October 24, 2000
Soon-to-be former President
William Jefferson Clinton has been looking for something to provide him
with a legacy by which his presidency will be hallowed in the annals of
American history. But each of us knows that our outgoing president
already has a legacy of corruption, venality, vice, deception, the killing of
the innocent here and abroad, and an abject distortion of reality to justify
whatever he does, both personally and politically. His legacy of spinning
the truth may prove to be his lasting “contribution” to
American political discourse: people on both sides of the political aisle
have exhibited a pronounced tendency in recent years to try to turn one
thing into something else.
For example, establishment pro-life
leaders went to great lengths in 1996 to try to spin Bob Dole into a
genuine champion of the unborn. His votes to confirm Ruth Bader Ginsberg
and Stephen Breyer were conveniently not included on scorecards issued
by the National Right to Life Committee’s political action
committee and the Christian Coalition in 1996. His active support for
funding fetal-tissue experimentation in 1993 was ignored. The former
Senate majority leader’s desire to insert a “Declaration of
Tolerance” concerning abortion into the Republican Party’s
1996 national platform was an embarrassment to those who had spun so
hard for him during the primaries earlier that year. His spinners assured
politically naive and uninformed conservatives that the inarticulate and
ever-changeable Dole was more “electable” than the
articulate and principled Patrick Joseph Buchanan. The result was a
disaster politically, a disaster that was not difficult to predict and one
that could have been avoided had simple honesty not been replaced with
spin.
The phenomenon is being repeated by
establishment pro-life leaders this year with Texas Governor George W.
Bush. Bush’s record of appointing
pro-aborts and pro-sodomites to the Texas State Supreme Court is
not mentioned. His discussion of abortion as a “matter of
opinion” (not a matter of fundamental justice founded in
truth) is left to stand as though he is right, that abortion is indeed
a matter of “opinion” over which “good”
people may disagree. His support for the destruction of little
babies in certain supposedly “hard” cases as a matter
of principle is accepted without complaint. His claim — in his
October 3 debate with Vice President Gore — that he would be
powerless as president to reverse the FDA’s decision to
market the human pesticide, RU-486, was represented by his
apologists as virtuous, although the handstands and gymnastics
required to pull off that spin were worthy of the Rosemary Woods
stretch. Bush’s statement that abortions should be
“rare” bordered on the Clintonian. Nevertheless, this
man who clearly does not understand the prophetic nature of the
life issue must be spun into something that he is not, the truth be
damned.
I carry no brief for
establishment pro-life spinners and their hapless candidates, who
spin as they do partly because they lack trust in the power of the
truth of an uncompromising, no-exceptions pro-life message to
resonate with voters. However, another reason they feel compelled
to spin is that they seek to do battle with pro-abortion Democrats
who have the tacit support of the leftist establishment within the
highest quarters of the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops/United States Catholic Conference. The vice
president’s partisans are trying to spin the rabidly
pro-abortion Albert Arnold Gore into a man who is opposed to all
late-term abortions, including partial-birth abortion.
The apparatchiks who populate
what I call the “cement palace” across the street from
the National Shrine of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in
Washington, D.C., are reflexively attached to the statism,
collectivism, and redistributionism of the left wing of the
Democratic Party. They are the people who time and again made
war against President Reagan in the 1980s, doing everything they
could to turn prudential judgments on national defense, foreign
policy, and the domestic economy into matters of revealed truth
from which there could be no dissent from Catholics in the pew.
Their patron saint, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, gave them
political cover by inventing the so-called Consistent Ethic of Life,
which equated opposition to abortion with all the issues listed
above. Abortion was simply one issue among many to consider when
voting. That was designed to help elect former Vice President
Mondale and other pro-abortion Democrats in 1984. A number of
Catholic priests spoke favorably of then-Congresswoman Geraldine
Ferraro, a pro-abortion Catholic, and the ever-arrogant governor of
New York at the time, Mario Cuomo. The leftist apparatchiks in the
NCCB/USCC believe that the Democratic Party is the repository of
moral truth and social justice, so much so that the destruction of
our Lord mystically in the persons of unborn children in their
mothers’ womb must be subordinated to the interests of the
statists and collectivists and redistributionists.
To wit, Robert D. Novak reports
that the United States Catholic Conference released a
questionnaire which had been sent to Gore concerning his stands on
issues. It quoted the Gore campaign as answering in part: “Al
Gore opposes late-term abortions and the procedure of
partial-birth abortion.” But the Catholic News Service,
which is an arm of the USCC, did not question the qualification that
Gore placed on that position: namely, that there had to be
“provisions to allow doctors to protect the life or health of
the mother.” There was no questioning of Gore on his
position, which would render such a ban absolutely
meaningless.
Indeed, the spinners at the
USCC unwittingly find themselves allied with the pro-life
establishment on the matter, as even the American Medical
Association has said that there is “no identified
situation” in which it is necessary to kill a child by the
means of partial-birth abortion, giving the lie to establishment
pro-life efforts to place a totally unnecessary (and morally
unjustifiable) “life of the mother” exception in bills
at the federal and state levels to ban partial-birth abortion. And as
I have noted on a number of occasions, even a total ban on all
partial-birth abortions would not save one single child as there
remain other ways in the later stages of pregnancy to slaughter a
child that would remain perfectly legal.
You really have to give Gore
credit for knowing the politics within the United States Catholic
Conference — and for knowing the state of the pro-life
movement in this country. He knows that most pro-life voters, so
desperate to defeat him, are willing to accept Bush as a pro-life
champion principally because he says he will sign (but not work
for) a conditional ban on partial-birth abortions. Well, why not tap
into that sentiment by trying to convince traditionally
Democratic-leaning Catholics that he, Gore, is just as acceptable
as Bush on the issue? All Gore wants to do is to win enough votes
in enough key states to swing the election his way. And he knows
he has supporters in the confines of the cement palace in
Washington eager to do his bidding for him. He was even astute
enough to use Bernardin’s “common ground”
slogan to evoke the image of a mild-mannered man who is open to
listening to people who disagree with him about a woman’s
“right to choose.”
However, Novak gets it all
wrong when he expresses “wonder” that “the
Catholic bishops have given [Gore] the unimpeded use of their own
transmission belt to communicate.” There is no wonder to it
at all.
First of all, there are bishops
who support Gore. As cowardly as Roger Clemens, they won’t
even reveal themselves publicly. But some bishops believe that the
Democratic Party is the true political church outside of which
there is no secular salvation. It is those bishops who have been
responsible for populating the cement palace with political
leftists, theological dissenters, and liturgical revolutionaries. The
bishops who support Gore are in the vanguard of an effort to
promote, as Pope Leo XIII warned in Testem
Benevolentiae in 1899, “a Church in America which is
different from that which exists in the rest of the world.”
No, there is no wonder at all that there are bishops who support Al
Gore, and who are all too happy to have an uncritical interview
with him circulate through the auspices of the Catholic News
Service.
Similarly, Novak’s
belief that the bishops have an “irrational” fear of
losing their tax-exempt status is simply wrong. True, there are
some bishops who understand the prophetic nature of the life issue
but who lack the apostolic courage to run the risk of losing a
status that could, if they desired to challenge the matter in court,
be established as an inherent right protected by the First
Amendment of the Constitution. And even if the argument I outlined
on this matter in The Wanderer nearly eight years ago
(and included in my book Christ in the Voting Booth)
wound up being rejected by the positivists who serve in our legal
system, a bishop has to understand that there is no blandishment
offered by the state that justifies his remaining silent about the
promotion of evil under the cover of law by those who aspire to
hold elected office in a democratic republic. The Apostles
weren’t concerned about losing any benefits offered by the
Roman Empire. They were willing to lose everything —
including their lives — to bear witness to the truth.
But there are a number of
bishops who use the threat of losing their vaunted tax-exempt
status quite deliberately as a cover to remain silent about the life
issue in the realm of electoral politics. Those bishops don’t
believe that abortion is the most pressing moral issue of the day.
They — and many of the priests under their direct supervision
and control — talk about poverty and welfare and
“social justice” in purely naturalistic terms having
nothing to do with the true social teaching of the Church, trying to
convince Catholics in the pew that we cannot be “single
issue voters.” The tax-exempt status is a convenient tool
that they use to denigrate the overriding importance of the
restoration of legal protection for the innocent unborn.
Indeed, it is that cynical
alliance with the forces of death that has led very well-meaning
people into thinking that we have to accept whoever it is the
Republican Party runs as candidates, even if such candidates are
effectively no different from the Democrats being touted as
acceptable by leftists within the Church. Many pro-life Catholics,
eager to defeat the Democrats, resort to the same spinning tactics
employed by the Left. And the loser in all of that is truth
itself.
There is no salvation in
partisan politics. The forum of electoral politics provides us with
a vehicle by which we can speak to the primacy of the Divine
positive law and the natural law over us men and our civil
societies. The more Catholics spin reality to fit the statists of the
Democratic Party or the careerists in the Republican Party, the
more the most pressing moral issue of the day will continue to be
subordinated to the interests of career politicians, who believe
that we exist to enable them to win office as an end in and of
itself. We must see the truth clearly for what it is, and then be
willing to trust in the power of the graces won for us by our Lord
on Calvary to plant the seeds for a day when Catholics will no
longer enable the statists or the careerists but will vote only for
candidates committed to a land where Christ is honored as King and
his true Church is recognized as the one, legitimate arbiter on
matters of fundamental justice.
Not possible? It is no less
possible than what happened in the First Millennium, when the
seeds planted by the Apostles and their successors resulted in the
glory of Christendom, where faith informed and directed culture.
No matter how small we are in number, our decision to choose as
rulers those who are committed totally to objective justice
founded in truth will help plough the ground for a day when we will
indeed have rulers who, like St. Louis, King of France, know that
they must rule according to the mind of Christ and not according to
the exigencies of this passing world.
Consider the words of Pope
Pius XI in Quas Primas, issued in 1925:
We firmly hope, however, that the Feast of the
Kingship of Christ, which in the future will be yearly observed,
may hasten the return of society to our loving Savior. It would be
the duty of Catholics to do all they can to bring about this happy
result. Many of these, however, have neither the station in society
nor the authority which belong to those who bear the torch of truth.
This state of things may perhaps be attributed to a certain
slowness and timidity in good people, who are reluctant to engage
in conflict or oppose but a weak resistance, thus the enemies of
the Church become bolder in their attacks. But if the faithful were
generally to understand that it behooves them ever to fight
courageously under the banner of Christ their King, then, fired with
apostolic zeal, they would strive to win over to their Lord those
hearts that are bitter and estranged from Him, and would valiantly
defend His rights.
We must love the good more
than we fear the evil. We must trust in the power of our
Lord’s truth more than we do in our own cleverness to hide
the truth and spin reality. For when we do the latter, we can only
accomplish short-term goals that wind up retarding — not
advancing — the cause of objective justice founded in the
splendor of Truth Incarnate.
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