When Bishop Tobin countered Rep. Kennedy's broadside against the U.S. bishops' stand on abortion and health reform, the Providence ordinary clearly struck a nerve among pro-choice Catholics. In the latest installment, Chris Matthews interrogated Bishop Tobin on Hardball and suggested that the good bishop had made unacceptable demands on Kennedy.
Ramesh Pomeru follows up with a brisk repudiation of Matthews' stance on National Review, and makes several excellent points:
"The Church's teaching is that the state has a duty to protect peaceable human beings in the embryonic and fetal stages of development (as at all subsequent stages) from being deliberately killed; to wish that the law would ignore that teaching is to reject it.
"The second point is ridiculous (and the third therefore collapses too). Let's say that the bishops said that the government has a duty to help the poor and sick by enacting legislation to expand the number of people with health insurance. Would Matthews really rule their comments out of bounds unless they went on to draw up a bill to reach that goal? (Would it have to be 2,000 pages long?) In that case I suspect that Matthews would be fine with their laying out of a goal. Would he criticize the bishops' comments on the death penalty unless they outlined a detailed penal code they would support? In that case I think he would be able to see that they could support a wide range of legal regimes so long as they did not involve capital punishment. In the case of abortion, as well, a wide range of legal regimes is compatible with adherence to the norm that the law should prohibit the intentional killing of unborn human beings. Not only do the bishops not need to pick one of those regimes; they would be wrong to suggest that the Church's teachings lead to one specific regime of penalties.
"There are other sound arguments that could be deployed against Matthews, but I'll just mention one more thing: The Church isn't actually ordering the congressmen to vote in any particular way; it is telling him the conditions for his reception of communion."
Update: I was out in California over the Thanksgiving holidays and was surprised to read a Los Angeles Times editorial strongly attacking the Manhattan Declaration, already noted in a previous post. After what might be called a kind of truce, we are witnessing a new era of increased hostility toward assertive church leaders. Stay tuned for the next installment.
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