Editorials
Strategy time III Despite expectations to the contrary, we found instruction in mailings received recently from NOW (the National Organization for Women) and NARAL (the National Abortion Rights...
...Ritter's familiar imploring face-with its heavy lidded, seemingly myopic gaze, as though he indeed has looked at an evil the rest of us only turn from-blanketed the page, his Roman collar as conspicuous as his troubles...
...nondirective counseling...
...Read what it said: "Appellants...
...That characterization allowed President Bush to send U.S...
...soldiers ransacked the Nicaraguan ambassador's house, blasted the Vatican compound with rock music to dislodge General Noriega, detained Cuban diplomats in their car, and sealed off the Peruvian embassy...
...If Ritter is guilty he, no less than anyone else, should face the penalties of both the civil and moral law...
...But we haven't given these many words to the topic to invite obloquy...
...Father Ritter Gets the Boot," read a smaller headline...
...embassy in San Salvador alarmed the world by announcing that the FMLN takeover of the Sheraton Hotel had created a "hostage situation...
...The gender bias built into the church's command-and-control structure doesn't help...
...In November, the U.S...
...Ritter's ordeal returns us not only to the mystery of evil, but to the equally humbling, and sometimes equally grotesque mystery of goodness...
...FALL FROM GRACE," were the taunting words of the New York Post headline writer on the day after Ritter's Franciscan superior asked him to take a leave of absence from Covenant House...
...The Manhattan District Attorney's office is investigating...
...For NOW, however, the Court puts itself at war with women when it speaks of a need to balance a woman's right to an abortion and a fetus's right to life...
...Ritter's equally plausible innocence raises other, perhaps more disorienting, questions...
...commandos directly to San Salvador and to claim that the twelve green berets bottled up there had been "liberated" by the expedition...
...But respect for these norms and trustworthiness in their observance are the infrastructure on which international dealings must be based...
...Ideally, in our view, this debate should be carried on not solely or primarily by church leaders, particularly when they choose to speak "prophetically" rather than persuasively...
...There are serious people who will acknowledge these hard-to-deny realities and yet will defend the choice of abortion as a lesser evil in some circumstances, especially where social supports for a genuinely beleaguered woman are missing...
...There are still others, cognizant of what abortion is and what its acceptance means to the quality of our civilization, who nonetheless question whether it can be effectively regulated by law in the present climate of opinion...
...In a political atmosphere less poisoned by stridency, the thrust of the Webster decision, granting state legislatures some leeway to express societal interest in fetal life, might have encouraged that debate...
...It goes as follows: The right to abortion will be and should be absolute because women are and always will be victims...
...Real freedom of choice with respect to abortion would entail access to objective data about the human developmental process...
...Ritter and those close to him steadfastly maintain his innocence...
...A NARAL letter asks: "Who decides-you or them...
...For the public, the result, at best, is confusion...
...financial assistance and other means of making alternative decisions possible...
...Responses are invited...
...COVENANT BROKEN...
...Will he be revealed as a pious fraud, another charlatan combating an evil to which he was secretly drawn...
...Is this what the women's movement is to become...
...argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses...
...We will never turn you out.'" But second-day denials or later reappraisals often get buried...
...Strong words...
...Individualism reigns...
...NOW and NARAL resist such measures in state legislatures...
...Just as disturbing as the twist given information is the manner in which our representatives have come to comport themselves...
...notions of obligation and responsibility recede to the margins...
...By conventional standards his accusers are men of dubious credibility, but they are among those persons whose humanity and dignity Ritter himself has done much to reveal to us...
...Another deception...
...Thus Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson told Congress last month that the investigation into the murder of the six Jesuits in San Salvador was being handled well by the Cristiani government...
...This in the course of urging continued assistance to the government that nominally controls the injustice system...
...This is a matter grave enough to invite continuing reflection and debate...
...Such conditions represent a profound injustice...
...Bullets, Booze & Backseat Sex" promised the teaser for another story at the bottom of the page...
...the FMLN soldiers had stumbled accidentally on the U.S...
...invaded under the pretext that Panama had previously declared war on the U.S...
...The issue is not the nature of abortion, nor is it the societal compact that denies millions of women stable homes, adequate nurturance, decent education, opportunity, a sense of self, knowledge of and respect for their bodies...
...But it is now clear that General Noriega had not declared war on the U.S.: in remarks to Panama's National Assembly on December 15, 1989, he had described how Panamanians perceived their relation to the U.S...
...So are we, as witness this comment and the two that preceded it (January 26, February 9...
...Describing an article by Janet Fleischman, we spelled Romania thus: PANAMA...
...The work must go on...
...The nuncio denied it the following day: "I told him [Noriega] up to the last minute: 'You can stay here...
...They propose a solution that is, first of all, a quick fix that identifies not societal indifference or male selfishness as the problem but rather the fetus...
...But, with honorable exceptions (cf...
...You," it can be presumed, stands for a beleaguered female victim of "them"-sleazy male politicians...
...Or: "The right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but...
...And victims, because they are protecting themselves, do not have to accept responsibility for hurting others...
...But for NARAL (and, at least currently, for NOW), the way to go is precisely to make desperate measures ordinary and legitimate...
...Bush's own demeaning comments about General Noriega before his capture, or his remarks last fall about Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega as "a little man" and "an animal at a garden party...
...servicemen had run a check point near the Panamanian military headquarters...
...The original women's movement was in part an angry, and justified, protest against patriarchal and chauvinist abuses, large and small...
...What is the real nature of that goodness...
...Real freedom of choice can also be affected by deeper moral and cultural attitudes that, unexamined, tend to weight too many decisions in favor of abortion...
...Disinformation and a cavalier attitude toward the norms of international decorum may seem to work in the short run...
...If Ritter has been falsely accused, his continuing humiliation seems a wholly perverse fate...
...There have been times, and they will come again, when we will need that foundation as much as anyone...
...Such is the company Bruce Ritter is forced to keep in the public imagination...
...For luminaries like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that is going beyond the pale...
...Depicting themselves as defenders of choice, they are in fact manipulators of choice and promoters of abortion...
...One lesson we got from them is that Bishops Leo Maher and Austin Vaughan-in the news for their imprudent and intemperate attacks on two Catholic officeholders-have nothing on NOW's Molly Yard or NARAL's Kate Michelman when it comes to fanning the flames...
...But Covenant House and its unquestionably good works-the nationwide organization spent $87 million last year, three times what the federal government does, on sheltering needy adolescents-is not the story that has people shaking their heads...
...Whether Noriega finds justice remains to be seen...
...Such an affinity is not unusual in either the history of psychopathology or religion...
...invasion itself that shut down the canal for the second time in its history (the first time being in 1914 following a landslide...
...And the continued operation of the canal was never in question...
...Supreme Court," says NOW, "has declared war on the women of America...
...citizens not fearful of anathemas from any source, and-perhaps most importantly-willing to work toward a consensus favoring compromise, to settle for half a loaf rather than to insist on having their particular orthodoxy made into the law of the land...
...Questions about the misuse of funds as well as the forgery of a baptismal certificate have also been raised...
...The invasion of Panama proves it again...
...On its positive side it projected a vision of a more egalitarian society, one in which rights and responsibilities mutually reinforce and sustain one another...
...Despite changes in law and attitudes, women as a group remain disadvantaged and vulnerable...
...However the fetus is defined, each product of conception is a living being, as uniquely individual as it is wholly dependent...
...or by advocacy groups bent solely on results...
...By and large, women who become pregnant become automatically more vulnerable...
...If that's the price of admission, the bishops are no doubt willing to pay it...
...The insistence of NOW and NARAL and their allies on an unqualified right of abortion signals the loss of that vision, and something more...
...treatment of Lucia Barrera de Cerna, the witness to the Jesuits' murders, saying the archbishop didn't know what he was talking about...
...Rights language permeates our legal system...
...Defending that right has become the program...
...It's not altogether clear from Schlesinger's Op-Ed piece (New York Times, February 2) whether, if the bishops continue to question "abortion rights" as understood by NOW and NARAL, Schlesinger will conclude that maybe, after all, the Klan and the Know-Nothings and the other anti-Catholic demagogues were possibly partly right...
...this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interest in regulation...
...Or is it dissimulation...
...What is the source of that grace...
...In the natural course of things, the more we know about life in the womb, the more seriously we view the act of abortion...
...ET CETERA NOTHING SACRED DEPT...
...Strategy time III Despite expectations to the contrary, we found instruction in mailings received recently from NOW (the National Organization for Women) and NARAL (the National Abortion Rights Action League...
...It's not the story mulled over at home in front of the television news or the story on the minds of New York subway riders as they scan the front page of their papers...
...that the security of the Panama Canal was at stake...
...Now separated from Covenant House, the shelter for runaway and abused children he founded in New York in 1968, the Reverend Bruce Ritter is accused of taking sexual advantage of young men under his protection...
...All of us could share in dealing with its other consequences, not only personally but also politically: by working to change the rules of the game so that the arrival of even a problem pregnancy need not be the occasion for desperate measures...
...Victims are exempt from the reciprocity that makes the interplay of rights and responsibilities possible...
...the "or not" as in "whether or not to have an abortion," has disappeared into a black hole...
...And we have some more...
...Still, what are we to think if such goodness has grown in the same soil with such manifest sin...
...Says NARAL: "We must...mount the most massive public mobilization ever undertaken in defense of choice-because even after Webster, the frightening truth is that the majority of American women still do not realize what they can do to make sure that the right to choose abortion is not taken away from them...
...The U.S...
...That climate is in large part the creation of groups like NOW and NARAL...
...Having positioned themselves as the more or less official voices of the women's movement, they have brought a disciplined passion to the task of redefining what is at issue...
...This individual life, once the focus of a million commonplace assumptions about virtue, is now seen as a shadowy labyrinth in which a great good and a great evil may compete...
...Prochoice groups exploit and inflate this reality...
...It seems no one was aware, or worse, cared, that the 1961 Vienna Covenant guarantees the immunity of diplomatic personnel and property from arrest, seizure, and searches...
...On January 4, for example, the White House announced that prior to General Noriega's capture, the papal nuncio had given the general an ultimatum to leave the Vatican compound...
...But the more basic reason for Catholic-bashing these days has to do not with the maladroit use of dubious tactics but with something more basic: the bishops identify abortion as the taking of human life, and they say that it is wrong...
...This is a matter for citizens, including the garden variety, but also legislators, governors, judges, and other officeholders...
...It is also, and in good part, a social wrong growing out of societal structures, our manners, morals, habits, and assumptions...
...particularly women who are poor and/or young, uneducated, alone...
...Abortion at any stage of pregnancy insures that one less human person will inhabit our world...
...It is not an injustice imposed by nature, by women's reproductive role, by the structure of their bodies...
...that's where the money goes and the energy flows...
...The Catholic church has taken a drubbing, some of it justified, over the abortion issue...
...Insofar as we can, we'd like to re-present it...
...Humanae vitae, and the fall-into-line response it evoked from the world's hierarchy, tore holes in the church's credibility on sex-related morality...
...Disinformation seems to work best when it puts the first spin on the facts...
...Diligent students of the cover of Commonweal's previous issue [February 9] will have noted a more radical innovation...
...A second lesson is that the priorities these and other groups are currently following have sadly diminished the scope and vision of the women's movement...
...Nor is that far from Mr...
...This solution asks us to relieve injustice to women by bringing the lives of others far more vulnerable than the women themselves to a violent end...
...When it comes to Central American policy, U.S...
...In a bitter irony, he stands accused, his life's work made a shambles, precisely by those on whose behalf he has so patiently petitioned a mostly indifferent world...
...This tangle of goodness and possible evil in Ritter's life is what holds our fascination...
...On abortion itself, the church has lost respect through the words and actions of a few bishops, the tactics used by some in Operation Rescue, a simplistic readiness on the part of some church leaders to endorse single-issue politics as an acceptable means of resisting the abortion tide...
...These groups ask us to resist that knowledge, to trivialize abortion, to numb our consciences with rhetorical novocain...
...Covenant House is perhaps bigger than one man, but it is that one man's story, his singular life and current torment, that reaches out from the headlines and TV reports...
...The U.S...
...No doubt the people who write these things believe in the Tightness, of their cause, but the words they choose are calculated not to persuade but to stun, to rouse anger, to polarize...
...But in response to questions, he admitted that "The judicial system down there is not exactly a model of justice," and that Salvadorans "do not have a justice system worthy of the name...
...It was the U.S...
...Marine shot and killed by Panamanian defense forces prior to the invasion-occurred after four U.S...
...Of course, some of the premises underlying the appeal of the abortion rights movement are perfectly sound...
...A significant step forward...
...Victims need not abide by the rule that says I will treat others as I would wish to be treated...
...Minnesota State Senator John E. Brandl's letter to constituents, Commonweal, December 1,1989), the challenge has been declined...
...William Walker, the U.S...
...It is sometimes an injustice an individual woman helps bring upon herself by her own actions...
...They ask us, including the politicians among us, to examine the ingredients on the "choice" label and consider whether ingesting this stew is good for the moral health of the community...
...If he has not, we only can marvel at how much good one person can help to bring about...
...officials feel little compunction about making assertions contrary to fact when distortions serve their perceived short-term interest...
...soldiers, never held them hostage, and had abandoned their positions at the hotel before any "liberation" was necessary...
...With examples like these, is it any wonder that in Panama U.S...
...That insistence is on the brink of implanting another moral norm altogether...
...civilian lives were generally threatened there...
...Whatever Ritter's possible hidden sins or crimes, he has been responsible for bringing grace and hope into the lives of the utterly forsaken...
...The issue is "choice...
...Thanks to their efforts, many Americans believe, seventeen years after Roe v. Wade, that the decision was all about individual choice and had nothing to say about life in the womb, or about the social dimension of the abortion decision...
...It rose as a struggle for economic, social, and educational justice...
...That is a conviction to which every editorial writer and politician, every prelate and social worker, every runaway kid and desperate parent circumspectly nods...
...Now, to the extent that the movement's goals are defined by such groups as NOW and NARAL, just one form of justice will do, one right is paramount: the right to abortion...
...With this we do not agree...
...Whatever...
...If Ritter has fallen from "grace," it reminds us of how perilous our condition is, how frail our own resources are...
...The New York Times has decided to go with the flow: As of Saturday, February 4, "Rumania" became "Romania" in its good grey pages...
...It's all right for the Catholic bishops to raise questions about the morality of our nuclear deterrence policy and about the workings of our capitalistic system...
...There is no way for any of us to share the bodily burdens and risks of another person's pregnancy...
...Have we forgotten Teheran...
...Victims are beyond the law...
...But when churchmen tell us (including the politicians among us) that abortion is wrong, they "seem to verify the fears long cherished by the No-Nothings [s/c]ofthe 1850s, the KuKluxKlan in the 1920s, and a succession of anti-Catholic demagogues that the Roman Catholic church would try to overrule the American democratic process...
...that General Manuel Noriega had to be brought to justice...
...ambassador to El Salvador, recently lashed out at Archbishop Rivera y Damas of San Salvador for criticizing U.S...
...that U.S...
...That is not an excuse or apology for any man's immoral behavior...
...Victims need not be morally responsible...
...Exit fetus, exit problem...
...Far from overturning Roe, moreover, Webster confirmed its trimester distinction and its position that the state could legitimately assert an interest in protecting fetuses who have reached the point of viability...
...And, increasingly, it's a one-way choice...
...following the failed October coup attempt...
...TWIST & SPIN Disinformation works...
...The casus belli-the U.S...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 4
