Theological reductionism

The issues raised recently of human life and rights aren’t going to go away in a political strategy of changing the subject to health care and employment. In fact, there’s no turning back on the forces of truth that have gathered to confront a jarring spate of distortions.

Recall Pope Benedict’s famous ‘dictatorship of relativism’ homily:

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves…

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires. 

That comes to mind, now that Sens. Obama, Pelosi and Biden together seem to have created the perfect storm.

When asked by Pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Forum when a baby acquires human rights, Barack Obama first changed the subject and then professed a faux intellectual humility about when human life begins, saying that the answer was “above my pay grade.” Not so far above his pay grade, mind you, to prevent him from endorsing a woman’s right to abortion at every stage of an unborn child’s life. He may claim not to know when human life begins, but of one thing he’s absolutely sure: it ends whenever a pregnant woman chooses, even for babies who survive abortion.

Then there’s Pelosi.

Describing herself as “an ardent, practicing Catholic,” the speaker distanced herself from Obama’s self-professed ignorance by noting that she had “studied” Catholic teaching on abortion “for a long time.” And from that study, she has concluded that the Church doesn’t know what it’s talking about when it comes to Church teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is for presumptuous Catholics, but for humble Catholics like herself Roe v. Wade reflects a lectio probabilior about the proper moral understanding of the value of life before birth.

And Biden…

As with Pelosi, his brand of Catholicism seems to carry with it a certain interpretative license with respect to Church teaching, especially on abortion. In Biden’s case, that means being all over the lot. When he first came to the Senate in the early 1970s, he adopted a traditional pro-life stance. After Roe v. Wade, however, his position, like that of most Catholic Democrats, began to morph into “I’m personally opposed to abortion, but….” The Senator, mind you, isn’t pro-abortion; he’s just pro-choice. You’d have to be an unborn child not to see the difference.

Or someone who follows an argument through to its logical conclusions. With intellectual honesty.

This is a good, clarifying article, calling politicians to account who usually slip past accountability with the help of a complicit media. Not so now, with Church leaders stepping up and out in the public square and ‘speaking truth to power’ to borrow a phrase. The bishops are doing the job they’ve been called to do.

These men are to be congratulated for their pastoral leadership and courage, which will have beneficial effects long after this political season is over. In the meantime, if Pelosi, Biden, and other Catholic politicians think they’re going to get a free ride this time around, they may find themselves confronting change they can really believe in.