When the U.S. Catholic Bishops gather for their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., this month, they will face a number of interesting controversies. It used to be that the feminists seeking ordination and the peaceniks seeking nuclear disarmament received all the attention and the press, but this time there will be conservative groups trying to be heard, too.
One springboard of discussion will be the recent survey conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute which reported that the abortion rate of Catholic women is 30 percent higher than that of Protestant women. All this time we were led to believe that the Catholics were the principal (or even the only) group opposed to abortion, and now it turns out (if the Guttmacher researchers are to be believed) that the evangelicals are the ones who really believe that abortion is wrong.
One explanation for this difference is that evangelical preachers actually preach that abortion is wrong, whereas one seldom hears a sermon about the sin of abortion in a Catholic church. Another explanation is the failure of the “seamless garment – consistent ethic of life” rhetoric popularized by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, which is a mish-mash of conflicting notions about abortion, military weapons, and welfare that hopelessly confuses the moral premise of the primacy of human life.
Some Catholic suggest that the “seamless garment” line had a hidden political purpose. It was really designed to rationalize a way for Catholics to vote for pro-abortion candidates such as Senator Edward Kennedy.
Another group of Catholic laymen is asking the Bishops to declare the Strategic Defense Initiative “morally superior,” despite the hierarchy’s collective criticism of SDI earlier this year. At their general meeting last June, the Bishops issued a statement asserting that “proposals to press deployment of SDI do not measure up to moral criteria.”
This group of Catholic laymen, headed by High Frontier author Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, presidential arms control adviser Edward Rowny, columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., and former Treasury Secretary William Simon, issued a statement stating, “We are distressed to see the moral force of our Bishops and of our church squandered in an attack on SDI, a program heavily supported by the American people.” The group urged the Bishops to “endorse the superior morality of SDI” because it is “better to protect the innocent than to threaten their annihilation.”
A third group assembled by the Catholic Center in Washington, D.C., is presenting the Bishops with a “Women’s Statement” signed by one hundred prominent Catholic women. This document allies itself with Pope John Paul II’s recent letter on the vocation and dignity of women because it “admirably sets forth the scriptural and anthropological sources for understanding the gift of womanhood.”
This Women’s Statement attacks what it calls “a false feminism, blind to the authentic vocation of woman,” which “disregards or despises the maternal vocation, falling prey to a lust for power which is the antithesis of the feminine vocation of self-donation.” More in sorrow than in anger, this letter to the Bishops observes that “even some of our pastors appear to have succumbed before this false feminist spirit which has become such a powerful current in secular society.”
These traditional Catholic women look upon the Bishops’ proposed pastoral on women and “sexism” as just troublemaking and pandering to the radical feminists whose real goal is the ordination of women. If the Bishops want to write a paper defending women against real harms, they should inveigh against the evils of divorce and pornography.
Still another group of Catholics is finding fault with the way the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Bishops’ bureaucracy, lobbied last summer in behalf of the Dodd-Kildee ABC Baby-Sitting Bill endorsed by Michael Dukakis. The bill died when Congress adjourned before the election, but controversy about the bill is far from over.
Catholic mothers who are fulltime homemakers have taken personal offense at the letter sent last July on U.S. Catholic Conference letterhead to Congressman Dale Kildee urging passage of this bill because, the women say, the bill would finance the placing of babies in institutions. It would blatantly discriminate, not only against mothers who care for their own children, but also against employed mothers who choose child care by other relatives or neighborhood day care mothers.
There is active resentment by Catholic mothers against the U.S.C.C. putting the political clout of the Bishops on the side of subsidizing institutional care in preference to mother and family care.
Speaking of the Bishops’ political clout, some Catholics are wondering if they have any clout any more. While clergymen have the same right to speak out on politics as any American, when they speak out too loud and too often on subjects that are outside of their knowledge and understanding, they run the risk of losing their effectiveness.
