Saturday, May 15, 2004
(12:39 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Few Bad Actors
General JC Christian, Patriot, posts on a pastoral letter from a Catholic bishop who has decided that those Catholic politicians who are pro-choice, along with those who vote for them, are objectively not in full communion with the Catholic Church and are jeopardizing their salvation. They may not receive communion until they recant their position and go to confession.
I am a totalitarian at heart, I confess, and the Catholic Church's coersive powers were one of the main things that attracted me to the arms of Holy Mother Church. I just wish that the Church's attempted use of coersive power had some kind of connection to reality -- i.e., I wish that it would use those powers in cases where it could possibly make some positive difference. Let's be honest here: being pro-life or pro-choice is basically a matter of slogans, not a matter of reality. The pro-lifers may make some inroads at the margins, such as stem cells or partial-birth abortion, but the pro-life agenda has never been, and will never be, a primary goal of the Republican Party. It's a slogan that they use to get certain Christians to sign onto their platform, and they occasionally try to throw a bone to that constituency, but pro-lifers are basically being taken for a ride by the Republicans.
I'd personally like to see a bishop proclaim that anyone who was complicit with the torture incidents, including those who developed methods of torture and trained others in their use, should be denied communion. I'd love to see a bishop proclaim that the people who created our punitive system for dealing with homelessness, or who try to turn schools, health care, prisons, or the military into for-profit industries -- those people should be denied communion. That would be great, in my opinion. I'd even be open to the possibility of excommunicating any Catholic who joined the armed forces in America, given what the armed forces represent. Temporary measures, all -- designed to get people to think. But abortion -- that's just sloganeering. It has nothing to do with anything. No matter whether Bush or Kerry is elected in 2004, abortion will remain legal.
The problem, of course, is that for people who buy into the rhetoric on abortion, it will always remain the biggest single moral issue in history. No matter what else is happening in the world, the mass murder of infants will remain the highest priority, and anyone who doesn't see that is blind. But such a one-sided focus undercuts its own moral credibility -- by being willing to accept anything in exchange for the promise to illegalize abortion, pro-lifers have consistently provided the necessary support for policies that are objectively anti-life. I know that a lot of my good Christian friends refuse to "accept the lesser of two evils" -- but the church has to have a workable strategy if it wants to make a concrete difference in the world. The pro-life strategy has failed. It has made the church complicit with needless wars and with the continued theft of the public sphere by capital and has robbed the church of its moral credibility. It's time to move on to something different, even if that means forming alliances with people who support abortion and with atheist/agnostics.
