For Kennedy, the judgment that counts for eternity is at hand. Here below, his many public achievements have been lavishly praised. His was the most public of lives — famous for who he was before he was known for what he did — so that his private life was part of the public record. He experienced more than most the truth of those foreboding words of Scripture, that all that is done in secret will be brought to light, and that which is whispered will be shouted from the rooftops. There were few Catholics in America whose successes and sins were more published, discussed and judged. Now, his fellow Catholics surely pray for his merciful judgment.
Father de Souza's main beef with the Senator, predictably, is his stance on abortion.
I'm tempted at this moment to meditate upon (or perhaps lament?) the single-mindedness exhibited by the Register and many more conservative Catholics, who appear to join some of their evangelical brethren in hawking over 'values' (Abortion is murder! Keep homos out of marriage! End the Darwinian hegemony in our schools!) to the detriment of at least equally pressing social-justice issues such as poverty, crime, racism, and immigration rights. But perhaps that is best saved for another post, when I'm feeling somewhat less partisan. The troubling thought that arose this morning had little to do with either side of the aisle.
Those who oppose abortion call themselves 'pro-life'. Why? Ostensibly, abortion kills babies. Regardless of the reason or the stage at which the procedure is conducted, a human that was once living, even in utero, is destroyed by the wanton whims of the adults that are supposed to care for it. Pro-lifers find this morally unacceptable.
Yet most of these pro-lifers (and Westerners across the political spectrum) would probably agree that unwanted pregnancies are a bad thing because, well, they're unwanted -- for a variety of reasons. Many of these pro-lifers, particularly Vatican-aligned Catholics, also promote abstinence as the only acceptable form of contraception -- and sex education programs that promote abstinence as such. Wait until marriage, they say, then it's okay to have sex and as many babies as you can handle. But in the meantime, pro-lifers are adamant that unwanted pregnancies should not be created in the first place.
A mini-Mudedeism just occurred to me: We wish to control the circumstances under which life is created.
A Fundamentalist who believes that God is solely in charge of assigning souls to bodies to birthdates might have problems with this agenda. After all, should not new life be welcomed with joy as a great gift from the Almighty, rather than a burden? Even the Register urges the faithful to think baby-positive, not pregnancy-negative: "The more life, the better."
Deacon Ferris would immediately scold me for taking him out of context, and he'd be partly right. But let's think about it for a second. It's reasonable to assume that many pro-lifers, especially religious pro-lifers, are opposed to the proliferation of life outside of 'the optimal', or 'the divinely ordained': that is, heterosexual, religiously-sanctioned marriage. At the same time that they decry the termination of a pregnancy once it's begun, they discourage the creation of that human in the first place, in that time and place, between those people. The propagation of human life is sacred, a gift from above -- and it must be controlled down here, on Earth, by none other than us fallen mortals. It is evil to destroy life, yet outside certain conditions, it is also evil to create life. This second is the lesser of the two evils, for a life cannot be destroyed if it is not created.
Anti-abortionists are not pro-life. They are anti-infanticide.
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