THE HUBRIS AND HYPOCRISY OF PRO-LIFE PRELATES

I am in California.

Tomorrow, I'll attend my niece's graduation from high school.

She is a Catholic and is graduating from a Catholic high school.  Her school is located in the Diocese of San Jose, which is just southeast of the Diocese of San Francisco, whose Archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone, has been in the news lately.

On May 20, Cordileone sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic and  the Speaker of the US House of Representatives whose home is San Francisco. In it, and in violation of Pope Francis' and the Vatican's own views on the matter (among his many hypocrisies, the Archbishop refuses to accept instruction even as he proclaims his right to give it), Cordileone told Pelosi that she is "not to present [herself] for Holy Communion and, should [she] do so [she is] not to be admitted to Holy Communion, until such time as [she]  publicly repudiates [her] advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confes[es] and receive[s] absolution for the grave sin in the sacrament of Penance."

The Catholic Church thinks abortion is murder.  It teachers that life begins at conception, the moment a sperm joins an egg to create embryonic cells.  There are a number of problems with this position. Morally, it claims to be based on natural reason, but the architect of natural reason, Thomas Aquinas, rejected the view that embryos are people and did not consider abortion to be the murder of a human person until much later in the pregnancy.  Theologically, it rejects both Aquinas's and Augustine's view of ensoulment, which was organic and also did not occur until well beyond conception. And politically, it rejects President Kennedy's belief "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act [and] no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source".

JFK expressed these views in a famous speech he gave in September 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in the heat of that year's presidential campaign.  Kennedy was only the second Catholic ever to have been nominated by a major party as its candidate for President and the first -- Al Smith -- had been defeated in a landslide thirty-two years earlier owing in large part to the fact that he was Catholic. Kennedy confronted  that prejudice head on in Houston, challenging America to eschew "religious intolerance" but also making it absolutely clear that the "statements of Catholic church leaders" were not "binding upon [his] public acts."

Without saying so, Cordileone rejects all of this.  His letter to Pelosi, which he made public the day he sent it, is not at all subtle.  In no uncertain terms, he is telling Pelosi "how to act" and refusing her communion (and directing the eighty-eight parishes under his control to do so as well) in order to force her to "publicly repudiate" her pro-choice position on abortion.  Were Pelosi to do so, she would, in Kennedy's words, be "accept[ing] instructions on public policy" from a "church leader" and making Cordileone's statements "binding" on her "public acts".

In his speech to the Houston ministers, Kennedy realized that there might come a time when his "conscience" interfered with his "oath of office."  In that event, he promised to resign.  Critically, however, he did not give any Catholic hierarchs a veto over that conscience or the right to tell him how to exercise it.

Pelosi should not do so either.

And she isn't.

In fact, she and other Catholic office holders are fighting back.

In the days following Cordileone's assault, Pelosi made it clear that she is not willing to impose her beliefs as a Catholic on the populace a whole.  At the same time, however, she also underscored how hypocritical Cordileone's position is.  The Catholic church, as she noted, claims it is pro-life.  But on numerous "pro-life" issues other than abortion, both it and Archbishop Cordileone refuse to impose any requirements on any public officials. They have not, for example, required any politician to vote against the death penalty, which the church categorically opposes, or threatened to withhold communion from Catholic politicians who support it. Indeed, as California's Governor Gavin Newsom pointed out yesterday, there are a host of pro-life issues -- from immigration to war and peace to climate change to gun control -- where those who oppose abortion are not pro-life at all.

Newsom -- like Pelosi and many other baptized Catholics (in fact, more than half of us) -- is pro-choice on abortion.

But, as far as he is concerned, he's pro-life too.

"There’s  a lot of folks out there that are pro-conception to birth,” Newsom explains, “but they fall wholly short of being pro-life." "Pro-life," he continues, means "you'd support pre-natal care.  You'd support infant health, you'd support child care and preschool. If you're pro-life, you believe in science, if you're pro-life you believe in climate change. But in every single one of these cases -- universally -- the same folks that claim or hold claim to this pro-life [stance] are cutting those programs [or] opposing expansion".

Three days ago, an eighteen-year old with an assault rifle walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and shot and killed seventeen fourth graders and two of their teachers.  In 2013, the Senate refused to pass a bi-partisan bill sponsored by Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey expanding background checks on gun sales.  Of the handful of Catholics who opposed that modest measure, none were criticized by any Catholic prelates even though all had, by their votes, made it easier to purchase assault weapons and thus made the carnage visited upon Uvalde more likely.  And as California Democratic strategist Dan Newman put it on Wednesday,  "Every damn day there's another reminder on how ridiculous it is for the party that wants more guns for everyone to call themselves pro-life".

America is unique in the number of gun-related deaths and in the number of mass homicides.  The rate of gun-related deaths is three to four times higher here than in other developed countries.  We also have more mass shootings than any other country. Despite the claims of the NRA and anti-gun control advocates, the reason for this reality is not that the United States has higher rates of mental illness.

It doesn't.

What it has is more guns. 

In fact,  though we have slightly less than 5% of the world's people, we possess  over 40% of the world's guns.

But on all those pro-gun votes by Republicans that have killed any form of gun-control in utero as it were, those votes that have made it impossible for us to stop our schools from becoming killing fields, San Francisco's ostensibly pro-life Archbishop and self-appointed enforcer of Catholic morality has been . . .

Silent.

And I don't have a problem with that.  

Although I disagree with their views, I also do not have a problem with Catholic bishops telling Catholics that they think abortion is wrong or with those same bishops exercising their Constitutional right to speak on the issue.  

When, however, they decide to tell public officials how to vote and try to leverage those officials into voting their way by withholding communion, they cross a line.

America is a pluralist republic. 

It has no established church and imposes no religiously generated litmus test on either its citizens or its government officials and elected representatives.  

For Catholics, that has been a blessing. 

Two -- JFK and Joe Biden -- have been elected president. Six now sit on the Supreme Court. Scores hold seats in Congress and in legislatures in all fifty states. We are free to practice our faith, or not, and no one assumes our public duties and obligations must or necessarily will conform to the dictates of our church’s hierarchy.  

Or at least no  one assumes that  . . .

Yet.

Cordileone’s attack on Pelosi upends this established assumption, undoes all that President Kennedy accomplished in 1960, and resurrects the possibility of inherent disqualification based on religion.

If it becomes the new norm, Catholics will discover what Governor Smith discovered in 1928.

He didn't lose that presidential election on election day.

He lost it the day he was . . .

Baptized.