Deepening the Pro-Life Commitment
By George Weigel

At their annual meeting in November, the Catholic bishops of the United States overwhelmingly adopted a statement titled "Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics." The statement is historic in several ways. (See NRLNews, 12/10/98, page 6).

Perhaps most importantly, it refines the "consistent ethic of life" framework for Catholic thinking about public policy issues by making it unmistakably clear that there is a starting point for the Church's defense of human rights. That starting point is the inalienable right to life from conception until natural death. The Church will continue to defend human rights across the board. But some rights are so fundamental that promoting and defending them must take priority.

"Living the Gospel of Life" offers a change in metaphor here that many will welcome. The "consistent ethic" has sometimes been misused to suggest that a public official who is "okay" on, say, welfare and capital punishment, is to be cut some slack if he or she is found on the wrong side of the life issues. Any such suggestion is no longer credible.

By shifting the metaphor for the Church's address to public policy questions from the "seamless garment" to the image of a house with foundations, the bishops have made plain that some issues are so basic that to lose on them is to risk losing the entire edifice of democracy.

After "Living the Gospel of Life," no politician will ever be able to claim moral credibility by suggesting that he or she batted .667 on the "consistent ethic."

If you strike out on abortion and euthanasia - - if you are prepared to countenance direct killing of the innocent - - then you are out. Period. "Living the Gospel of Life" was widely misreported as the bishops' effort to form a "Catholic voting bloc." The truth of the matter is that the statement formalizes and mandates what had already been done informally by many bishops in the partial-birth abortion debate: seeking out legislators, privately when possible and publicly when necessary, to engage the issue head on.

The name for this is "democratic process." Evidently, some reporters find it hard to recognize when those engaging in the process are Catholic bishops rather than ministers affiliated with, say, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But attempts to scare the bishops (and their national legal staff) by invoking the specter of partisan activity that would jeopardize the Church's tax exemption have been decisively rebuked by "Living the Gospel of Life."

The bishops pledge to act as citizens of a democracy, exercising their right to make their views known, forcefully.

The statement also marks the official end of what some call Cuomoism, after the former governor of New York who helped popularize the view, "I'm personally opposed but...." That is not a plausible Catholic position on life issues. "Most Americans," the bishops write, "would recognize the contradiction in the statement, 'while I am personally opposed to slavery or racism or sexism, I cannot force my personal views on the rest of society.' " To do this, the bishops state, is to "indirectly collude in the taking of innocent life."

Further, they write, it is no violation of the canons of democratic etiquette to bring religiously grounded moral convictions into public life. Genuine pluralism, the statement rightly notes, involves people of moral conviction working through every legal and ethical means to persuade others of their position. Which, in the case of the Catholic position on abortion and euthanasia, is not a sectarian position that only Catholics can grasp, but a public argument on behalf of the cornerstone of democracy.

Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. Reprinted with permission.