I don't know if this is true or not, but I can't believe she would be telling a lie in a national publication, but Patricia Miller writes that the National Schismatic Reporter would not allow her to place an ad in their fish wrap, I mean newspaper, because it promoted the possibility of Catholics being pro-choice to protect a woman's autonomy. They said it would be like placing an ad for polygamy in their paper? I wonder if Pope Francis' Vatican is asking bishops to crack down on heterodoxy (Catholic corruption) in so-called Catholic publications and maybe even with blogs? At any rate, the author of this article laments the narrowness that is coming to the Catholic Church on the abortion debate. She thinks it is sad. I would say, let us rejoice and be glad!
Why the Catholic Church's Suppression of Abortion Dissent Should Concern Us All
Posted: Updated:
Patricia Miller
(Patricia Miller is the author of Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church.)
In recent years the U.S. Catholic bishops have been among the strongest proponents of "religious freedom," by which they mean the right of Catholics to express values, such as opposition to same-sex marriage or contraception, in their daily lives. For example, they've pushed strenuously for a broad-based exemption to the Affordable Care Act to allow any employer claiming a religious objection to contraception to refuse to provide it to employees.
But a recent incident illustrates that the institutional church doesn't extend that same freedom of religious expression to the many of its followers who dissent from its official position on abortion. The National Catholic Reporter, which is by far the most liberal of the semi-official Catholic publications, refused an ad for my book, Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church, which charts the clashes between pro-choice Catholics and the Catholic hierarchy over whether "good Catholics" can support abortion rights or vote for pro-choice politicians. A spokesperson said the publication couldn't "respect arguments that try to say that abortion can be a good thing" and likened giving space to abortion dissenters to promoting polygamy.
I'm not sure the person delivering that message grasped the irony of censoring an ad about a book that's largely about attempts to suppress abortion dissent. The episode is emblematic of how any discussion of abortion has been completely suppressed within the church -- even to the point of trying to deny history. Legitimate questions about how to comport Catholic doctrine with competing demands for women's autonomy and access to health care and the rights of others in pluralistic society have been reduced to aspersions that pro-choice Catholics think abortion is "a good thing."
Sadly, while many Catholics today would find it preposterous that anyone affiliated with the church could support abortion rights, prominent Catholics once addressed questions about the morality and legality of abortion in ways that were beneficial not just to Catholics but to society as a whole. And the stifling of these voices should concern us all.
In the summer of 1964, for instance, with support growing for the legalization of abortion in the circumstances of rape, incest and fetal deformities, the Kennedy family summoned some of the nation's most prominent Catholic theologians to Hyannis Port to deliberate how "formulate a political stance on abortion that would be compatible both with Catholic teaching." They concluded it wasn't possible to enforce the church's strict prohibition of abortion without "significant attendant social evils" and said that Catholic lawmakers could support some legalization of abortion. The principle that religiously observant policymakers could separate elements of doctrine from its application in a pluralistic society would guide generations of lawmakers.
Several years later, shortly before the Roe v. Wade decision, Father Robert Drinan, dean of Boston College Law School, argued that from the perspective of Catholic moral teaching it would be better to repeal all laws banning early abortion and leave the decision to individual conscience rather than have the government decide who should and shouldn't be born. This helped provide legitimacy to the still-contentious idea that abortion should be a woman's decision.
And in 1984, when vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro came under withering criticism from conservative bishops for her pro-choice stance, nearly 100 priests, nuns, and theologians signed an ad in the New York Times saying there was a diversity of Catholic opinion about abortion and that abortion "can sometimes be a moral choice."
The ad provided legitimacy to pro-choice Catholic politicians, but also spurred years of crackdowns by the Vatican on dissent. The theologians lost teaching positions; nuns and priests were threaten with removal from their orders; liberal bishops saw their careers stalled. Official discussion of abortion was extinguished but not dissent. Today, the majority of Catholics support abortion rights and fewer than 20 percent recognize church leaders as the final moral authority on the issue. (My comments, this author is stuck in the "spirit of Vatican II" ideologies fomented in the USA by the late Fr. Drinan who among other things ran for Congress and won but was forced to resign by Pope John Paul II who did not want priests and bishops in politics. While there is a nostalgia for the 1970's amongst many of us who lived through it and those younger who are clueless about this actual historic period, the author of this piece truly hasn't moved on and is stuck, stuck, stuck.)
At the end of the day, the acceptance of the church's abortion teaching is an internal matter. But the suppression of dissent should give us all pause because the church frequently asserts itself in the public square on the issue. The U.S. bishops almost got a provision in the ACA to exclude all abortions from private health plans -- even for health reasons or for nonviable pregnancies. They forced the creation of a cumbersome segregation methodology for public funding that experts fear will cause insurers to drop abortion coverage. Underlying the bishops' moral authority on the issue is the church's unified opposition to abortion. But this is the result of decades of suppression of opposing views. How should we evaluate claims made by an institution that engages in energetic censorship and then presents itself in democratic assemblies seeking concessions to that position or asserting its right to "religious freedom"? We can't demand that the church change its position on abortion. But policymakers can question the weight they accord that position if it's based on fundamentally anti-democratic practices.
6 comments:
Since Church teaching on such things as the essentially masculine priesthood, the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation, the rights of unborn children, the evil of divorce and artificial contraception, etc. are established such that they cannot be reversed, a Catholic who proposes such reversal displays either a lack of faith in the nature of the Church, or a touch of insanity. The Church is doing dissidents a favor by preventing them from looking like fools by advocating the impossible.
A nation that will kill children in the womb is capable of anything. Civilization is a very, very thin veneer.
I'm too young to remember "theologians" like Rahner, McCormack, Curran and this Drinian guy...but at the time, didn't anyone challenge their heterodox claims in open, public forum debates? Didn't people challenge them head on, in front of their peers for an accounting of their position? It seems to me their truth claims are not all that impressive. A lot of special pleading and use of equivocal definitions. Sloppy thinking in sexuality that they'd never apply in a principled manner in any other field of human endeavor.... in short, they said and taught for years...and no one challenged them? Why not?
I realize that one cannot throw pearls to the swine - that some people simply will not listen to reason. But one can expose such irrational players for what they are - charlatans and pseudo-intellectuals.
One can show a peanut gallery of their peers that their premises, a prioris, definitions, and unuttered presumptions are simply wrong, that God isn't what they claim He is, that the Church and humanity aren't what they claim it is, that their moral prescriptions will not and indeed have never lead people to the flourishing they claim it will "this time".
At the very least one can rattle their presumed intellectual and moral superiority claim.
It would be generous to characterize this article as disingenuous and misrepresenting the events and the actions of the Church. In reality, I am afraid the woman actually believes what she wrote is an argument and is not intelligent enough to understand how silly she is.
I cannot understand how anyone who calls or considers himself or herself Catholic can hold these kind of positions. It is perplexing, inexplicable. disconcerting, and disheartening. We can't lose hope and we must pray that they will one day accept the Church's teaching.
I pulled into the church parking lot a few months ago and was greeted by a car with an Obama/Biden sticker on it. I was horrified! Obama and Biden are not Catholic kosher!
Post a Comment