February 8, 2004

In a year of elections one is reminded of the inconsistencies that beleaguer politics, and here I employ the term as a polite euphemism for hypocrisy. This is my complaint: The Catholic Church is routinely disenfranchised from addressing the moral direction of the nation on the grounds of a distorted separation of Church and State, while the ministers of non-Catholic sects publicly campaign for politicians and often run for public office themselves, and allow politicians to make campaign speeches in their "churches" and "tabernacles" and "worship centers." The double standard is glaring.

Bishops are criticized even when they order their own household. The public media have taken offence at the new Archbishop of St. Louis for trying to order his own household. Archbishop Raymond Burke has declared, with the logic of intellect and grace, that public officials who act to expose the unborn to the violence of abortion may not receive Holy Communion. I knew the Archbishop more than twenty years ago in Rome and laugh when this amiable and mild man is called a "fanatic."

This has been recently addressed in an article by two distinguished Catholic laymen, Robert P. George who is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and Gerard V. Bradley, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame. They point out that the Archbishop does not compel anyone to accept his authority by use of civil law. Catholic legislators may legally vote the way they want. The Archbishop also has a legal right as a bishop to excommunicate anyone who promotes grave evil.

In terms of canon law, the first purpose of discipline is "medicinal" by warning legislators that their unjust acts are spiritually harmful to their own souls. The second purpose is to prevent "scandal," by which is meant the way one's bad example weakens the faith and moral resolution of others. As Holy Communion is the sacrament of unity, pro-abortion Catholics traffic in pretence in claiming to share in the faith they publicly defy.

Laxity in these matters, like laxity in child abuse, genocide, slavery, and racism is inconsistent with the pastoral office of a bishop. Archbishop Burke now is criticized by the same sort of social "progressivists" who applauded the Archbishop of New Orleans in the late 1950s when he excommunicated segregationists. Professors George and Bradley write: "[Archbishop Burke] knows perfectly well that his actions might, in fact, redound to the political advantage of the legislators to whom his order is directed. His specific aim is not to win specific legislative battles over abortion (however much he would agree that these battles should be fought and won); his purpose, rather, is to defend the integrity of Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life and to confirm in the minds and hearts of the Catholic faithful their solemn moral obligation to oppose the killing of the innocent."

Fr. George W. Rutler