by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
(May 20, 2008) Instead of overlooking the pro-abortion position of political candidates in favor of other issues of concern to Catholics, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver says Catholics should try to convert them to a pro-life position.
“In the United States in 2008, abortion is an acceptable form of homicide,”Archbishop Chaput wrote in a recent column. This situation will only change when “Catholics force their political parties and elected officials to act differently.”
His comments were directed to a group known as “Roman Catholics for Obama ‘08,” who cite one of the Archbishop’s letters on the subject of Catholics and pro-choice politicians on their website to justify their decision to support the pro-abortion candidate. The problem is that they only use a portion of the letter that seems to justify their position.
“So can a Catholic in good conscience vote for a pro-choice candidate?” reads the portion of Chaput’s letter that appears on the website. “The answer is: I can’t, and I won’t. But I do know some serious Catholics — people whom I admire — who may. I think their reasoning is mistaken, but at least they sincerely struggle with the abortion issue, and it causes them real pain. And most important: They don’t keep quiet about it; they don’t give up; they keep lobbying their party and their representatives to change their pro-abortion views and protect the unborn. Catholics can vote for pro-choice candidates if they vote for them despite — not because of — their pro-choice views.”
What the group neglected to add was the following paragraph of the letter: “But [Catholics who support ‘pro-choice candidates] also need a compelling proportionate reason to justify it. What is a ‘proportionate’ reason when it comes to the abortion issue? It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life — which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.”
The group concludes by saying: “After faithful thought and prayer, we have arrived at the conclusion that Senator Obama is the candidate whose views are most compatible with the Catholic outlook, and we will vote for him because of that — and because of his other outstanding qualities — despite our disagreements with him in specific areas.”
This kind of moral calculus sounds like the same reasoning he used 30 years ago, Chaput says, and goes on to explain how he came to embrace his own personal convictions about politics and abortion.
It began with the 1980 Colorado campaign for Jimmy Carter’s re-election.
“Carter had one serious strike against him,” Chaput wrote. “The U.S. Supreme Court had legalized abortion on demand in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and Carter the candidate waffled about restricting it. At the time, I knew Carter was wrong in his views about Roe v. Wade and soft toward permissive abortion. But even as a priest, I justified working for him because he wasn’t aggressively ‘pro-choice’.”
Carter held a “bad position on a vital issue,” Chaput wrote, “but I believed he was right on so many more of the ‘Catholic’ issues than his opponent seemed to be. The moral calculus looked easy. I thought we could remedy the abortion problem after Carter was safely returned to office.”
Carter lost his re-election bid, but even with the pro-life Ronald Reagas president, “the belligerence, dishonesty and inflexibility of the ‘pro-choice’ lobby has stymied almost every effort to protect unborn human life since.”
Chaput changed his mind about supporting “pro-choice” candidates, especially when he began to notice “that very few of the people, including Catholics, who claimed to be ‘personally opposed to abortion’ really did anything about it. Nor did they intend to. For most, their personal opposition was little more than pious hand wringing and a convenient excuse — exactly as it is today.”
In fact, Chaput writes, “I can’t name any ‘pro-choice’ Catholic politician who has been active, in a sustained public way, in trying to discourage abortion and to protect unborn human life — not one.”
Abortion has since become acceptable in the United States, and the only way to change things is to change our politicians, he says.
But that’s going to take more than “verbal gymnastics, good alibis and pious talk about ‘personal opposition’ to killing unborn children,” he writes. “I’m sure ‘Roman Catholics for Obama’ know that, and I wish them good luck. They’ll need it.”
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