The abortion villagers are at the gates again brandishing their torches and pitchforks. They claim to speak for God and are demanding that everyone, and I mean everyone, kneel to their will. I speak of the Catholic Church, in the person of its middle management, which continues to attempt an ecclesiastic coup in the United States. Not content with advising its adherents to respect the life of the unborn, they are bound and determined to alter the American justice and legislative systems to do their bidding. In 2004, Saint Louis archbishop Raymond Burke forbade Sen. John Kerry from taking communion in his domain. It is impossible to know whether this action cost Kerry any votes among Catholics but when the margin of victory in Ohio was 130,000, any issue could be seminal.
Today's effort to control the world comes from Cardinal Edward Egan of New York. The good Cardinal has attacked the Jesuits of Fordham University for their plans to honor Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Justice Breyer is to receive the Fordham-Stein Ethics Prize. Cardinal Egan has voiced his objection to this honor on the grounds that Breyer has voted early and often to uphold Roe vs. Wade. Apparently the archdiocese is unimpressed with the hundreds of other decisions that have marked Justice Breyer's fifteen years on the High Court. Hello, Pierre the bridge builder!
Breyer will be the seventh justice to receive the Fordham-Stein award. All were on the "wrong" side of Roe. There have also been three former Attorneys General. None of those awards caused so much as a ripple around St. Patrick's Cathedral. That might be because none of the other recipients were announced before an American Presidential election. Fortunately, the Jesuits have a long and storied history of thumbing their noses at Church authority. You can expect that Cardinal Egan's blustering will receive all the attention it deserves...none.
Having grown up under the sometimes heavy hand of the Roman Catholic Church, I am at a loss to understand why they have chosen the abortion question as the cause celebre and why in the United States. Abortion, in one form or another, is legal in all 27 European Union countries where the number of abortions is much higher. That includes Italy and Ireland where Church influence is systemic and pervasive. Why the U.S.? Perhaps the folks in Rome feel a natural kinship with the neocons of the Republican party. In Europe, religion is almost never a part of the political discourse. Politicians never pander to the God squad. No one cares what you believe. They care how you will govern. What a novel concept!
Strangely, the Church has not been nearly as vocal on other issues it considers sinful. One never hears of popes and bishops railing on about adultery. The last time I checked, the prohibition on adultery was still listed in the Ten Commandments right between killing and stealing.
And what about capital punishment?If state sponsored murder doesn't rate a little papal indignation, what does? No one in the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy made a peep when George W. Bush ran for President from one of the most execution-happy states in America. Does war count? No one tried to excommunicate Jack Kennedy for invading Cuba. At least the U.S. government isn't in the abortion business directly. I suspect that if you want to know why the RCC considers one sin more worthy of protest, you'll need to buy a ticket to Rome.
Nevertheless, neither the Republicans nor the Catholics have had any success making abortion part of the presidential election in 2008. It would appear that in the face of an economic meltdown of biblical proportion, the only God America wants to pray to is Henry Paulson. It only took a President of epochal mediocrity to remind the country that leadership and false piety aren't synonymous. In fact, they don't even pray in the same church.
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