Editorials

...While right-to-life activists try to minimize division over the various anti-abortion measures currently proposed, knowledgeable pro-life lobbyists give little chance to any measure not making an explicit exception for danger to the mother's survival...

...But what about the argument that there is no such thing as "natural law" and ipso facto no grounds on which to oppose abortion which are not in fact only disguised religious teaching, "with some universalist face-lift," and therefore imper-missibly invoked legally (or perhaps even morally) outside the circle of that religious tradition...

...Alas, the promise of synods has not been fulfilled...

...A nation of immigrants, many of us political refugees, is being asked to sit trial on a group of fellow citizens who, like Raoul Wallenberg, have acted on the injunction: "Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy brother...

...Ironically, what consensus we do enjoy about the liberal state and individual rights, which Rabbi Hertzberg sets out to defend, was itself established in large measure through appeals to precisely the kind of "natural law" principles which he here rejects...

...Conscientious Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, teach that Jehovah's Witness parents should refuse blood transfusions for their children even when such refusal means certain death...

...Said Msgr...

...Milton D. Morris notes that Mexico's projected population boom and its inability to provide jobs for its labor force will continue to force Mexican citizens to look for work elsewhere...

...We do not pretend for a moment to equate the moral weight of such sectarian traditions with that of Judaism, or to deny that the government should do everything reasonably possible to accommodate religious beliefs...

...We too are concerned about the well-being of the liberal state...

...AS A practical matter, of course, this example is not very telling...

...If a religious group wants to propose moral 8 February 1985: 69 principles as guidelines or limits for public policy, it must offer those principles in terms that citizens outside the group can understand and evaluate...

...In modern times, it has been identified, often pejoratively or polemically, with religious thinkers...

...But these are not easily disentangled from the evolving process of understanding the council's full significance...

...Our own nation took seventy-five years to recognize the contradiction between slavery and our founding text committing us to liberty and equality...

...is purely the product of economic privation: "Political forces are among the principal causes of refugee flows...

...In his recent book Immigration: The Beleaguered Bureaucracy (Brook-ings, $22.95, 150 pp...

...It has been applied to theories of philosophers as different as Aristotle and Locke...

...The-pope's call to a synod comes in the midst of continuing tensions, not only between Rome and individual thinkers or activists, but between Rome and local bishops or religious superiors, in whose capacities the Vatican appears to have limited confidence...

...There are divergent emphases in the council's documents...

...Let us follow this argument more closely...

...To do otherwise would be to admit the very kind of fundamentalist theocracy Rabbi Hertzberg fears...

...told Congress last September, "I would suggest that the state of affairs in that country (El Salvador) are so severe as to place the live of most anyone in jeopardy...

...That seems less and less likely today...

...Yes, there have been misinterpretations of the council...

...That is why such claims should be tested in public debate, not barred from it...

...The difficulty, of course, is that no institutional means for distinguishing misinterpretation from evolving understanding have emerged, at least not any that can so unequivocally base their legitimacy on Vatican II that they, too, are not subject to the same disputes over interpretation...

...That Wallenberg fell prey to the iron gulag of another power, one meant to facilitate his liberation, may not have surprised him...

...If talk about "human rights" or "fundamental liberties" or "natural law'' is not disqualified as' 'rarified'' religious doctrine, out of place in a pluralist polity, when used in reference to racial or sexual equality or economic justice or nuclear war, then we do not see why it should be so disqualified when applied to abortion...

...There is even a species of Catholic Bonapartist who is positively exalted by the thought of a pope on a white horse...

...We also welcome Rabbi Hertzberg's acknowledgment that "the issues are not quite as clearcut as the most passionate protagonists on both sides of the argument would have it...

...In this case it is the so-called "sanctuary movement" — over two hundred churches and synagogues throughout the country that have acted as an underground railway to harbor refugees from Central America...

...As a logical matter, Rabbi Hertzberg's example does not withstand examination either...

...Progress has been made...

...The present case, brought to prominence by the sanctuary movement, presents an avenue fof avoiding past failures...

...Can this synod be different...

...Which, by the way, is eminently possible in the case of abortion to save a mother's life...

...The prospect of the church's leadership gathering from all parts of the globe for a frank and full evaluation of the council's aftermath is, on the face of it, a promising one...

...We too are willing to live "in untidiness," which is why we can oppose most abortions morally and favor greater restrictions on abortion than currently exist, but still reject as imprudent the idea of a sweeping legal prohibition of virtually all abortions...

...Practically speaking, then, we are in agreement that abortion on the current scale indicates a grave moral disorder, whatever conclusions one might reach about its legal permissibility...

...On the other hand, perhaps it is traditional Jewish teaching which cannot be considered the absolute standard for society...

...Isn't there plenty of evidence that the developments in the church after the Vatican Council have been epochal — but also mixed and in many cases halting...

...A synod — solidly based on the collegiality affirmed at the council — should be the solution to this problem...

...Is there a limit to tolerance and relativism...

...All of this leads to no small amount of confusion...

...They—we—underestimated the difficulties of the post-conciliar scene...

...While this status presently applies to Ethiopians, Poles, Lebanese, and Afghans, it has not been granted to refugees from Central America...

...No one should dispute the need for self-scrutiny, for taking stock searchingly and willingly...

...Ellis simply: *'I would dare to say there is not a person in this country who knows what the pope has in mind...

...And that returns us to the question of "natural law...

...We too recognize the threat that religious zealotry can pose to it...

...Consequently, an amendment banning abortions without exception would force a conscientious rabbi like himself "to give moral instruction to Jews which would be illegal in the law of America...

...The blood that cries out this time is that of Central American peasants, teachers, and catechists, the blood of anyone caught on the wrong side of someone else's exacting list...

...Certainly the Holy Father is a sincere, even a zealous adherent to the council...

...But does either Pope John Paul's style or the record of past synods suggest such a collegial outcome...

...Why should we even be worried about what the pope has in mind...

...It is precisely to exercise that "decent concern for the opinions of all people," whatever its cost to the preconceptions of either pro-life or pro-choice proponents, that Rabbi Hertzberg desires to defend...

...As a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest during World War II, he saved more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews by issuing them Swedish passports, and providing them material support in fleeing the Nazi bloodmaze...

...To some extent, John Paul II fulfills their dream, although the Holy Father's appeal in fact touches a much wider group of Catholics...

...But beyond that, he also challenges the whole framework by which thinkers and leaders in the Catholic church, and many outside the church as well, have commonly linked morality and public policy — not only in the area of abortion but in the areas of racial equality, nuclear warfare, economic justice, and even fundamental political liberties...

...it was an historic event that vindicated voices Rome had tried to silence and that discredited the claims to exclusive truth and authority which had supported those attempts to stifle inquiry...

...Some people, Rabbi Hertzberg says, insist that "natural law" forbids all abortions...

...Their agendas have too frequently been narrowly set, and when the bishops have tried to engage in the kind of open discussion that marked the council, their views have too often been simply passed by in the final documents...

...True, there are many Catholics who see no problem with Rome exercising authority after the council in approximately the same unilateral fashion as before...

...The Vatican has modified its methods somewhat to conform to the council, but by and large its authority is still derived and its actions conducted in a 8 February 1985: 67 manner that can be only narrowly — and therefore disputably — legitimated by Vatican II...

...We are forced to ask the question of refugees streaming across our southern borders: do they come in search of economic promise or political asylum...

...The fact that there is a conflict between Jewish teaching and this specific conclusion which some people might draw from "natural law" does not necessarily tell against natural law in general...

...Having reached such a sorry outcome, he might have done well to reexamine what led him there...

...But how is a consensus changed...

...Within a ten-day schedule and without a longer period of preparation...

...Most of all, we take note of his forthright assertion "thatlfind wholesale abortions, in the hundreds of thousands, morally revolting...

...No, the real problem is this: in dismissing what he calls "natural law," he appears to dismiss any basis for a public morality except what has emerged, more or less by happenstance or history, as "consensus...

...We also must ask whether the sanctuary movement itself is purely and simply a humanitarian rescue project, or is it propelled by an equally sincere but somewhat different concern for raising political consciousness...

...The issues and the motivations of both the refugees and those offering them illegal hospitality are complex...

...So too deliberation and decision by national conferences of bishops...

...And we recognize the risk that what people claim as generally applicable moral standards frequently reflect their own religious (or class, or cultural) backgrounds...

...Those who would challenge an existing consensus — about the treatment of women, say, or minorities, or the unborn, or even nature — must obviously appeal to something other than the consensus itself...

...This is an important argument...

...The council, furthermore, was not only a set of texts...

...Is there such a thing as a universal "natural law...

...It was an article dealing with abortion, but dealing with it as a specific instance of more general questions about religion, morality, law, and conscience...

...SANCTUARY'S LAMP Forty years ago January 18, en route to Soviet army headquarters in Debrecen, Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg was "disappeared.' ' Although the verb had not yet been coined (Southern Hemisphere, 1970s), Wallenberg would have understood instantly its nature and scope...

...American courts have repeatedly put that religious principle beyond the pale of legality...

...Perhaps it is only this particular reading of natural law that is unfounded...

...But that is not the key to our difference with Rabbi Hertzberg...

...Those who have strongly believed that the very process of dialogue and debate could itself provide whatever correction was needed to maintain Catholic identity and continuity have been remiss as well...

...Why not assume a similar evolution of understanding in the case of Vatican II...

...In effect, the case for legally restricting abortion is no less a theocratic imposition of some believers' will on society, "in the name of their God," than is Khomeini's imposition of his version of Islamic orthodoxy on all of Iran...

...United States immigration policy is itself a political thicket: witness Congress and the Simpson-Mazzoli bill's many lives, many deaths...

...It is genuinely distressing to recognize the extent to which the pontiff himself now provokes hostility and suspicion, not among average Catholics for the most part but precisely among many whose lives are directly controlled by church institutions and who have most consciously and wholeheartedly devoted themselves to Christ's work within that framework...

...In fact, versions of natural law currently hold their own among professional philosophers...

...Even the one anti-abortion amendment not making such an exception explicit, but yet enjoying a degree of popularity in pro-life ranks, is said by spokesmen like Senator Helms to provide for such an exception implicitly...

...But note the ghastly consequences of a policy that fails to take into account the alarming cry of those attempting to flee for their lives...

...Indeed, those texts remain but partially understood and realized after two centuries...

...But that has not saved the church — and even great popes — from tragic retreats into the institutional shell in the past...

...The Refugee Act of 1980 warranted the granting of Extended Voluntary Departure status to political refugees...

...It will not allow us to be doomed by our own indifference...

...commonweal THE SYNOD: HOPE & APPREHENSION OF ALL THE immediate responses to Pope John Paul's unexpected announcement of a synod to review changes initiated by Vatican II, perhaps none was more direct and honest than that of the distinguished, senior church historian John Tracy Ellis...

...Can the two objectives really be separated...

...Hertzberg leaves them with nothing but illegitimately disguised religious teaching...

...Just as poignant an irony is being played out in the courts of the United States today...

...And as Representative James McNulty, Jr...

...The Holy Spirit never ceases to surprise...

...Hertzberg's position directly challenges our own view that opposition to abortion is not an imposition of religious doctrine (whether "unabashed" or "sophisticated") in the sense rejected by the First Amendment...

...But Jewish teaching unequivocally commands abortion when necessary to save the life of the mother...

...To Hertzberg, this is unthinkable and exposes the false universalistic claims of this "natural law" as, in truth, particularistic...

...foreign policy toward Central America...

...Hertzberg says no:' 'What it teaches as universal truth applicable to all is really a rarified version" of the particular religious principles of those — from Maimonides and Spinoza to Archbishop John J. O'Connor — who would invoke it...

...This is the merit of the sanctuary movement, whatever its inconsistencies or political motivation: it will not allow us to abandon our responsibilities...

...Can one logically celebrate the statements of the council without acknowledging the generations of dissent that made it possible, without repenting the closed and complacent triumphalism that made it necessary...

...On what basis is it consolidated or maintained...

...This very context might itself recommend such a synod — as the occasion for resolving conflict or at least for affirming a procedure of dialogue and internal discipline...

...Likewise, the state cannot refuse to "impose" racial integration simply because there are conscientious Christians who believe segregation to be ordained by Scripture, nor can the state refuse to intervene against wife-battering because some sects entertain peculiar views on the prerogatives of husbands...

...Yet, Morris concludes, there is no way to determine what proportion of current immigration to the U.S...

...It should be, at least until their status is more clearly understood...

...They have often been reluctant to engage in vigorous criticism when it might have involved "our side" — a reluctance reinforced by natural solidarity whenever critics and dissenters within the church appeared to be the objects of unhearing or authoritarian censure...

...This is not a term we have favored in our own discussions of abortion...

...Is he really so Commonweal: 69 uncertain about the abominable wickedness of the Holocaust, of rape, torture, racism, and a host of other acts and attitudes...

...Our plea, in sum, is a minimal one: that the kind of moral reasoning we apply in some areas of our contemporary life not be ruled out of order in others...

...Is it true, as an immigration official charged, that the refugees are pawns in a debate aimed at changing U.S...

...Commonweal: 68 UNTIDINESS REVISITED Three issues ago Commonweal published "The Case for Untidiness" by Arthur Hertzberg...

...Nonetheless, in the end, the state cannot withdraw from essential matters, especially life-and-death ones, because some faith, whether Catholic, Jewish, Methodist, Jehovah's Witness, Quaker, snakehandler, or whatever, holds a religious position opposed to state action...

...Forms of dialogue are increasingly accepted...

...Nor do we think he would be silenced by the reply that "What you say may be applicable to those of your own religion, but applying such convictions to others is only 'imposing' a particular tradition with a universalist face-lift.'' Yes, we too are skeptical about claims to universalism that sweep across historical epochs or ignore extreme circumstances...

...But be honest...

...Perhaps its adherents have overreached, as adherents are wont to do, and gone beyond what other, more modest exponents of natural-law principles might be willing to conclude about the rare but excruciating cases where a mother's survival is threatened...

...What may have been at one point mere indifference, as David S. Wyman has pointed out in his The Abandonment of the Jews, may become something far more reprehensible and finally damning...

...We feel confident that he is not...

...Indeed, for a time, it seemed as though his personal charisma might supply the unity and direction for which institutional mechanisms were still lacking...

...Blood issues always are...

...why they should be measured against other claims, tried out on analogous cases, and so on...

...We feel similarly confident that he does not posit his convictions about these evils on the mere fact of "agreement everywhere on such basics" but would cry out against them to the heavens even if the society were as divided or indifferent about one or other of them as pre-Hitler Germany was about anti-Semitism...

...Rabbi Hertzberg finally asks — and he can find "no clearcut answer...

...That attack is manifest in the demand of "some unabashed right-wingers . . . that America must return to being a 'Christian nation.' " But the danger, he suggests, is not less present in the claim of' 'the more sophisticated'' that there is a " 'natural law,' which supposedly teaches what is good for everybody...

...Although Rabbi Hertzberg evoked images of Khomeini's bloody purges in Iran and of fundamentalist ul-tranationalism in Israel, his real focus was on what he termed an "attack" on "the liberal Western state, with its commitment to individual human rights," in our own country...

...Yet it remains a poignant, bitter irony for the rest of us...

...Now "consensus" — or "what we tend to define by consent" — is important, at some level even crucial, in the political life of a stable, pluralist, liberal democracy...

...To bring such forms of moral reasoning to the question of abortion is not to institute "absolutism" or install the rule of Khomeini...

...The problem is that Vatican II is not all of a single piece...

...We should be careful, however, not to let our disagreement with Rabbi Hertzberg eclipse the considerable amount of common ground he has staked out...