By Tuesday, the speaker was buried in ecclesiastical censure. Chaput pounced with a formal denunciation, labeling as "gravely evil" the "evasions employed to justify [abortion]. Catholics who make excuses for it -- whether they're famous or not -- fool only themselves." Other heavyweights piled on, including New York's Cardinal Edward Egan.
All this conservative crosier waving is about a simple set of numbers. Catholics constitute 25% of the electorate, and no presidential candidate in decades has won the popular vote without carrying Catholics. Obama and Sen. John McCain are in a statistical dead heat for the Catholic vote, with Obama leading 42% to 40% and 17% undecided, according to the pollsters' consensus. The Republicans think their margin of victory might be found in that 17%, many of them white, ethnic, swing-state voters presumed to be socially conservative. The bishops are desperate to demonstrate that their flock isn't ignoring them on abortion the way it has on contraception for half a century.
If Pelosi had half a wit about her, she might have done what most U.S. Catholics instinctively do, which is to rely on a tradition of moral reasoning that stands athwart Chaput's novel reductionism. Nearly five decades ago, the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray offered this classic appraisal of the real matter at issue:
"The American Proposition makes a particular claim upon the reflective attention of the Catholic ... in the matter of the 'pluralist society ... ' " Murray wrote. "By pluralism here I mean the coexistence within the one political community of groups who hold divergent and incompatible views with regard to religious questions -- those ultimate questions that concern the nature and destiny of man within a universe that stands under the reign of God. Pluralism therefore implies disagreement and dissension within the community. But it also implies a community within which there must be agreement and consensus. There is no small political problem here."
Murray went on to argue that the "working out" of that political problem is itself "an exercise in civic virtue" -- and a theological imperative.
It is this older line of Catholic moral reasoning that allows Biden, who has voted to ban late-term and so-called partial-birth abortions, to say he is "prepared to accept" the Catholic Church's teaching that life begins at conception while supporting Roe vs. Wade because, for now, it "is as close as we're going to be able to get as a society" to accommodating all religious views on the issue.
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timothy.rutten@latimes.com
