Quotes of the Day
When Dick Durbin's hometown priest slammed the Senator's pro-choice voting record, Durbin's office did not sit idle. It compiled a scorecard ranking 24 Catholic Senators by their votes on issues of concern to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Abortion made the list, but so did the minimum wage, the death penalty and media ownership, all weighted equally. Democrats did better than Republicans, and the test's high scorer was John Kerry. An incensed (and low scoring) Senator Rick Santorum fumed that abortion and "how many television stations somebody owns ... are not equivalent moral issues." True, but Durbin did express a prevalent Democratic curiosity: Does the church see the right to life as trumping all its other concerns?
Technically speaking, yes. The most useful comparison may be with the church's anti-capital-punishment stance. The Pope has explicitly connected executions with abortion as part of the "culture of death." But church teaching on abortion is "definitive": Catholics must obey it as an act of faith. Teaching on capital punishment is merely "authentic," meaning believers may bring reason to bear on the issue. The church's catechism calls abortion an absolute evil but hedges on the death penalty, quoting the Pope as saying cases necessitating it "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." And canon law includes a penalty of excommunication for abortion but none for aiding state-sanctioned executions.
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Pittsburgh, Pa., Bishop Donald Wuerl has recently asserted that "sometimes a single issue will be so important that it overrides a whole range of lesser issues." Yet many experts who confirm abortion's import insist that the issue does not impose lockstep political behavior on believing voters. The church allows believers commonsense, or "prudential," latitude in fitting doctrine to political action. That is not license to contradict teaching, but an acknowledgment of the delicacy of its application in the real world. In practice, says the Rev. John Langan of Georgetown University, prudence could translate into supporting Pennsylvania's pro-choice Arlen Specter (as Santorum has) to maintain the Senate majority of the Republican Party, which skews antiabortion. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once famously suggested that "prudential" latitude might involve voting pro-choice because recriminalizing abortion would allow people to pretend they had solved the problem while merely pushing it underground.
Most American bishops think Cuomo took prudence too far, providing philosophical cover for Catholic politicians whose prochoice votes were less pious tactics than they were Democratic careerism. But in Rome some moderate theologians are less fervent on abortion's primacy than are their colleagues in the U.S. "The only black and white in all of this is that abortion is wrong," says a Roman canon-law expert. "The idea of the litmus test is not part of Catholic teaching. It is part of American political culture." Nevertheless, the same scholar senses "an emerging impatience" among church leaders around the globe at U.S. Catholic politicians who cast their pro-choice votes without even the appearance of pain. "You can tell when a politician is really wrestling with the issue," he says, citing Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, who voted first against and later for a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. "With Kerry," he comments, "you just don't see that struggle."
- David Van Biema