HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Writing for Crisis Magazine, Mark Gallagher reveals in The Bishops’ Fateful Decision Respecting the Unborn just how soon Catholic bishops in the United States, represented by their Washington lobby, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, abandoned their duty to oppose abortion as an intrinsic evil that must never be supported in resistance to the unrestricted abortion “right” the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions of January 22, 1973 — taken together — invented for women in America.

Mr. Gallagher also recounts the unsavory whys behind that fateful decision, and tells us that nothing has changed in the intervening 40-odd years.  According to Crisis, “Mark Gallagher worked with the Government Liaison Office of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Washington from 1974 to 2007. He was mainly responsible for lobbying Congress on abortion and programs for the poor.”  Gallagher is an eyewitness to the crime.

The when is shocking enough: 1976, when the USCCB issued a voting guide called the “Political Responsibility Statement” that presented moral relativism as a reliable guide for Catholics’ consciences and declined to identify the pro-abortion position as one Catholics may never support by voting for candidates who hold it:

[The USCCB’s Political Responsibility Statement] did not call upon Catholics to vote against a candidate who opposed the Common Good by supporting abortion. It cited no intrinsic evil that if supported would render a legislator morally unacceptable for office. And it did not include relevant Catholic moral theology: (a) that the constant teaching of the Church is that there are “certain choices that are always intrinsically evil” (i.e. abortion: … if one could eliminate all poverty in America at the cost of permitting the killing of one innocent person, that cost was too high and morally wrong); and (b) the applicability of proportionalism. According to one authoritative source, it holds that “the moral quality of an action is determined by whether the evils brought about by proposed action are proportionate to the goods the action effects. If the goods effected by the action are not in proportion to the evils caused, then the action is evil, but if they are, then the action is morally good.”

But, as Mr. Gallagher notes:

First, there are no proportionate goods achieved by the killing of a million unborn each year. Second, voting American Catholics are not faced with any moral evils equivalent to abortion that might warrant voting for a pro-abortion candidate. Voters have never been faced with the dilemma of choosing between a pro-abortion candidate and, for example, a rival candidate that would permit the killing annually of a million citizens through starvation or freezing. Or, by way of another example, Catholic voters do not have to choose between a pro-abortion candidate and a candidate advocating an unjust war that would involve a first-strike nuclear attack on millions of innocent persons. Voting for pro-abortion candidates in America has never been, and still cannot, be justified under the principle of proportionality.

If the when is somewhat surprising (to those of us who weren’t paying attention to the USCCB in the 1970s, anyway), the why is less so — and depressingly predictable, once one thinks about it:

The Social Development and World Peace staff at the bishops’ conference disagreed with [Mark Gallagher’s recommendation “that the bishops conduct a major campaign to educate and correctly form the consciences of American Catholics to their responsibility to elect candidates who support the Common Good, which is protecting the human life and respecting the human dignity of every person created by God (including the unborn). And those candidates who refused to support the Common Good would be morally unacceptable for public office. The laity’s responsibility included being involved in their political party so that Common Good candidates would be recruited and nominated for office.”]. They dealt with the economy, poverty, food policy, housing, human rights, military expenditures, and U.S. foreign policy, and felt their goals and prudential judgments were more reflected by the Democrats in Congress. I was told sometime later of their concern that Roe v. Wade would cause Catholics to seek the protection of the unborn by voting for Republicans (most were pro-life [90+ percent]) instead of Democrats (about 2/3rds were pro-abortion then [94 percent now]). This shift in the Catholic vote would necessarily hurt their legislative agenda. So a campaign should be undertaken to convince Catholics that there was justification to vote for pro-abortion candidates. Their view prevailed and they pursued with the relevant bishops’ committees the first-ever Catholic voters guide published in 1976, called the “Political Responsibility Statement” (now called Faithful Citizenship). It would be the primary tool to achieve their objective.

Those who think the USCCB is the clerical arm of the Democratic Party are not wrong, it would appear.  That helps explain the USCCB’s militant activism in favor of open borders and illegal aliens ad infinitum.  In accordance with the USCCB’s preferential option for the Democrats, the conference buried Catholics’ moral imperative to oppose abortion:

[The 1976 Political Responsibility Statement] listed everything they hoped a legislator would support (at least a dozen). This marginalized protecting human life by making it just one of many important issues. The candidate who supported abortion could say (and routinely did), that they supported 90-95 percent of the bishops legislative agenda.

According to Mr. Gallagher, at the USCCB nothing has changed on this front:

The current voter guide explicitly permits Catholics to vote for candidates who support intrinsic moral evils. It says, “A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil” like abortion, “if the voter’s intent is to support that position.” But what if a voter supports a pro-abortion candidate for some other reason? “There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons.” The moral reasons must be “truly grave,” yet as I have argued, there are no grave moral reasons that trump protecting the unborn. Also would it really be far fetched to imagine that a Catholic voter, following the guide’s exception, might support a pro-abortion candidate because, for example, his position on “climate change” echoes that of the bishops who have said that saving the planet by reducing carbon emissions was a moral obligation?

The USCCB’s explicit permission for Catholics to vote for pro-abortion candidates is not new.  In 1976, when the USCCB released its Political Responsibility Statement, the USCCB’s Social Development and World Peace staff explicitly gave America’s Catholics justifications and excuses to vote for pro-abortion candidates:

In addition to this voters’ guide, the national Social Development and World Peace staff, as well as their diocesan counterparts, informed Catholics that there was justification to vote for pro-abortion candidates. This education campaign included workshops to persuade the laity that it was better to use their vote to achieve a good (helping the poor) rather than to oppose an evil (abortion).

Mr. Gallagher does not overlook the episcopal pastoral inaction with respect to abortion-supporting “Catholic” politicians that has dismayed and enraged devout American Catholics for decades and that shows no sign of changing, to the ongoing confusion and scandal of the Catholic faithful.  Nor does he forget its baneful effects:

A final step that helped pro-abortion Catholic candidates was the bishops giving them, or permitting them to receive, Communion. Many laity concluded that these legislators’ votes for abortion were morally acceptable, and that Catholics could vote for them in good conscience. Regular reception of Communion in the Catholic Church conveys that the person is a practicing Catholic, in the state of grace, in good standing, in communion with the Church.

All of these actions decreased the number of churchgoing Catholics voting pro-life, and this prevented (and still prevents) achieving sufficient votes to legally protect the unborn.

From a political science perspective the division of the Catholic vote (those voting for pro-life candidates and those voting for pro-abortion candidates) has severely limited if not completely neutralized the effect of the Catholic vote for good.

Mr. Gallagher concludes reasonably, if to my mind mildly:

The bishops have continued on their failed course for forty years, with fateful, disastrous results. If the bishops would change course, the legal killing, now at 56 million, could be stopped. The bishops need to teach that: (a) Legislators have the compelling moral responsibility to pursue the Common Good, protecting the human life and respecting the human dignity of every person created by God, born and unborn. And those who do not, are morally unfit for office; (b) “Catholic” legislators who support abortion are not in communion with the Church and they will not be given Communion until they are; and (c) Catholic citizens cannot in good conscience elect legislators who support the killing of the unborn (for there are no proportionate reasons to justify it).

This pastoral malpractice of so many Catholic bishops in the United States deserves far harsher condemnation, and Mr. Gallagher slips by calling abortion “legal killing.”  That it can never be.  And still the USCCB stays its scandalous course, while no Pope or Nuncio has intervened in the almost 42 years since Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton were unleashed upon America’s innocent children and their too-often confused parents.  As to the USCCB, why?  As to the Vatican, why not?  It is inconceivable that any body of Catholic bishops before 1970 would have treated such a grave moral issue — literally one of life and death and the peril of souls — in so cavalier and misleading a way.  It is only out of the wreckage that followed the Second Vatican Council that behavior such as this could arise.

I try to imagine what a Pope with a firm sensus catholicus such as St. Pius X would have said — and done — had he learned of such episcopal malfeasance on his watch.  Yet, since 1973, Popes Paul VI, John Paul I and II, Benedict XVI and Francis have all had the opportunity to intervene to end this persistent scandal in the richest and arguably most globally influential national Catholic church.  It’s a sign of bad times that one of these negligent pontiffs has been named a saint and another beatified.

If we cannot trust most of our bishops to stand fast for life itself, can we really expect them to stand firm for marriage and chaste conduct?  I suppose we must fall all the way down before we can start to rise again.

One other question occurred to me as I read Mr. Gallagher’s article.  Mark Gallagher seems a faithful Catholic who sincerely wants his bishops to preach true Catholic doctrine on abortion and other moral issues.  Yet he was willing to work for the moral miscreants of the USCCB for 33 years, presumably constantly seeing his correctly formed views flouted.  How could he bear to be a spokesman for such people, for as many years as Our Lord was on this Earth?

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