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Get to Know the Issues
While concern about a presidential candidate’s moral convictions on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death and his or her political courage to protect it lay at the core of every Catholic voter’s conscience, other important choice issues cannot be left out of consideration during the upcoming election campaigns.
In the New York State primary on Sept. 9, the freedom of Catholics to choose the educational venue for their children is right on the line. As we have reminded our readers many times, freedom of choice in education is as much about good economics as it is about quality education in a fair academic environment of healthy competition. It saves taxpayers money, gives parents and teachers more opportunities and improves our children’s futures.
It is regrettable that some of our elected representatives still lack the political courage to resist the radically anti-Catholic school position of the New York State United Teachers Association and its affiliates who want to deny Catholic parents their constitutionally guaranteed right to choose. Unless they hear from their constituents loud and clear at the ballot box this year they will never get the message.
In fact, the most important political decision Catholic parents make for the well-being of their children may be the candidate they support in the primaries. So know your state representative’s position on educational choice and vote your conscience. As the child goes, so goes the nation!
Abortion and Politics
“Some men think the Earth is round, others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King’s command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it?”
- Thomas More in “A Man For All Seasons” by Robert Bolt.
After centuries of speculation, the world has turned out to be round. What philosophers once could only debate, science at last has confirmed.
Catholic theologians, historically, have used the tools of philosophy, natural law and whatever biological and cosmological constructs were available to them. Even without the supportive insights of the biosciences of genetics and embryology, never has Church teaching since wavered on the immorality of abortion. And the further we probe the mystery of the origins of every human life, the one non-arbitrary point where its start can be pinpointed is the moment of conception.
The Catechism clearly spells out the teaching of the Church: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law” (n. 2271). There is no way to reconcile Church teaching with the violence of abortion without doing violence to the teaching itself.
No one can begrudge another American citizen – especially a person as distinguished as the Speaker of the House – the freedom to express her opinion on political issues. What Nancy Pelosi attempted recently, however, was a tortured deconstruction of Church teaching itself to shoehorn it into a particular political viewpoint.
The immorality of abortion is really “controversial,” she instructed Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press, because the “Doctors” of the Catholic Church have not in fact agreed on when human life begins. “The point,” according to Pelosi, “is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.” Oh no?
Ms. Pelosi is a member of our Catholic family and a prominent public servant. Had she not leaped into the limelight first by touting her strong Catholicism (“an ardent practicing Catholic”) and then by adding, as if to bolster her credibility, that this is a subject she had “studied for a long time,” her misrepresentation of Church teaching might not have been so vexsome.
Bishops then have every right to clarify distortions of Church teaching. And because the error was so public and potentially scandalous, these legitimate teachers of the Church would naturally be the first ones responsible to set the record straight publicly even as some of the House Speaker’s Catholic colleagues did.
Here’s the point. If there is anything “controversial” about abortion, it is not any ambiguity or inconsistency of Church teaching. Nor can personal opinion – even that of a public figure: scholar, statesperson or political strategist – thwart its profound legal and sociopolitical implications. Not everyone accepts this teaching; it does not alter its clarity or moral authority.
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