Is Abortion A “Preeminent Right”?
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
When various states began enforcing their Wuhan Virus shutdown policies in March, the impact was immediate. Yes, the ban on religious services during Holy Week and Eastertide was devastating, as we have all learned firsthand.
However, the impact on the economy was profound as well.
Consider: In the past month, across the country millions of businesses small and large were forced to close. Entire supply chains shut down. In the hospitality industry alone, millions lost their jobs.
With grit, prayer, and hope, those affected hunkered down.
Not one of them sued.
Do you know who did?
Abortionists.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, was already an abortion extremist. We recall that, last year, he endorsed a bill proposed by Democratic delegate Kathy Tran that legalized infanticide for newborns who survive abortion. So it’s no surprise that Northam’s lockdown order last month exempted abortion mills, while barring public religious services until after Trinity Sunday.
Northam’s pro-abortion Democrat colleagues in Kansas (Gov. Laura Kelly) and North Carolina (Gov. Roy Cooper) followed suit. For them, abortion was “essential” — but ironically, following Cooper’s edict, Charlotte police started arresting sidewalk counselors outside an abortion mill there.
However, the “abortion as essential” policy wasn’t unanimous. In issuing their own states’ regulations, Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Mike DeWine of Ohio refused to exempt abortionists as “essential” service providers. They sought to preserve scarce protective medical devices for legitimate health-care workers.
Well, “legitimate health care” wasn’t on the abortionists’ agenda. In both Texas and Ohio, the mass killers took the governors to federal court. After victories in district courts, the abortionists lost in Texas but won in Ohio when the cases went to different regional Courts of Appeal.
Rest assured, they will not quit. Abortion has become the Prime Mandate of America’s Left. The reason is simple, and has a logic of its own: If you can kill the most innocent, you can kill anybody — including the infirm, the aged, the poor, the unwanted — or the “undesirable.”
This power knows no limits.
Life Is The Preeminent Truth
At their annual meeting last November, America’s Catholic bishops confronted the Left’s relentless campaign to make abortion an “unalienable right.” The bishops voted 143-69 to reaffirm their position that abortion was the “preeminent” political issue facing the Church and the country this election year. That decision rankled many in the USCCB’s bureaucracy, where the “preeminent” policy was shoved down the Memory Hole. But several bishops who had voted in the majority continued to emphasize the issue as months went by.
On March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, two of these prelates revisited the Church’s teaching to reflect on the importance of their November resolution.
Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, who chairs the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, used the occasion to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of St. John Paul II’s The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae). He quoted St. John Paul’s challenge to every age:
“With great openness and courage, we need to question how widespread is the culture of life today among individual Christians, families, groups and communities in our dioceses. With equal clarity and determination we must identify the steps we are called to take in order to serve life in all its truth” (EV, n. 95).
Archbishop Naumann knows that our own age’s answer to St. John Paul’s pressing question might be rather disappointing. The fact that a third of our bishops voted against the resolution last fall means that there’s a lot of work left to be done, not just once but “in season and out of season.” This effort calls for the energetic participation of the laity as well as that of our shepherds. We should be grateful for Archbishop Naumann’s bold wake-up call — and respond to it.
Also celebrating the encyclical’s anniversary on March 25, Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver addressed “the significant challenges” that confront the culture of life. With St. John Paul, he pointed to the “progressive darkening of the capacity to discern God’s living and saving presence [brought on by] the systematic violation of the moral law.”
“We have seen the progressive darkening grow,” Archbishop Aquila writes, “especially in the last 10 years with physician-assisted suicide, the redefinition of marriage, and a few bishops, even more sadly, since they should know better, arguing against abortion being a preeminent issue in voting.”
Such welcome clarity, undoubtedly offered in humility, is no longer optional. In our secular culture today, the “darkening” identified by Archbishop Aquila has led many to allege that our country’s greatest social sin is to offend somebody. Behind that pathetic ruse lies what Pope Benedict calls the “Dictatorship of Relativism.” This “progressive” virus of our darkened age poses a greater challenge to our age than the Wuhan Virus ever will, and we must confront it just as forcefully.
Yes, Magisterial Is Different Than Prudential
Archbishop Aquila strongly recommends an essay that articulates the differences between the issues of euthanasia and abortion, on the one hand, and those regarding the environment, immigration, and other issues on which good Catholics can disagree. The author, Fr. Luis Granados, DJCM, academic dean at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, provides a simple but indispensable guide.
“In Evangelium Vitae St. John Paul II invites us to love, respect, and promote life. The encyclical focuses on two offenses against life: abortion and euthanasia,” Fr. Granados writes. “Two solemn declarations condemn them as intrinsically evil, as the deliberate and direct killing of an innocent human being (EV, nn. 62 and 65). But some argue today that it would be better to focus on other ethical issues like immigration, social injustice or environmental sins, which they claim are just as wrong.”
“What makes these two offenses graver than sins against the environment or immigrants, for example,” he asks.
“First of all, in the case of abortion and euthanasia, we are dealing with the direct and intentional killing of the innocent. As such, we are dealing with the irreversible end of the life of the victim and, for that reason, also with the destruction of the heart of the murderer.”
“The second reason is the consideration of the victim,” he continues; “an innocent and fragile human being. In abortion, we have the baby in the womb, the most vulnerable and innocent among the vulnerable, while in euthanasia, we have the elderly and the disabled.”
“Thirdly, the greater gravity of abortion and euthanasia is manifested when we consider the murderer. The physician, the father and the mother, those appointed by God as its keepers, are those who destroy the baby, and are subsequently morally destroyed. Children are called to honor their elderly parents, but in euthanasia, it is sometimes the children who decide to kill them. In both cases, the relationship between generations, the basic bond that builds our society, is destroyed.”
“Finally, abortion and euthanasia are the type of sins that can never be justified. They are intrinsically evil. ‘No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church’ (EV, n. 62). In other sins against life, like immigration, we enter into the realm of prudential decisions: How many immigrants should our country welcome? Under which conditions? But in the case of abortion or euthanasia there is no such deliberation. We are dealing with an action that is always evil: always and in every circumstance (Veritatis Splendor, n. 52).”
Thank you, Archbishop Aquila and Fr. Granados. A blessed Eastertide to all.