectacle of a professing Catholic who knowingly and freely and energetically gives financial and legal aid and moral comfort to those who daily add to our national holocaust. Watching the most powerful man in the country throwing his arms in a warm embrace around those who kill unborn children, while banishing from government and judicial office those who would promote life, would be heart-rendingly painful. That this same man then could claim communion with the Church of Life is astounding. Such unavoidably would be an act of fundamental dishonesty and contempt for the Church’s witness to life. The scandal that would be caused to the faithful and the injury to the Church’s credibility and voice on issues of life might reverberate for years.
In words expressed by many other bishops as well, although not targeted at Kerry in particular, Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark has explained that “Catholics who publicly dissent from the Church’s teaching on the right to life of all unborn” have thereby chosen to separate themselves from the Church and “in a significant way from the Catholic community.” He asked that such people should “honestly admit in the public forum that they are not in full union with the Church,” and that any attempt by such a person to “express ‘communion’ with Christ and His Church by the reception of the Sacrament of the Eucharist is objectively dishonest.” To emphasize the fuller meaning and the powerful meaning of communion is not bullying; it is a matter of simple integrity.
Finally, contrary to Professor Kaveny’s indictment, the prospect of a Kerry Presidency does not evoke in me any thoughts of violence or plans for revolution. Instead, if this tragedy should come to pass, my heart will be broken. Still, I would not accede to any demand that I withdraw into silence or enter into “a life of monastic prayer” (however much I value those fellow-believers with a vocation to the latter). No, I would not be quiet in my expressions of grief. And when an appropriate term of bereavement had passed, a return to hopeful action would follow. At that time, I would hope to rejoin, both in communion and in concerted action for life, those who had played a role in bringing this debacle to pass by foolishly casting a vote for a manifestly unworthy candidate. We all make mistakes.
But the time for mourning has not yet come. We still may be spared the occasion of such grief. To that end, we must continue to speak, forcefully and faithfully, the truth of life, including calling upon our fellow Catholics to consult a conscience properly formed in the teaching of the Church when casting a vote upon which the lives of the next generation of the unborn well may rest. That some seek to distract us from revealing the frailty or cowardice of politicians who deliberately accommodate evil, while cynically professing communion, is all the more reason to bear witness.
Greg Sisk
Friday, September 10, 2004
Several weeks ago, the “communion controversy” was the subject of several postings on the Mirror of Justice, which in turn prompted our co-blogger Rob Vischer to encourage a couple of us to further develop our thoughts into articles suitable for publication in the Catholic Lawyer later this fall. Toward this end, my University of St. Thomas colleague Chuck Reid and I prepared a piece, titled “Abortion, Bishops, Eucharist, and Politicians: A Question of Communion,” a link to which is located near my name on the Mirror of Justice.
I now want to highlight for your attention a wonderful further addition to this discussion, an essay by our co-blogger Amy Uelmen, titled “The Spirituality of Communion: A Resource for Dialogue with Catholics in Public Life.” This piece, which also will be published in the Catholic Lawyer, is also accessible by a link next to the listing of Amy’s name on the Mirror of Justice.
The communion controversy, that is, the question of whether pro-abortion politicians thereby break communion with the Church such that they should either be denied or encouraged to withhold from taking the Eucharist. A crucial element of that debate, from all perspectives, concerns the appropriate pastoral response, including dialogue between the Bishop and political leaders within the diocese. Amy’s piece thoughtfully explores how that dialogue might unfold, what it would reveal, and how it can made more fruitful. More importantly, Amy’s essay emphasizes the spiritual elements of communion and John Paul II’s call to generate a life of communion in the Mystical Body in our churches and homes. In other words, Eucharist should be appreciated as “our greatest resource on the journey” and therefore a means to nurture the efforts “to build an authentic culture of life.”
Amy’s piece is not a simplistic “I’m-Okay-You’re-Okay” approach (quite the contrary, as she appreciates the need we all feel for redemption). Nor does she mean at all to deprecate the discipline of a rigorous examination of conscience before receiving communion, including an inquiry into fidelity to the Church’s moral teaching. Rather, Amy takes things to the next step. With those fundamentals in place, how do we draw upon the “precious resource” of communion, the real presence of Christ, and thereby “move beyond and transform the polarizing and paralyzing tensions that plague not only the Church, but much of the broader political discourse.”
Greg
Friday, September 3, 2004
Although later than anticipated, my most recent article, Searching for the Soul of Judicial Decisionmaking: An Empirical Study of Religious Freedom Decisions, is finally in print in the Ohio State Law Journal. Many on this weblog have received a copy in the mail and for anyone else interested it also is available at this link in pdf format. At the risk of shamless self-promotion, please allow me to offer a glimpse of what my co-authors (Michael Heise of Cornell and Andrew Morriss of Case Western) and I hope will be received as a valuable contribution to the empirical study of the courts. I will focus on one of two elements most pertinent to the Mirror of Justice audience (saving the second most pertinent element for another day).
To briefly summarize the purpose and design of our study, as we describe it in the article: Many thoughtful contributions (including important ones by members of this blog) have been to the debate about whether judges should allow their religious beliefs to surface in the exercise of their judicial role or instead should be constrained to rely upon and report only secular justifications for court decisions. Yet much less has been written about whether judges’ religious convictions do affect judicial decrees, that is, whether religious beliefs influence court decisions, consciously or unconsciously. What might motivate a judge to smile upon the religious dissenter who seeks to avoid the burden of a legal requirement that conflicts with what he or she regards as the obligation of faithful belief? What experiences or attitudes might persuade a jurist to frown upon a specific example of governmental accommodation of religiously-affiliated institutions and instead insist upon a strict exclusion of what he or she regards as inappropriate sectarian elements from public life? Most poignantly, might the judge’s own religious upbringing or affiliation influence his or her evaluation of religiously-grounded claims that implicate those beliefs?
To explore those questions empirically, we conducted a comprehensive statistical study of federal court of appeals and district court judges deciding hundreds of religious liberty cases over a ten-year period, including creation and analysis of integrated models of judicial attitudes in practice toward the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. (The details of our research design, database, data collection, coding, etc. can be found in the article itself).
Based upon our study, the vitality of religious variables to a more complete understanding of judicial decisionmaking seems abundantly clear. Indeed, the single most prominent, salient, and consistent influence on judicial decisionmaking in our study was religion—religion in terms of affiliation of the claimant, the background of the judge, and the demographics of the community, independent of other background and political variables commonly used in empirical tests of judicial behavior.
While the study reports many findings on a variety of variables, let me focus here on one that would be of particular interest to those reading the Mirror of Justice: In certain instances, Catholic judges (who accounted for 25.9 percent or 385 of the 1484 observations) were significantly more likely to take a favorable approach toward religion, what we called the Pro-Religion Model (positive outcomes on Free Exercise Clause (and related statutory) accommodation claims and negative outcomes on Establishment Clause claims).
When the Pro-Religion Model was considered as a whole, the variable for Catholic judges came closest to statistical significance, rising to the 93% probability level. While this falls just below the standard significance level of 95% and thus makes us wary of pronouncing this result as a “finding,” the variable does point in the anticipated positive direction for this model—that is, being Catholic made a judge more likely to be “Pro-Religion” when interpreting the Religion Clauses.
The influence of Catholic Church membership upon judges so affiliated emerged to full significance with respect to one important dimension of the Church and State debate—education. In the context of free exercise claims in which parents or students sought exemption on religious grounds from school policies or insisted upon accommodation by school authorities of religious practices, Catholic judges were significantly more likely (at the 95% probability level) to be receptive to those religious claimants. In the context of Establishment Clause claims challenging affirmative acknowledgment of religion in a public school setting or government aid to private religious schools, Catholic judges were significantly less likely (at the 95% probability level) to sustain those challenges.
Beyond reporting these results, we did not much speculate on the possible reasons for the correlation between Catholic background for judges and what we characterized as the “Pro-Religion” approach to religious liberty issues. Why might account for this influence? Given that other variables, such as political party, race, gender, etc., were controlled for through our regression analysis, does this not suggest that some true and genuine molding of attitudes toward religious faith in public life has occurred (at least in the past) in Catholic parishes through this country? Or does it reflect the continuing effect of history, in which Catholic judges remember when a strict separationist approach, at least on the Establishment Clause side, too often was combined with an anti-Catholic attitude, or at least an antipathy to Catholic schools? These are interesting questions to ponder. I invite the thoughts of others. (In a future posting, I'll note the other element of potential interes to this audience, which is the significantly less favorable success rate for Catholic claimants in asserting free exercise accommodation claims).
Greg Sisk
Friday, June 4, 2004
In my earlier response to Father Radcliffe’s statement posted on this weblog, I quite deliberately did not take on the difficult, but perhaps unavoidable, question of whether and when the appropriate Church response to political cooperation with evil is to deny the Eucharist to those who exercise political power to faciliate that evil. My more limited purpose in that earlier posting here to the Mirror of Justice was to insist that passivity on the part of the Church about fundamental matters of immediate significance, such as the taking of unborn human life, is not a viable option. In that particular message, I intended only to challenge what I saw as Father Radcliffe’s endorsement of an “I’m-Okay-You’re-Okay” Church, in which everyone is a member of an inert family lounging around the house serenely untroubled by any words of action of the Church that might offend modern sensibilities. (As with any summary of a position, especially one extracted from a short homiletic polemic, this undoubtedly is a caricature of Father Radcliffe’s position, but I will say is the impression left not only with me but with other readers, as confirmed by my e-mail correspondece.)
In that earlier posting, I did not touch on, much less presume to advise what particular action should be taken or specific expression should be offered by the Church when those professing the name of the Church and presenting themselves for the Church’s sacraments nonetheless exercise political power to deny protection to unborn human life or otherwise transgress against fundamental natural laws. I merely wished to insist that silence or a pretense that all is well with the world cannot be the Church’s answer. Once we are agreed on that modest point – and those on this weblog appear to be in general consensus on this – the difficult question remains as to the appropriate response for each individual situation or category of situations that is both consistent with the Church’s pastoral role and faithful to its public witness.
So let me now turn to that question of appropriate action, or at least the propriety of the course of action being debated at the moment, which is withholding of the Eucharist from intransigent offenders. In doing so, I mean here to raise questions, while still refraining from offering any definitive answers (which are not ours to make anyway as the matter is reserved properly to the apostolic leaders of the Church).
The Eucharistic sacrament has multiple dimensions, as an extension by God’s grace of the real presence of Christ to his followers, as our faithful expression through partaking of our desire to be counted in the communion of saints, and as a symbol of unity within the Church. As philosophy Professor John O'Callaghan of Notre Dame reminded me by e-mail, “the question of reception of communion by anyone, politician or not, is a matter of Church discipline, not a matter of politics.” He observes that while the Church in “charitable concern for the faithful” ordinarily assumes good faith on the part of congregants and thus offers communion to all who come forward, “traditionally the Church holds out the possibility of denial of communion when because of the public character of both the reception of the Eucharist and the notoriety of the recipient, it would give grave scandal to the faithful.”
My colleague here at the University of St. Thomas and canon law expert Charles Reid further clarifies that, under canon law, material participation in the abortion of the unborn leads to automatic excommunication, not just from communion but all sacraments. This mandate flows from the unequivocal direction and urgent nature of the Church’s teaching on the preservation of unborn life. Thus, when a public official uses political power to facilitate the extermination of the unborn, the argument that Church discipline should attach – that this exercise of power is material participation in abortion – surely is a plausible (if not the only possible) interpretation of canon law. (I should note, by contrast, that however much some of us (and I include myself) might wish that political approval for, and most especially participation in, capital punishment should invoke a similar condemnation, neither Church teaching nor canon law has yet developed in a manner that would plausibly support imposition of similar discipline.)
In his e-mail to me, Professor O’Callaghan poses a hypothetical that should provoke us to consider whether the Eucharist is ever properly withheld and, if so, under what circumstances:
“Since the Mirror of Justice is a legal blog, perhaps a hypothetical is in order. I used to live in Omaha. The abortion clinic in Omaha, made famous in the Supreme Court case Stenberg v. Carhart, was across the street from a Catholic Church and its grade school. Now suppose Dr. Carhart was a Catholic. Suppose also that in his conscience he did not think that his business of performing abortions precluded him from receiving communion. So suppose further that it was his practice, perhaps from when he was a child, to regularly attend mass on a daily basis and receive communion. Suppose at lunch time, having performed any number of ‘intact dilations and extractions,’ he strolled across the street to attend mass and got in line for communion with all the other faithful, including as many children from the school who happened to be there for their weekly class mass. . . . What would the appropriate response of the pastor be? . . .
Of course this is simply an analogy. It is not at all designed to draw a moral equivalence between an abortionist who actually performs abortions, and a politician who legislatively and politically supports that abortionist. They are not equivalent, and should not be treated as equivalent. But that does not mean that they should not be treated in any similar ways. And with regard to politicians it is necessary to distinguish between those who politically and legislatively support abortion and those who tolerate it while working to eliminate it. The point of the analogy is simply to ask whether in general there is any public scandal great enough that the refusal of communion to someone is justified and consistent with . . . charitable concern for the sinner.”
Should the Catholic leader who seeks after political power and publicly promises that he would affirmatively empower the abortionist in his deathly craft be seen in the same light as the abortionist? Is the prospect of scandal to the Church and harm to the Church’s witness to human life similar? Do either warrant the exercise of disciplinary authority by the Church?
It may be tempting to avoid these questions by asking larger political ones, such as which candidate for political office given an imperfect choice is the best alternative or which partisan grab-bag of political platforms is most consistent with Catholic Social Thought as a body of thought. But that is not the immediate problem. Instead, the question is whether the Church in integrity can remain silent and inactive when an individual professes to be part of our Catholic communion, but seeks political advantage by aggressively advocating a course of action that is deeply antithetical to fundamental premises of the Church as an advocate for human life and social justice. It is the very claim of Catholic affiliation that creates the occasion of conflict from a disciplinary standpoint and makes the matter so poignant and painful as a pastoral matter.
As I’ve said, my undoubtedly frustrating point here is to raise questions rather than suggest answers, as I remain unsettled myself on the proper disposition. But I am increasingly of the view that something must be said or done, and something powerful, or the Church’s witness to the sanctity of human life will be seriously undermined. I close with the following link to a story from the Catholic News Service, which reports that Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has indicated doubts about the wisdom of denying communion and has asked to meet with the United States’s bishops task force to achieve “a concerted and nuanced approach” on the question. Both the Vatican and American bishops are seeing an urgency in clarifying the issue.
Greg Sisk
Wednesday, June 2, 2004
By questioning Father Timothy Radcliffe's statement recently posted to this blog, I fear I will be seen by some as uncharitable. After all, who could take issue with a call to love sinners or with a portrayal of the church as a home and sanctuary? And, yet, I believe that an overly indulgent and unchallenging approach to the Church’s teaching would render the Church ineffective as a vessel for sanctification and irrelevant as a witness to the truth in a troubled society.
The message of hospitality is always comforting, but the welcome extended to all by Christ’s Church cannot be divorced from the vigorous challenge offered to all by the Church’s teaching. The Church must always energetically exhort its members to live and act according to the mission, especially when the Church speaks to those possessing or seeking the political power to alter and reform society. Without that integral element of responsibility and accountability, Father Radcliffe’s statement strikes me as radically incomplete as a description either of Church or of home.
“The Church,” Father Radcliffe says, “should be a large, capacious home for all sorts of oddbods, saints and sinners, progressives and conservatives, the convinced and the searching.” Father Radcliffe protests that his statement is “not wish washy relativism.” Methinks he doth protest too much. Yes, the Church should always welcome sinners and seekers and indeed should seek them out with compassion. But the Church must also act with firm and loving correction, just as we should expect from our family members when we go astray and then later return home.
In framing his message of welcome and church as home, Father Radcliffe says that when we come to the Church, we should be left “untroubled and unafraid.” When seekers and sinners came to Jesus and after they had been greeted in love, did he not then exhort them to live as His disciples and to witness His truth to the world? Was Jesus constrained to leave those who heard him “untroubled and unafraid,” carefully choosing his words and actions with nuance and sensitivity so that no one would feel unwelcome, no would be subjected to pointed questioning, no one would be offended, no one would be left to conclude they might be in serious error, etc.? I seem to recall Jesus uttering the rather direct, arguably intolerant, words, “Get thee behind me Satan!” And, note, that this strong rebuke was directed toward a particular individual in a position of some or potential authority. Jesus’s words of correction were unequivocal, although the hope and ultimately the reality of reconciliation remained available after repetenance. Might there not be a message here for the Church today as well?
Let us further consider, could our Church be true to itself were it to receive in placid silence those who openly advocate racial segregation, those who call for extermination or the sterilization of the mentally infirm, those who advocate unrestricted license to abort the unborn, those who would undermine the institution of marriage by removing its foundation in the complementarity of the genders, etc., with speaking challenging words of truth and, yes, rebuke when merited? Does anyone really believe that the archbishop of Louisiana was reprehensively unwelcoming in 1956 when he warned Catholic legislators that they risked excommunication if they voted for a proposed law requiring separation of the races in school? Did his strong words improperly introduce conflict into the Church home? Some leaders of the Catholic Church in the Germany of the 1930s have been sharply criticized for inadequately challenging the rise of Nazi leadership in that country and for failing to exclude Nazi Party members from the Church. Would anyone today instead hold up such inaction as a model example of proper churchly tolerance?
In sum, if each individual is free to claim Catholic affiliation when it is comfortable and beneficial, while assuming a license without fear of any rebuke to emphatically and publicly reject Church teaching when expedient, then the witness of the Catholic Church to our larger society on any issue would be entirely undone.
Moreover, if we were to reconstruct the Catholic Church into a homeless shelter, housing all who seek shelter without challenge or correction, we thereby would sacrifice the very elements that empower the Church to offer the love and peace that we all seek. A gathering of people without a shared vision and purpose can never be a fellowship upon which the blessings of God's peace would be bestowed. Instead, to be a Catholic is to become one part of the worldwide Body of Christ animated by a shared belief in the Gospel and a commitment to values that are larger than any single one of us or any single parish. A community of faith is not a holding station for a disparate and dissolute group of unconnected people with no common purpose. If the Church were to devolve into an open-ended social club devoid of principled content and reluctant to exert any call upon its members, the Church simply would cease to be the Church.
I submit that this is also an impoverished view of home and family life as an analogy to the Church. A genuine familial love experienced in the home is both a balm and a rod. When we return home and are again among our most intimate family members, we can no longer get away with the pathetic excuses for failing to take responsibility that we offer to others. Nor can we avoid being called to account for the compromises of principle and affection that we make in the outside world. Our family knows from whence we came and knows what our true potential remains. To fully achieve the joy and fellowship of full membership in the Catholic Church, we likewise must accept the responsibilities that accompany that affiliation. This is no different than the accountability and sense of mutual obligation that exists among members of a family within a home.
Consider again the words of our Lord Jesus, which begin Father Radcliffe's statement: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” The promise of love is accompanied by an exhortation to keep God's word. To live in the fullness of that love, and to experience God’s peace, we must overcome sin and join our will to that of the Lord. If we do anything less, we are left far from home.
Greg
Thursday, April 15, 2004
The recent opinion piece by columnist Ellen Goodman (link here) well illustrates my fears about the potential for scandal to the faithful posed by the nomination by a major political party of a candidate for president who claims membership in the Catholic Church and yet strongly disavows central Catholic teachings on the sanctity of human life and the vitality of the family to civil society. The central and predictable theme of the Goodman column is that religious faith is but a private matter of isolated conscience, little more than a hobby, that should have no implications for public life. In other words, an individual citizen, or at least a politician, should lead a splintered life, carefully segregating matters of faith from everything that is public-regarding. That of course is bad enough.
Perhaps even more troubling is the resurrection of anti-Catholic attitudes and figures masquerading as reasonable and authentic alternative Catholic voices. While the Catholic Church is large and diverse, it is not open to everything such that it stands for nothing. Goodman’s column devotes entire paragraphs to lengthy quotations from Frances Kissling of the deceptively named Catholics for a Free Choice (CFC). Kissling is a former abortion clinic operator and head of the abortion industry trade group, and, moreover, acknowledges that she does not pray nor take Communion (so much for being Catholic). The CFC is not a membership organization and instead funded by wealthy foundations aligned with the abortion industry. Even beyond its pro-abortion line, CFC is a virulently anti-Catholic organization, with sweeping rejections of everything that is distinctly Catholic, from Church leadership to sexual teaching to any religious witness to the culture, often expressed in the most stereotypical of anti-Catholic language.
John Kerry’s nomination thus may provide respectable cover and even moral support to anti-Catholic entities like Catholics for a Free Choice, further damaging the integrity of Catholic Social Teaching as a meaningful and coherent set of teachings and subverting the witness of the Church to the world. In my view, on certain fundamental matters like human life, no public figure can call him or herself Catholic with integrity unless he acts to protect the defenseless unborn. But, at the very least, surely we can agree that Kerry is obliged to clearly and loudly acknowledge that he believes in the sanctity of unborn life as a matter of personal faith and moral teaching and that he emphatically distances himself from fraudulent and notorious anti-Catholic figures like Frances Kissling.
Greg Sisk
