Deal Hudson, of InsideCatholic.com, is at it again. He has published an article accusing two groups, Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, with being "fake Catholics" because of their support for health care reform. He admitted to "journalistic hyperbole" in making the charge in an interview with Dan Gilgoff, but then went on to defend it. "This has to do with a nonnegotiable teaching of the church," he said.
The term "nonnegotiable" derived from a voting guide issued in 2004 by the group Catholic Answers, a group that does not, last time I checked, enjoy any magisterial authority. The five "nonnegotiable" items on their list conveniently dovetailed with planks in the Republican Party platform. It involves a sleight of hand. There is a difference between being an abortionist and being a legislator. The latter task involves weighing a variety of concerns, applying principles to concrete situations, and finally trying to achieve the common good while working with those who do not necessarily share one’s worldview. It is a moral task, to be sure, but people of good will and good conscience can sometimes reach different conclusions and, besides, legislation is all about negotiating. Sometimes, negotiations are the only way to convince others to see your own point of view.
To be clear, I do not see how anyone can be pro-abortion and Catholic. The charge of "fakeness" is not, a priori, an impossible one to level. Indeed, the group Catholics for Choice seems to me to deserve the charge and Hudson conveniently fails to note that Catholics for Choice has consistently attacked Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for being too pro-life. And both Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance have consistently stated, and publicly stated, their opposition to federal funding of abortion.
But, the deeper falsity of Hudson’s charge lies in the crimped analysis he brings to his task of political evaluation. Hudson reduces religion to ethics, not just politics. The reason abortion is of such integral significance – integral is a key word used by Pope Benedict in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate – is because it offends not just Catholic morality but it offends Catholic anthropology. There is not a single moral claim in the Creed, but the Creed does claim, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth." Catholics cannot abide abortion because it cannot be reconciled with the idea that life, all life, is created and creation is received as a gift. It is not the product of our strivings. Liberal Democrats are the not the problem here. Modernity is the problem here, and Hudson is smart enough to know it. The modern worldview sees man as the creator of his own world, his own values, his own ethics and just so it is a deceit. But, it is a deceit that is found just as easily among the Republicans as it is among the Democrats. Unsurprisingly, Hudson does not want to have that discussion.
Hudson’s charge would also carry more weight if his on-line journal had not been so utterly indifferent to the needs of the uninsured, especially to the plight of poor women who lack health insurance and for whom the prospect of carrying a pregnancy to term is unbelievably daunting. She, too, is created in the image and likeness of God. But, Hudson passes by on the other side of the road when he sees that woman in need. His slavish devotion to the free market trumps his concern to help poor women, and he fails to see that the Catholic belief in subsidiarity requires the government to care for its citizens when the private sector fails to do so, and that the federal government must step in when states and localities fail to meet their obligation to care for the health of their citizenry. All that gets shunted aside because it is more important to hand President Obama a defeat.
It is not clear what the final language on abortion funding will be. It is quite clear that the obstructionist tactics of anti-reform zealots like Hudson have made it harder, not easier, to achieve pro-life health care reform because if they are going to oppose health care in any event, there is no reason for Congress or the White House to listen to them. I have been quite clear that if there is federal funding for abortion in the reform, I would vote against it if I had a vote. But, I can see how others see it differently, and that difference does not make them fake Catholics.
Perhaps he should focus some attention on groups on his side of the aisle and their ignoring Catholic teaching on a range of important issues (they use the phrase “prudential judgment” as a magic wand to arrive at any conclusion they want). Or even at their funding. Erik Prince, the kind soul who runs Blackwater, has been a major donor to Catholic Answers Action (the voting guide you mention), Hudson’s own former magazine Crisis, and a range of other conservative Catholic groups. His company’s involvement in war-profiteering, indiscriminate killing of civilians, bribing foreign governments, regimes with terrible human rights records, and CIA assassination and rendition/torture programs is certainly at odds with Catholic teaching (including “intrinsically evil” acts). It would be like an abortion-provider funding liberal Catholic groups (how do you think Mr. Hudson or his comrade in arms Bill Donohue would react to that?).
In my view, Catholics United and Catholic in Alliance are more faithful to Catholic social teaching in its entirety then the perspective Mr. Hudson represents.
If you want a Church where everybody accepts the party line, I guess kicking out members is the way to go. If you want a Church where each member is treasured and heard, then you can't call some of them "fake".
My own sense is that the sacredness of life is a lived belief. And Church is more than an institution or a club with rules that must be adhered to or else you're out. But then, I color outside of the line and many people would call me "fake".
MSW says that Catholics for Free Choice deserve the title, "fake". I wonder if that term also applies to infertile couples who use in-vitro fertilizaton in order to conceive a child? I know that the many Catholic who strongly support the Death Penalty are not called "fake".
I'm just saying that drawing this line between fake and real Catholics may getting into very tricky territory.
As far as health care reform expanding abortion, no one is sure. It's pretty unlikely that an insurance exchange without some form of Stupak will pass conference and very unlikely that any public option will even pass the Senate at all. Until the Confence Committee begins markup, we don't know what's in the bill. If the Senate provisions on public financing are adopted in lieu of the public option, then there will be no public insurance coverage because Medicaid, Medicare (as far as I know) and FEHBP are all currently covered by Hyde. Have you been paying attention to current events? Apparently Hudson has not, since a bill resembling what is being considered in the Senate has no expanded abortion coverage.
Catholic liberals can keep calling Deal Hudson partisan all they want, but the simple fact is that when liberal Catholics told us to support Obama and the Democrat takeover on the basis that they were for a pro-life Democratic coalition, it was a fraud. A Democratic coalition has emerged, in the form of Stupak, Nelson and the USCCB, and these groups are siding with Obama and NARAL to push the bill without the Stupak amendment when it comes down to it. So as it turns out, they were just partisan Democrats all along, Obama-right-or-wrong types, who refuse to stand on principle with real pro-life Democrats when they actually emerge.
In your hypothetical, if the mandate gave insurance to all poor and minority women, and mandated that each of them had to have access to a plan covering abortion, and everyone in those groups had to pay an abortion premium to cover the cost of these newly mandated covered abortions, like the Senate and Capps-House bills say, then of course there would be opposition to it on moral grounds. But you still arrogantly deny all the research studies showing that these women exist and that they aren't getting abortions due to lack of coverage. You even failed to specify in your hypothetical how such a plan would cover the target group, many of whom don't have jobs. And you of course didn't specify the degree to which the women who are covered in your hypothetical would have abortion as part of their coverage.
Catholic liberals such as the ones criticized by Hudson have wedded themselves to politicians whose primary goal is to make abortion free for everyone in the country by government funding or mandate, especially for the poor who aren't getting abortions because they aren't free. Every single "compromise" from their side has made sure to achieve this goal. Yet the Catholic liberals who claimed they were for a PRO-LIFE Democratic coalition are supporting health plans with these "compromises", instead of standing with the pro-life Democrats who actually answered their apparently fraudulent call for pro-life Democratic action. You got what you asked for, the Stupak coalition, and now that it is here you want to hand it a death blow. I guess you never wanted the pro-life part of pro-life Democratism in the first place.
‘There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Cagtholicism’ he concluded. ‘It is quite enough for each one to proclaim 'Christian is my name and Catholic my surname’ “
David Gibson, “Who Is a Real Catholic?” The Washington Post, Sunday, May 17, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051501390.html?sid=ST2009051503626
If that is what you intend to say, the best that can be said of your observation is that it is just another Republican zinger which is somewhat warped in its logic.
There is indeed an issue on subsidies being used to purchase plans that include abortion. I personally would like an iron-clad Stupak provision. But there is no moral argument out there that this must be (to use that awful phrase) "non-negotiable".
Why? Well, first, the real issue is private insurance funding of abortion. If they didn't do it, the government would not be tainted. What's the moral difference between a person having a remote connection to abortion through taxes or through private insurance premiums? Given the domination of the US insurance industry by a small number of large players, I'm pretty sure that nearly all of us with private insurance are subsidizing somebody's abortion somewhere. Why is this not on the radar at all?
Second, private provision of insurance is already subsidized. The tax treatment granted to employer-sponsored insurance amounts to a subsidy of $250 billion a year. Economically, a subsidy is something that changes the relative price of a product - it does not matter whether it happens on the tax or spending side (I fear that that many, including some in the USCCB, don't fully understand this). There are even more direct examples. The federal government gives money to Planned Parenthood with the proviso that it not be used for abortion - but isn't money fungible? About 13 percent of abortions are paid by medicaid - despite the Hyde amendment, the federal government gives a wink and a nod to the states to finance this.
So, yes, let's fight to keep the distance between health reform and abortion as great as possible. But let's not kid ourselves that this is some line in the sand - that line has been crossed many many times. Let's focus instead on the real problem - the cozy connivance between the abortion industry and the big insurance companies. And lets remember that adequate health insurance for the poor is not only something that all Catholic should support, but that it will also help alleviate the conditions that cause women to seek abortion in the first place.
The larger point was how any "Catholic" can support "healthcare reform" with language that seeks to proliferate the culture of death in this country with taxpayer money.
Matt's points are correct; the Catholic Democrats supporting this bill are more concerned with political power than protecting innocent human life in all phases.
Yes you can. You just need to be one of his drunk students. The hypocrisy that surrounds this man is bewildering.
However, I would not be inclided to call anyone that in comon parlance unless they were outrageously heretical. That is, a teenager seduced by progressivism-a phase many go through-is not a heretic. A person who is only nominally Catholic and errs, I would not call a heretic. But anyone who would say, "as a Catholic I believe abortion is not evil," such a person is approaching the point where I would use the term. And, a public and obstinate and formal proponent of Abortion-like the group Catholics for Free Choice-are the real deal and should bear the full brunt of a canonical smackdown.
We can differ on how this evil is to be combatted in practical terms (eg whether we should go for wholesale unborn personhood, starve PP financially, slowly regulate it into oblivion, accept life, rape, and incest compromises as a step in the right direction), but in order to speak on this issue as a Catholic, much less a Catholic in good standing, one must never deny that it must be combatted in every feasible and moral way.
The Canon Law that says that those who procure abortions is "automatic" is meant to show how integral the beleif that life is a God-given gift is to the Creed. If we truly believe that our lives are sacred gifts from God, any deliberate act refusing or abusing this gift (including executing criminals), automatically separates one from the body of believers.
However using the threat of excommunication to keep believers in a political block is not only scandalous, it is simply absurd. No one has the power to excommunicate else, excommunication is an inside job.
I'm saying that it is time for Catholcs to recognize this, and not fall for the line that they are not "good Catholics", or "fake", if they don't fall in line with certain political ideologues who are using Catholic beliefs to justify their one-sided agendas.
As I and others have said, no one argues with the immorality of abortion.
Last I checked, by the way, a public policy was not required to be a bishop. Those of us who have such things are a bit more qualified to judge the "how" to protect life than the bishops are.