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The Vatican is not serious about abortion

By Max Wallace - posted Thursday, 20 August 2009


Earlier this year the Vatican backed a Brazilian bishop who excommunicated the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old girl after they arranged an abortion of the twins conceived when she was raped by her step-father. In 2003, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua excommunicated the parents and doctors of a nine-year-old girl. They too had arranged for an abortion after the girl was raped and became pregnant.

Taking a line from those actions, you would think the Vatican was serious about its strident anti-abortion policy. But there is evidence the Vatican only gets tough on abortion in jurisdictions where it has significant sway over the political system. When its abortion policy could conceivably threaten its finances in less authoritarian liberal democracies, it goes to water.

This paper argues that if the Vatican was serious about abortion in western liberal democracies, it would: stop complaining about its availability; purge those members of the church who do not share its supposed hard line, including bishops; excommunicate Catholic politicians who dissemble on abortion; suffer the consequences, whatever they may be, for holding to its principles.

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Rather than do this, I argue, the Vatican uses abortion as a Machiavellian feint, feigned outrage, designed to situate itself on a contrived high moral ground for perceived political advantage. It has no intention of taking a tougher line when the price is too high, as we shall see below.

An instructive book, published by Threshold, NY, in March 2008, details some of the evidence for this. It is entitled Onward Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States.

The book was written by Professor Deal W. Hudson, a formerly successful Catholic political activist whose work helped sway the result of the 2004 US Presidential election, resulting in the defeat of Catholic John Kerry, and the victory of the born-again Christian, George Bush.

Hudson’s research found a core of conservative Americans, especially Catholic Hispanic and evangelical, who were unhappy about the availability of abortion in America following the 1973 Supreme Court case, Row v Wade.

These voters were sufficient in number to influence an election if the right pitch was made to them. George Bush’s advisor, Karl Rove, picked up on this, and in what reads like a tell-all insider’s account, Hudson details how meetings were held to reconcile Bush to a firmer position on abortion to outflank Kerry.

Most importantly, Hudson details a meeting including John Klink, a Vatican diplomat, and George Bush. Bush was asked whether he would (1) support signing the partial-birth abortion ban (2) encourage US states to demand parent-notification bills be passed (when young girls presented for abortions) (3) ban abortion in the third trimester (4) end abortions conducted at federal facilities in the US and abroad (5) disallow federal funding for abortion domestically and under UN auspices.

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Bush said the list was a “no brainer” - of course he would agree to all of the above.

Amazingly, the “liberal” US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the peak organisational body of the church in America, was sidelined with publicity carefully generated for bishops who took a harder line on abortion and who criticised Kerry for not being Catholic enough.

With evangelicals and hard line Catholics combining as never before, Bush was on the road to victory and Hudson was installed as the White House liaison person with Catholics, even over the head of the Conference of Bishops. Hudson boasted that columnist Ellen Goodman wrote that “Letting Hudson define Catholicism is like letting Osama define Islam.”

All was going swimmingly well until, in Hudson’s words at p.194, “prior to the 2004 election, in late August, I stepped down from my position as Catholic advisor to the White House and the RNC [Republican National Committee]. A left-wing Catholic newspaper that supported John Kerry published a lengthy expose about me on its Web site. The article contained documents from a supposedly sealed file at Fordham University [NY], where, as a philosophy professor, I had had a sexual encounter with a female undergraduate in February 1994.”

To save causing Bush further harm, Hudson resigned and became a footnote in American political history. His book reads like a cri-de-coeur for his unrecognised work. He says, with some credibility, that he was at the vanguard of religious and political history.

Hudson argues while the Conference of Bishops was naturally opposed to abortion in principle, when push came to shove, they were not prepared to switch their allegiance from the liberal John Kerry, who supported a woman’s right to choose, and back George Bush.

Moreover, and here is the point, the Vatican turns a blind eye to moderate bishops’ refusal to embrace its supposedly absolutist line on abortion for two main reasons. It doesn’t want to cause a damaging rift in the church and second, the church’s financial position could be at stake were it to undertake a purge of backsliding bishops.

Hudson details at p.141 the Vatican’s pragmatism on abortion historically where he points out that in 1975 US Catholic bishops realised anti-abortion lobbying would cross the line which established them as a charity at law with tax-exempt status. Citing T. Byrnes’ 1991 Catholic Bishops in American Politics, Hudson argues:

“The bishops were well aware of the dangers such a national organising effort [against abortion] would present to their Conference, such as an IRS [Internal Revenue Service] challenge to their tax-exempt status.” The bishops said that pro-life groups were not “an agency of the church, nor operated, controlled or financed by the church”.

Hudson comments: “this qualifying language doomed the [anti-abortion] enterprise to failure, no matter how well intentioned the effort.”

He points out that militant evangelicals were “bold enough” to do what the Catholic bishops were not, even running into challenges from the IRS which they saw off.

He concludes the US Bishops Conference, ever since, has “increasingly used the fear of losing its tax-exempt status to etch a boundary line around its pro-life activity”.

In other words, the Vatican, through its US Conference, considers its tax-exempt status to be more important than its stand on abortion. So, everything has a price, even abortion dogma. As the Pope himself said in 1969 when a leftist Italian government was contemplating revoking the Vatican’s tax-exempt status, “no matter is of greater importance”.

If the Vatican was serious about abortion, it would encourage its priests to openly breach charity law by advocating the election of anti-abortion candidates like Sarah Palin, from all pulpits, inviting tax authorities to abolish its tax-exempt status. But it never has.

(When and how the religious can exercise their free speech in the US without compromising their tax-exempt charitable status is carefully detailed in a September 2007 document entitled “Constitutional Protection for Pastors” (PDF 76KB), published by five US evangelical groups, including Focus on the Family. It is freely available on the internet. The Australian Tax Office artfully avoids discussing this issue on its website.)

Another piece of evidence that the Vatican is not totally serious about abortion is the change in policy towards Catholics who will not enforce Catholic dogma. Reviewing the recently published papers of Australia’s most prominent Catholic activist, B.A. Santamaria (now deceased), Michael Sexton noted in The Australian (April 14-15 2007) that Santamaria’s early view was that:

“Any Catholic members of parliament who personally agreed with the teachings of the church but did not think these should be imposed on the non-Catholic majority in the community should be removed from their parliamentary office and also deprived of any role in the affairs of the church.”

That tough policy no longer exists. Occasionally, some Catholic parliamentarians are criticised by the church hierarchy when legislation that offends Catholic policy comes into parliaments. But their bark is worse than their bite. They have no intention of placing any sanction against parliamentarians voting for legislation of which they disapprove.

For example, state politicians wavering about the decriminalisation of abortion in New South Wales and Queensland need have no fear. If they support decriminalisation the sky will not fall in. They will not be excommunicated and it is unlikely they would be denied Communion because the Vatican and the Australian church is not really serious about its opposition to abortion. They are all talk and no action. Where are the priests at pro-life demonstrations?

Another example: Malcolm Turnbull, a convert to Catholicism not long before his preselection for the seat of Wentworth, has been outspoken in his view supporting a woman’s right to choose (see my previous article here). There is no report of him being refused Communion.

Were Australia’s best known anti-abortion Catholic politician, Tony Abbott, to become Leader of the federal Opposition, it is unlikely priests will be telling constituents to vote for him from the pulpit.

Under our charity law, the church here is in the same position as the US church. All churches are in effect “supernatural charities” eligible for tax-exempt status because to “advance religion” is legally deemed to be a form of charity.

It could only take one recording of such a speech to land the church in trouble with the Tax Office.

Would politicians who vote for decriminalisation of abortion lose votes? Yes, if the vast majority of women in their electorate find out they voted against it, they will.

A minority of Catholics might disagree, but in the context of all the other more pressing issues, it would be unlikely to sway all their votes.

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About the Author

Max Wallace is vice-president of the Rationalists Assn of NSW and a council member of the New Zealand Assn of Rationalists and Humanists.

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