Editorials
Contents Volume CXI, Number 6 Correspondence 162 Editorials 163 By way of farewell: James O'Gara 165 Facing the facts: Abigail McCarthy 167 The bishops & the politics of abortion: Mary Meehan...
...Of course there will be no mollifying at least one segment of that audience, and Cardinal Bernardin and the bishops who agree with him ought simply to resign themselves to that fact...
...Not one of the highlights of my life...
...From the Editor BY WAY OF FAREWELL A PERSONAL NOTE I N JANUARY I completed thirty-two years at Commonweal, roughly half as Managing Editor and the other half as Editor...
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...It has been kept going by militants, not a few of them relatively new to political organizing...
...But now the question was more easily asked: why should they not be any less free to disagree with the bishops on the human life amendment or the Hatch amendment than on the nuclear freeze or "no first use...
...That is why the bishops were largely right in supporting the Hatch amendment, whatever reservations one may retain about their formal endorsement...
...To me the expression meant one who had a definite commitment to the church but who was not sectarian in spirit...
...In this respect, too, Cardinal Bernardin's proposal holds out great hope...
...Peter Steinfels Assistant Editor: David Toolan Editorial Assistant: Anne Robertson Columnists: John Garvey, J. Bryan Hehir, Abigail McCarthy Poetry: Rosemary Deen, Marie Ponsot Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, Sheila Tanksley Advertising Manager...
...While I was in Chicago I wrote regularly for the magazine, and Commonweal stood for something in the American church that I was proud to identify with...
...It may not be difficult for leaders of social movements to condemn the outrages that clearly discredit their own goals...
...I was a youngish married man with two children when I moved from Chicago to New York to be Managing Editor, and the move was not carded out without trepidation on my part...
...10016...
...The fact is that the only time to prevent nuclear holocaust is before the missiles start flying...
...Inevitably it has attracted a fringe of extremists -- a few advocates of violence, a greater number of simplificateurs who reduce complex human reality to a few either/or slogans...
...Toss in one more ingredient -- Cardinal Bernardin's proposal that the American church articulate and defend a consistent and comprehensive moral vision embracing a broad range of "life" issues including abortion, nuclear war, capital punishment -- and even "support of the quality of life of the powerless among us...
...James O'Gara Executive Editor...
...Both concerns have an urgent claim on our energy...
...On the contrary, it has been a genuine grassroots social movement -- with all the problems which that entails...
...Canada, $47...
...And most of all they are going to have to create the kind of Christian community that itself embodies a treasuring of life, that challenges, in its daily existence, the very idea that human beings could be "unwanted...
...Need I say I was very proud to be asked to join Commonweal's staff...
...We were leaving the city where my wife Joan and I both were born and grew up, and where we had relatives and many friends...
...After Roe v. Wade and the 1975 Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities, when the church began to systematize its anti-aborti0n involvement, some pro-lifers complained that their independent initiatives were being reined in...
...ABORTION, POLITICS, & THE BISHOPS III I II F OR OVER A DECADE, the American Catholic bishops have been uncter attack because of their role in opposing abortion...
...These are the developments behind the debate in this issue of Commonweal...
...Telephone: (212) MU 3-2042...
...Said the letter, simply, "May Bishop Sheil and the editors of Commonweal burn in hell for all eternity...
...Then there was the verdict pronounced by the at that time 23 March 1984: 165...
...At least some pro-lifers felt that the stamp of approval the hierarchy had given their political efforts was being further discounted by the limits on episcopal authority that the pastoral letter had merely pushed to the fore...
...Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christn'ta~New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Publishing Co., 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Given the existing suspicions, it is not surprising that some right-to-life activists reacted negatively...
...The anti-Vietnam war movement had its campus bombers and devotees of Ho Chi Minh's Communism...
...For them, however, the linking vision is not an agenda of "life" issues but the across-the-board defeat of modern liberalism with its toleration of open debate on fundamental values and its challenge to traditional social roles and inequalities...
...The civil-rights movement had its gun-toting revolutionaries and militant separatists...
...In addition, those pro-lifers subscribing to the New Right's enthusiasm for the Reagan arms buildup -- and this included the Moral Majority forces that had belatedly joined the anti-abortion ranks -- simply didn't like the pastoral at all...
...they had never marched in political lockstep with their bishops...
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...Both pro-lifers and pro-choicers have been all too ready to fasten on extreme expressions of the others' position to justify their own case -- and overlook their own weaknesses...
...The climate was stormier then, in my earlier days here...
...However frustrating that may be to those who observe the daily destruction of life, such is the case...
...To demand a legal ban on virtually all abortions now is simply to leap far ahead of too much conscientious public opinion, and to add the burden of defending exceptional government coercion to the already difficult task of persuading a throw-away society to value the easily disposable lives that disrupt our own hopes for the future, especially when those disruptions can be genuinely tragic...
...And since the right-to-life movement did draw heavily, although not entirely, from the ranks of conservative Catholics, the inner-church conflicts over post-Vatican Council changes added an extra dash of tension...
...Then the momentum stopped...
...That, more than any amount of lobbying, any number of arguments about the moment of conception, will convince fellow Americans...
...The bishops are going to have to give far more attention not only to telling Catholics themselves that the church opposes abortion but why...
...In the letter itself the bishops tried to make clear that this was not the case...
...Of course, in practice, that was exactly what American Catholics were accustomed to doing...
...Urged on by Joan, I decided we should come anyway, and here I am in 1984_9 As the joke has it, I knew the job would never last...
...Finally, it is ironic that conservatives have balked at the cardinal's proposal - - although, in fairness, a good number have welcomed it...
...The complications in the relationship between the bishops and the anti-abortion effort did not end with the frustrating wake of the 1980 election...
...A good bit of the debate is therefore no less relevant to them and us than to the bishops, More important, the discussion, though turning on specific judgments in recent Washington politicking, raises again the larger questions about the church's proper role in seeking social change through political involvement...
...Carlene B. Hill 175 'Neither incompetent nor indifferent': David N. O'Steen 179 Screen: Jonathan Baumbach 182 Books The Right to Lifers/Enemies of Choice: Dave Andrusko 183 Our Right to Choose: Barbara Hilken Andolsen 183 People of the Lie: Leo J. O'Donovan 186 Staff Editor...
...I remember, for instance, an anonymous leaflet produced by some faceless person or group which denounced me as a "red Communist rink...
...it is more delicate, however, to dampen the wilder rhetoric without either denying the shared passion behind it or introducing unproductive dissension into the ranks...
...Commonweal salaries have never been much to brag about, and in those days they were even less so...
...Nonetheless, the pastoral did in fact raise problems of a more subtle kind...
...But there was also the question of the bishops' political strategy -- first, their hesitance about the statutory maneuver that would skirt the need for a two-thirds anti-abortion majority...
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...23 March 1984:163 The administration proved more interested in reducing taxes than in reducing abortions...
...No doubt there were bishops and priests, aware of both the philosophical and pastoral complexities of abortion, who did discourage the crusading spirit...
...Thus I saw the description intended to be derogatory as a badge of honor, something to be lived up to, and I still feel the same way today...
...Was he demanding that pro-lifers abandon effective political coalitions which could not survive an attempt to seek agreement on a broad platform that included arms control and the death penalty...
...Politically, it should simply try to reopen the public debate that Roe v. Wade effectively curtailed...
...It seems easy for some to forget how much desert there was in the pre-Vatican church, but I cannot help but remember...
...Canada, $26...
...BASIC FACT about the struggle over abortion is that it will continue for a long time...
...Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome but cannot be considered or returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Some of the criticism has come from Catholics convinced that the bishops had imprudently chained their anti-abortion teaching to political support for a constitutional ban on all legal abortion...
...The controversy surrounding the pastoral, pitting proponents against administration spokesmen and loosing charges that the bishops were in the grip of an ultra-liberal staff cabal, fed pro-life suspicions that the hierarchy might edge away from the abortion cause...
...On many of these points, Cardinal Bernardin has tried to reassure pro-lifers, but the discussion continues...
...Cardinal Bemardin and his fellow bishops will also have to face the argument that abortion is a present holocaust while nuclear war is a potential future one -- and that therefore the former should be the controlling priority...
...Was the cardinal trying to "smother" the church's antiabortion position amidst a host of other concerns...
...Even before Roe v. Wade some abortion opponents were dissatisfied with the church's leadership, suspecting it of hankering after "respectability" or of giving fu'st political priority to more immediate institutional objectives like aid to parochial schools...
...Most of that criticism has come from advocates of ready access to abortion, some of whom were quite happy to dismiss all right-to-life pressures as emanations of inquisitorial Catholic authority...
...foreign, $53...
...As one of my friends pointed out when he saw the letter, at least it was signed only "Sincerely yours," not "Sincerely yours in Christ...
...The magazine was consistently scornful of Senator Joe McCarthy and his phoney crusade, and I remember a letter we received shortly after Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago gave a talk also denouncing the junior senator from Wisconsin...
...It has been a good if somewhat hectic three decades, but it is time, I think, to step down, while I am still physically up to doing other things and while I have an able colleague, Peter Steinfels, to whom I can turn over the Editor's chair...
...Two more elements were added to the brew...
...But because Cardinal Bernardin's apCommonweal: 164 proach cuts across so many existing ideological preconcep_9 . . l . taons, ~t promises to keep at least pro-hfe Cathohcs from a dangerous self-righteousness...
...the demand to "prioritize" -- or hand out voting instructions according to such priorities -- should be resisted...
...And in that desert Cornmonweal was often a lonely voice crying out on behalf of human rights, of ecumenism, of interracial harmony, of social justice, of intellectual integrity...
...All this suggests why the relationship between the bishops and the right-to-life movement has never been without its tensions...
...dollars by International Money O/der or by check on a U.S...
...But let it be noted that the bishops' position was shared by quite a number of other opponents of abortion, this journal included...
...foreign, $29...
...A bright lawyer concocted a way of challenging Roe v. Wade that only required a majority in Congress instead of the two-thirds needed for a constitutional amendment...
...In this period I figure I wrote between 750,000 and 1,000,000 words in editorials, articles, and in the weekly column I did for a few years...
...All of us who served here have scars to show for it...
...On the side I wrote a number of religious documentaries for television, served as general editor for a series of religious books, for a period did a great deal of lecturing around the country, wrote a few articles for other magazines, and for four years managed to teach sociology at Fordham University a couple of evenings a week and on Saturday morning...
...Hard politicking will have to continue...
...The first was the pastoral letter on nuclear arms...
...The 1980 election complicated matters further...
...Just as it complicates things for pro-choice liberals to have to denounce the bishops for "imposing morality" in regard to abortion while quoting them on Central America, the death sentence, and the arms race, it confuses New Rightists to have to welcome the bishops' moral leadership on abortion while considering them dupes and knaves on economic and international problems...
...1 HIS, OF COURSE, was not the way our critics saw things - - not by any means...
...The Irish West Side of Chicago where I grew up was not without its virtues, but an intellectual oasis it was not...
...The commitment of the "Commonweal Catholic" was - - and is - - to a church that was open and pluralistic, not rigid and authoritarian, a church that was the visible manifestation of Jesus's presence in the world...
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...And some of the criticism, little noticed by the media, has come from the right-to-life movement itself...
...There was no place else I would sooner have worked...
...No less than the cardinal, these right-to-lifers see abortion as part of a "seamless garment" of issues...
...It is also because of this long-range perspective that abortion opponents must refuse to play fast and loose with our constitutional framework or with the basic demands of civil discourse that hold our society together...
...The term was originally coined by our critics as a denigrating description, to indicate someone whose theology was shaky at best and whose loyalty was dubious, but I never took the term that way...
...bank...
...With some justice, conservatives have made the point that the church has recently been too concerned with political activity, too neglectful of educational and spiritual leadership...
...Now it had supposedly captured the White House and possibly the Senate too...
...Pace many pro-choice publicists, the right-to-life movement has never been a puppet of the Catholic hierarchy...
...Morally, the church should proclaim the sanctity of human life from its very early stages...
...no one should doubt it...
...second, their endorsement of a compromise constitutional amendment that would overturn Roe v. Wade without really banning abortion, an amendment which, in the event, proved to have little more chance of immediate passage than an unqualified ban...
...The very complexity and delicacy of the nuclear issue compelled the bishops to emphasize what had long been sound theological teaching: that Catholics might agree on general moral principles while loyally and even vigorously disagreeing on the many intervening factual and prudential judgments needed to translate those principles into public policy...
...From the time I was old enough to begin to develop some opinions of my own, I have always been what used to be called a "Commonweal Catholic," as I'm sure many of our readers are too...
...This issue will be the last one, therefore, with my name at the top of the masthead...
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...Shortly before I came, Edward Skillin felt he had to warn me that the magazine was in even shakier financial condition than usual, and this news was nerve-producing...
...Economics pushed abortion into the shadows in the mid-term election...
...Like any social movement organized around a moral issue, it has dealt uneasily with political compromise and suspiciously with those who are less singleminded about its goals...
...one Sunday early in my life here this was distributed after every Mass at my parish where my children attended the parochial school...
...Anti-abortion sentiment was already dominant in the House of Representatives...
...Contents Volume CXI, Number 6 Correspondence 162 Editorials 163 By way of farewell: James O'Gara 165 Facing the facts: Abigail McCarthy 167 The bishops & the politics of abortion: Mary Meehan 169 The church & abortion, perception & reality: Phyllis Zagano 173 A question of honor...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 6
