Dutch national and abortion advocate Liliane Ploumen may not be a household name in the United States, but she ought to be.
This is a woman who, in six short months, raised over $300 million to help foreign nationals work around the Mexico City Policy, a directive instituted by President Ronald Reagan and extended by every Republican president since — Trump being no exception — that prohibits the funding of abortion overseas.
In fact, the organization Ploumen represents is a group named SheDecides. What is she deciding? Abortions. A lot of them, and in numbers that would make Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards positively bloodthirsty with envy.
It took Michael Hichborn with the Lepanto Institute and Steve Skojec with the popular Catholic news site One Peter Five no time at all to rack up the research on Ploumen’s past history — as a visceral advocate of abortion services.
Now I consider myself to be quite the jaded politician. I have worked at every level of government — national, state, and even local — and have seen some truly outlandish and odd things. Even the Vatican, whose diplomatic corps goes to places the United States cannot go such as Haiti, has offered surprises from time to time.
Yet this was a surprise that rattled me to the core.
Commander of the Order of St. Gregory: For comparison purposes, Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, for those of you who are brother Knights, is a mere knight in this chivalric order. For an organization known for its advocacy of pro-life values, Anderson is a rank below Ploumen — such was the degree of honor conferred upon such a soul.
Hapsburg and Chesterton…and Ploumen. Men and women who have devoted their lives in service to God and Country…and Ploumen. Men and women who have endured countless slanders and calumnies in defense of the Risen Christ…and Ploumen.
What baffles me is this. Pope Francis could not have been incognizant of Ploumen’s reputation, as Ploumen’s connections among the moneyed elite are deep and longstanding.
We live in a world that no longer treats Catholics as a separate other with which the world might disagree, but leaves to our own devices. Lay Catholics are constantly attacked as haters, bigots, have the most vile things said about our priests and sisters, are accused of supporting a pedophile church that denies the basic human right to love to homosexual couples, a faith bound by rules and devoid of the sort of spiritualism that the world tolerates because it believes nothing.
Such lay faithful are under attack even within the Church itself. German bishops and the “reform of the reform” castigate those faithful to the Magisterium as neo-Pelagians. American bishops fob off concerns about Catholic Relief Services and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development as hate-filled and destructive. Planned Parenthood actively infiltrates the Church on a scale not seen since Freemasonry’s heydays in the 19th century, our supposedly Catholic colleges and universities actively defy Pope St. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae, female ordination is actively discussed, the Pontifical Academy for Life now seems to work in opposition to the pro-life movement writ large, and the Eucharist — the very center of our faith — is bartered by a Catholic hierarchy more attentive to moneychangers than Magisterium.
Is this why we are suffering the calumnies of our own hierarchy? So that Ploumen may be raised and the Eucharist trampled?
Judie Brown of the American Life League is fond of saying that the Real Presence is the key to undoing the culture of death. Namely, that if we really and truly believed in the Real Presence and the imago Dei that dwells in the womb of every mother, then it would be an impossibility to even countenance the idea of abortion.
Yet this is the problem at core. The Greatest Story Ever Told stopped being a romance and became a novel, then a history book, before finally settling into fable and into fiction. Jesus stopped being a Person to encounter and became a mere idea, and ideas are as easily abstracted. The baby becomes a fetus; life a clump of cells; our faith a rulebook.
This is the core evil behind the idea of proportionalism. Our creed as Catholics is not an abstraction that “we believe” but rather a credo — namely that I believe. Once we reject the totality of the Real Presence, once we barter away the totality of Christ and the immersive transfiguration of the Christian in the presence of Christ Himself, the rest is a matter of arithmetic.
I have been reading a great deal of the ascetic Carlo Carretto lately. His insight into the value of humility in the face of such human barter is remarkable. Carretto counsels us that the Church is indeed a mystical body full of fallible human beings. It will stumble, as both St. Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of Assisi experienced directly. The response of these saints to their times was not to build another church, but rather to stay with the Church because it alone is the Deposit of Truth and Faith.
Yet one sees individuals such as Liliane Ploumen raised by Pope Francis’ own hand, and it is difficult to reconcile. Sees the Pontifical Academy for Life disbanded and reconstituted. Sees the German bishops scrambling to preserve their church tax. Sees the American bishops delicately balance the thirst for federal grants against the viscidities of USAID, sees these very same bishops misguided by an opaque layer of bureaucrats that interposes itself between the bishops and the faithful.
One has to wonder openly. Do the bishops — and does this Pope — truly understand how pervasive the rot has become? What the laity are being asked to disbelieve? How professors, administrators, and bureaucrats are all conspiring to Americanize our faith in their own image?
If one truly desires a faith that embraces female ordination, abortion, contraception, that has already surrendered on family, that is more concerned about the material forms of charity than with the salvation of souls, then there is an Episcopalian faith more than happy to welcome such individuals. I bear no ill will toward them. May they go with God.
Yet for those of us attempting to hold fast to the faith of our fathers, why are accolades being heaped upon the enemies of the Church by the Catholic Church?
Please explain this to a Catholic who has lived the first four decades of his life in obedience and fidelity to the Catholic faith, only to watch the sand wash away from the foundation stone. If we are to endure the calumny of the world only to discover that the Holy Father finds our fidelity a touch too strong, where then is the path forward?
Ploumen was positively jubilant, in her interview with BNR, about being a pro-abort who “received a high award from the Pope.” Count me among the disheartened, even the aghast, but not the despondent.
Not yet, at least.
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Of course, I am succeeding (but not replacing) the inestimable Mr. James K. Fitzpatrick for the First Teachers column. Please feel free to send any correspondence for First Teachers to Shaun Kenney, c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 — or if it is easier, simply send me an e-mail with First Teachers in the subject line to: svk2cr@virginia.edu.
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