The Church Flatulent
2nd March 2012
Paul Rahe at his most incisive.
The bishops, priests, and nuns of the American Catholic Church may be dismayed, but they should not be in any way surprised. The situation that they now find themselves in is one of their own making. Thirty-eight years ago, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision inRoe v. Wade, the country was resolutely hostile to abortion on demand. At that time, many Democratic politicians, not all of them Catholic, announced their opposition to abortion. For a time, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were in their number. Had the Church pressed the question resolutely at the time, the 5-4 court decision would quickly have been reversed. As Mr. Dooley was wont to say, the Supreme Court follows the election returns.
The reason why people make ‘slippery slope’ arguments is because all too often they turn out to be correct. And all the ‘oh, fiddlesticks’ handwaving can’t change that simple historical fact.
The American Roman Catholic Church is full of people, from Mario Cuomo to Ted Kennedy to Kathleen Sibelius to Nancy Pelosi, who would have been instantly excommunicated prior to the 1960s. It is small comfort to recognize that the degeneration of the modern Church merely tracks the same degeneration in the culture at large.
The Blunt-Nelson amendment failed to pass the Senate today for one reason and one reason only. The supporters of abortion-on-demand are serious about the matter. They will do what it takes to punish at the polls any Democrat who crosses them. The bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States have spent almost four decades intimating with a wink and a nod that they are not really serious about this question. In the process, they have made themselves politically irrelevant.
Say what you will about the Left, they never make the mistake of bringing a knife to a gun fight.
March 3rd, 2012 at 19:42
It isn’t the wink-and-nod which has rendered the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church politically irrelevant, it’s the fact that we now have the technology with which to move mountains, and so no longer need the faith.