July 7, 2002

Last March 4 the former managing editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, wrote an “Op-Ed” essay on scandals in the Church entitled “Is the Pope Catholic?” Mr. Keller scratched out a diatribe so bitter that many were embarrassed for him. Calling himself a “collapsed Catholic” and not just a “lapsed Catholic,” he incoherently attacked doctrine and even stooped to mock the Pope’s illness.

On June 29 he published another “Op-Ed” column recounting his wife’s abortion two years ago. Ultrasound imaging showed a boy. Keller says “a boy-like creature.” He resents that “the anti-abortion lobby” gives “tadpole-sized fetuses the poster appeal of full-grown infants.” But a father is a father, and Keller remembers “the poetry of the first heartbeats” of the “boy-like creature” he named Charlie. Tests indicated that the child might be born dead or in a “vegetative” state. “Facing the prospect of a greater heartbreak, watching a child die or suffer inconsolably, or exhausting the emotional resources needed for two other children, we decided to end it.” They had consulted a “nun” who told them, “Think about what God would want, not want the Church would want. They are not always necessarily the same thing.” Keller’s revulsion at child abusers did not extend to this unhelpful consoler who thought that killing the child might be God’s will. “The last thing Emma was aware of before surrendering to the anesthetic was Charlie kicking madly.”

If the “collapsed Catholic” Keller had obeyed Christ and the Vicar of Christ whom he considers an “unintelligible” old man “on his last legs,” instead of a dissident nun echoing Eve on the world’s first bad day, he would not be disquieted of soul. His wife says that if there had been no abortion “we would have lost that baby, but we would not have killed that baby.” He admits that many think a cleft palate or wrong gender justifies abortion. The New York Times that same weekend reviewed a book about the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, trying to explain the process of “violent socialization” which enabled executioners to sing while babies slowly died on their bayonets. The author’s psychological analysis of moral meltdown hauntingly matches the justification of crimes against the unborn in what the Pope has exposed as our “Culture of Death.”

Maybe, just maybe, the venomous anger that Mr. Keller cast at the Church in his March 4 essay, was not unrelated to what happened two years ago. Now he senses “a change of heart.” Don’t call that “Catholic guilt.” Guilt is guilt and the Catholic Church most truthfully calls it what it is. A “collapsed Catholic” has collapsed under his own cross. A man so furious at the Church could become a great saint of the Church, like Saul of Tarsus. Mr. Keller has the intelligence and conscience needed. Now he needs humility. He does not need any more advice from a muddled nun who may be less fortunate than he on the Day of Judgment.

Fr. George W. Rutler