Persuade or coerce? A response to Kenneth Woodward

Ken Woodward has decided it's time to challenge a speech I gave at Notre Dame twenty years ago, and John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president who, he says, may have been influenced by it. He does so by excerpting the speech selectively and, I regret to say, carelessly. He also finds it useful to review my life since 1984, probe my psyche, and announce that he has discovered I lacked "political courage," was guilty of "sophistry," and generally have not been as sincere about my religion as he is. I will not respond in kind. I am not interested in discerning Ken's hidden intentions, political preference (I have a guess here), private ambitions, or character weaknesses. He has been for a long time a successful professional writer on religion whose writings I have read and learned from without needing to wonder what he truly believed or only says he believes, judging instead only the words he has chosen to write.

My speech echoed the teaching of great American theologians like John Courtney Murray who told us it is a "foolish position to say all sins ought to be made crimes." Murray's position was consistent with Aquinas's observation that although civil law is concerned with leading everyone to virtue, it does so prudentially--gradually and not suddenly. Aquinas believed good law must be enforceable, otherwise it would be disregarded and risk causing contempt for all laws. These considerations seemed to me relevant in dealing with the subject of abortion as the governor of New York State in 1984, when it was already apparent that our church had failed to convince even our own members not to have abortions. The relevance was further illuminated by the fact that the church appeared to be making no effort to insist on civil laws against contraceptives, divorce and remarriage, and the death penalty. All of that remains true today, with the added significance of the church's refusal to speak out against what the pope and the bishops have called an unjust war in Iraq, although it has killed many thousands of human beings and continues to kill more every day; and the fact that the church in America continues to refuse to take an aggressive stand against the death penalty, although the pope and the new catechism clearly condemn it (in all places capable of imposing permanent life imprisonment) as plainly as they condemn abortion.

My 1984 speech said that I believed it was not the right time for the church to be punishing Catholic politicians or Catholic voters for failing to promote aggressively civil laws that would deny a woman the right to an abortion--even when not being able to legally obtain an abortion might lead to her death. The only really effective way of judging Ken's discursive attacks on the speech is to read the speech in its entirely. It's easily accessible on the Internet in a number of places, or from me (mcuomo@willkie.com), and it can be read in a half-hour or so. For now I will have to limit myself to pointing out a few of Ken's conclusions that I believe miss the mark.

Ken's article is principally a dissertation on abortion as a religious issue. It culminates in his confident assertion that a fetus is a human being from the moment of conception. He arrives at the conclusion not from scientific evidence he has gathered but because he says it is the current clear teaching of the church. Ken suggests--as have only a handful of American bishops out of three hundred that are in place--that Catholic politicians who do not promote the church's position on abortion aggressively are at fault politically and morally; he names John Kerry three times. He does so without pause to consider Fr. Murray, Aquinas, or the church's selective choice of grave matters it chooses to advocate.

Of course, if the proposition that human life begins at conception were as clear to the American people--or even just the Catholic people of America--as Ken makes it out to be, there would have been no speech in 1984, and Ken and Robert George, whom he quotes, would have no difficulty finding support in the Constitution for their position. The difficulty is that at the moment it is considered at best an article of faith accepted by only some of the faithful.

My speech was not a religious dissertation. If it were, I would have felt obliged to point out that not only does today's Catholic Church refuse to claim infallibility in teaching that the fetus is a human person from the time of conception, it is a conclusion that has troubled the church for centuries and that has been contradicted by the church's own actions in modern times. If the fetus is a human person from conception, every abortion, whether to save the life of the mother or not--except in limited cases where the principle of double effect might apply--would be prima facie a murder. But it wasn't until Pope Pius IX's 1869 decree that the church taught for the first time that ensoulment occurs at conception. Aquinas thought it would not happen for forty days, and Augustine confessed he did not know when the fetus became a human. Were they wrong? And if the church were certain it happened at conception, wouldn't the church have insisted on baptizing aborted fetuses and burying them in consecrated ground, which it has not? Is this the kind of evidence Ken and his followers believe we should present to the American people as we make the case that women should be denied the right to abortion even if it means the loss of their own life?