The “A” word.
I knew it was coming, obviously. I’m not blind to how big an issue this is in the church. And I was all ready to launch into a balanced discussion of whether or not life begins at conception, and the rights of a human being to control what happens to its own body, and so forth.
Luckily, I don’t have to worry about any of that, because it turns out that the Catholic Church couldn’t care less.
You heard me right: The Church doesn’t give a damn whether a pregnancy is the same as a child. It doesn’t enter into the equation.
If you read my last missive, you’ll see that I accepted (at least in principle) that the church had to pick a side and stick to it. Well, here we have the ugly spectacle of the rubber hitting the road on such a policy.
You see, it makes no difference to the Church, in any factual sense, whether a zygote or a fetus is a viable human being. What matters is that in someone’s ancient and uninformed opinion, any pregnancy is interchangable with any baby. This, to me, is like trying to make wood pulp out of acorns instead of actual trees, or putting a frame around a pile of paint without making a painting first, or making appleseed pie. It is self-evident to me that one is not the other, no matter what they will eventually become.
But the Church has picked a side. The homily today was an outrage piece worthy of National Review’s op-ed page. It seems that “a certain political figure who is Catholic”* said this week that she thought the Church was wrong on abortion. Obviously the Church is not wrong on abortion because the Church says it is right on abortion. Ipse dixit. End of story.
A number of problems arise from this smug and self-righteous stance, and none of them have to do with whether or not an acorn actually is a tree.
1) Just because the Church says it doesn’t mean that Catholics believe it. Many Catholics, not just politicians, are pro-choice. These people are convicted enough about both their faith and the abortion issue that they’re willing to be denied communion over their opinions. That is, in its own weird and stunted way, very inspiring. It speaks to how important the Church is to these people, as well as to how wrong they think the Church is on this issue.
2) There are even disagreements within the Church hierarchy. Bishops and priests fight all the time to change this or not change that. It doesn’t make them bad Catholics, it just shows how much the institution means to them. I don’t pretend to grasp all the issues surrounding the revival of the Latin Tridentine Mass, but you can start learning about it here. Likewise, this link will drop you into the deep end of an argument about female clergy that’s worth taking a look at. I don’t need to understand the deeper issues to see that these are both instances of people fighting for what they think is right to make the church better than they see it now.
3) What’s more, there are some things the Church has finally and conclusively been defeated on. The church changed a great many things after 1965, and will continue to change a great many more. Things that seemed like airtight dogma a few years ago are now openly being changed.
The Church occasionally faces a simple choice: either it dials down the rhetoric and allows people to decide for themselves on an issue, or it sentences itself to irrelevancy. This threat has been avoided dozens of times over the centuries, and yet to the faithful the institution of the Church is no weaker for it.
4) Finally, removing any nuance is bad for everyone, Catholic or not. Obviously abortion is a complex issue, but the Church refuses to treat it as such. This is largely because the more complex they allow the discussion to get, the more they lose ground on the details. For the sake of simplicity, the tyranny of simple arguments that I elaborated on last week, they have to say that it is categorically bad and just pretend the obvious gray areas don’t exist. This functions mostly to make the people forced into this position look like well-intentioned idiots. In order to make such arguments appear valid in our mass this week, for instance, Father had to essentially condemn the last 500 years of progress in human rights, free expression, and learning. Such an emphasis on “individual rights,” Father insisted, were just anomalies that keep us from seeing the true design of Christ. He failed to mention, of course, that such heretical and useless ideas are the reason he can drive a car, vote for his leaders, get medical treatment, and eat a balanced diet. But hey, if it’ll prop up a colossally bad argument, why not just throw it all out the window?
Overall, this episode gives me the impression that saving souls is secondary to maintaining control in the mind of the Church leadership. This doesn’t exactly shock me, of course, but I was a little taken aback at just how vigorous the assertion of control was. An otherwise very nice elderly gentleman offering the mass threatened me rather boldly with eternal damnation for failing to accept the decree of the Church. I suppose people who grew up with this sort of crap are used to it, but it rankles me. Christ’s abiding love, my ass.
*Oh, by the way: it was Nancy Pelosi who said it, but nobody can mention that in public for fear that we might think Catholics are being told how to vote. This ridiculous loophole may be the subject of future posts, but we’ll see how it plays out.
