2 of 7

It's not like he has to read all of canon law to get the point. Just reading news coverage of what he's writing about—or the very bishops' statement he's criticizing—would have hit the highlights.

"Does the church see the right to life as trumping all its other concerns?" David Van Biema wrote in last week's Time cover package.

Technically speaking, yes. The most useful comparison may be with the church's anti-capital-punishment stance. The Pope has explicitly connected executions with abortion as part of the "culture of death." But church teaching on abortion is "definitive": Catholics must obey it as an act of faith. Teaching on capital punishment is merely "authentic," meaning believers may bring reason to bear on the issue. The church's catechism calls abortion an absolute evil but hedges on the death penalty, quoting the Pope as saying cases necessitating it "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." And canon law includes a penalty of excommunication for abortion but none for aiding state-sanctioned executions. …

The church allows believers commonsense, or "prudential," latitude in fitting doctrine to political action. That is not license to contradict teaching, but an acknowledgment of the delicacy of its application in the real world. In practice, says the Rev. John Langan of Georgetown University, prudence could translate into supporting Pennsylvania's pro-choice Arlen Specter (as Santorum has) to maintain the Senate majority of the Republican Party, which skews antiabortion.

The specific circumstances surrounding the Iraq war mean prudence plays an even bigger role than it does in capital punishment cases. More on that in a moment, but let's first keep in mind that the debate over abortion and Communion isn't simply because it's an election year. It's largely because the Vatican issued a doctrinal note to the bishops in November 2002 suggesting they weren't taking the matter of rogue Catholic politicians seriously enough. That doctrinal note repeatedly mentions abortion, along with same-sex marriage, divorce, education, drug use, prostitution, religious freedom, and an economy that is at the service of the human person and of the common good. Then it says this:

Finally, the question of peace must be mentioned. Certain pacifistic and ideological visions tend at times to secularize the value of peace, while, in other cases, there is the problem of summary ethical judgments which forget the complexity of the issues involved. Peace is always "the work of justice and the effect of charity." It demands the absolute and radical rejection of violence and terrorism and requires a constant and vigilant commitment on the part of all political leaders.

Most politicians who supported the Iraq war believed they were doing the work of justice and charity. A politician who supports abortion, however, would have a hard time saying he was protecting the unborn. That line about "forget the complexity of the issues involved" is worth noting, because the church radically differs on its teachings of abortion and war. "The killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified," the American bishops said in their most recent statement. The Roman Catholic Church has always held that war can be justified. The debate was whether invading Iraq met the qualifications of a just war, and it's worth noting that folks in the Bush camp tended to reference traditionally Catholic doctrine on this issue while folks in the Sojourners camp tended to take a more pacifist view.

next page... |  2 of 7

share this page

June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48