Bishop Chaput v. Professor Kmiec
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 12:30 PM
Those of you following the debate among pro-life Catholics about which way to turn in the election in two weeks will want to read the latest salvo from Archbishop Chaput.
It started last February, when Professor Douglas Kmiec, a member of the Reagan administration and Professor of Law at Pepperdine University, suggested that Barack Obama would be a natural choice for Catholic voters in a column for Slate.
Initially his reasoning seemed to be that the war in Iraq was as serious a concern as the right-to-life, and he had made the prudential judgment to support the anti-war candidate. If that had remained his position, we could agree or disagree with his judgment, but it would have remained within the bounds of Catholic thinking.
To review:
Catholics are bound to vote to defend the right to life of the unborn not only as champions of the innocent, but also because the right to life is the foundation of the law itself. When it is attacked or weakened, the rule of law is also being attacked. As the Vatican put it in a “doctrinal note”:
When political activity comes up against moral principles that do not admit of exception, compromise or derogation, the Catholic commitment becomes more evident and laden with responsibility. In the face of fundamental and inalienable ethical demands, Christians must recognize that what is at stake is the essence of the moral law, which concerns the integral good of the human person.This is the case with laws concerning abortion and euthanasia…
The exceptions to this duty are two:
when there is no pro-life candidate (or no perfectly pro-life law or program being proposed), in which case we are permitted to vote to limit harm, or
when another intrinsic evil outweighs the intrinsic evil of abortion in a particular circumstance.
Prof. Kmiec seemed to be invoking the latter exception, but later he argued that Sen. Obama was more pro-life than Sen. McCain. Last week he seemed to drop that claim and instead made an argument in the Los Angeles Times that amounts to “I’m personally opposed, but….”
Sometimes the law must simply leave space for the exercise of individual judgment, because our religious or scientific differences of opinion are for the moment too profound to be bridged collectively. When these differences are great and persistent, as they unfortunately have been on abortion, the common political ideal may consist only of that space.
Isn’t that the same thing Sen. Biden means when he says he can’t impose his religious views on others?Read it yourself and see what you think.
Meanwhile, Denver’s Archbishop Chaput recently attended a dinner for a women’s group called Endow, at which he gave this address.
He begins with what he humorously calls the “litany of the IRS,” which I reproduce because Faith & Family is a non-profit organization and I’m speaking for myself not my employers when I talk politics, so I’d like to invoke it too.
I’m not here tonight to tell you how to vote. I don’t want to do that, I won’t do that, and I don’t use code language—so you don’t need to spend any time looking for secret political endorsements.
I plan to speak candidly, but I can only do that if you remember that I’m here as an author and private citizen. I’m not speaking for the Holy See, or the American bishops, or any other bishop, or even officially for the Archdiocese of Denver. So the things I say tonight are my personal views, nothing more. I think they’re pretty solidly grounded in Catholic teaching and the heart of the Church, but it’s your task as Catholics and citizens to listen, evaluate and then act as you judge best.
In part his address simply recapitulates the argument of his book,Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life
What he says is tough, but since it’s directly relevant to a conversation we’ve been having here in several different posts, I thought I’d highlight it:
Prof. Kmiec argues that there are defensible motives to support Senator Obama. Speaking for myself, I do not know any proportionate reason that could outweigh more than 40 million unborn children killed by abortion and the many millions of women deeply wounded by the loss and regret abortion creates.
To suggest—as some Catholics do—that Senator Obama is this year’s “real” pro-life candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse. To portray the 2008 Democratic Party presidential ticket as the preferred “pro-life” option is to subvert what the word “pro-life” means. Anyone interested in Senator Obama’s record on abortion and related issues should simply read Prof. Robert George’s essay of earlier this week, “Obama’s Abortion Extremism,” at thepublicdiscourse.com. It says everything that needs to be said.
Of course, these are simply my personal views as an author and private citizen. But I’m grateful to Prof. Kmiec for quoting me in his book and giving me the reason to speak so clearly about our differences. I think his activism for Senator Obama, and the work of Democratic-friendly groups like Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, have done a disservice to the Church, confused the natural priorities of Catholic social teaching, undermined the progress pro-lifers have made, and provided an excuse for some Catholics to abandon the abortion issue instead of fighting within their parties and at the ballot box to protect the unborn.
He makes several further points and then concludes that portion of his discussion thus:
As I suggest throughout “Render Unto Caesar,” it’s important for Catholics to be people of faith who pursue politics to achieve justice; not people of politics who use and misuse faith to achieve power. I have no doubt that Prof. Kmiec belongs to the former group. But I believe his arguments finally serve the latter.
For 35 years I’ve watched thousands of good Catholic laypeople, clergy and religious struggle to recover some form of legal protection for the unborn child. The abortion lobby has fought every compromise and every legal restriction on abortion, every step of the way. Apparently they believe in their convictions more than some of us Catholics believe in ours. And I think that’s an indictment of an entire generation of American Catholic leadership.
The abortion conflict has never simply been about repealing Roe v. Wade. And the many pro-lifers I know live a much deeper kind of discipleship than “single issue” politics. But they do understand that the cornerstone of Catholic social teaching is protecting human life from conception to natural death. They do understand that every other human right depends on the right to life. They did not and do not and will not give up—and they won’t be lied to.
So I think that people who claim that the abortion struggle is “lost” as a matter of law, or that supporting an outspoken defender of legal abortion is somehow “pro-life,” are not just wrong; they’re betraying the witness of every person who continues the work of defending the unborn child. And I hope they know how to explain that, because someday they’ll be required to.
Tough words from a brave man. I find them all the more interesting because Archbishop Chaput is certainly not “in the tank” for the Republican party. He campaigned for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and seems to be a natural liberal politically speaking. His book and his remarks come as the fruit of his years of ministry.
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