On the culture of death and "single-issue anti-abortion zealots"

Bill McGurn's talk at Notre Dame, given last night, is available online in PDF format (ht: Francis Beckwith). A small taste of an excellent address:

In the past few weeks, we have read more than once the suggestion that to oppose this year’s speaker and honorary degree is to elevate politics over the proper work of a university. In many ways, we might say that such reasoning lies at the core of the confusion. As has become clear with America’s debates over the destruction of embryos for scientific research, over human cloning, over assisted suicide, and over other end-of-life issues, abortion as a legal right is less a single issue than an entire ethic that serves as the foundation stone for the culture of death.

With the idea that one human being has the right to take the life of another merely because the other’s life is inconvenient, our culture elevates into law the primacy of the strong over the weak. The discord that this year’s commencement has unleashed – between Notre Dame and the bishops, between members of the Notre Dame community, between Notre Dame and thousands of discouraged Catholic faithful – all this derives from an approach that for decades has treated abortion as one issue on a political scorecard. This is not the road to engagement. This is the route to incoherence, and we see its fruit everywhere in our public life.

Someone else once wrote something similar, worth quoting at length:

There is an even more profound aspect which needs to be emphasized: freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.

This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail. Still, in the face of other people's analogous interests, some kind of compromise must be found, if one wants a society in which the maximum possible freedom is guaranteed to each individual. In this way, any reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism. At that point, everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life.

This is what is happening also at the level of politics and government: the original and inalienable right to life is questioned or denied on the basis of a parliamentary vote or the will of one part of the people-even if it is the majority. This is the sinister result of a relativism which reigns unopposed: the "right" ceases to be such, because it is no longer firmly founded on the inviolable dignity of the person, but is made subject to the will of the stronger part. In this way democracy, contradicting its own principles, effectively moves towards a form of totalitarianism. The State is no longer the "common home" where all can live together on the basis of principles of fundamental equality, but is transformed into a tyrant State, which arrogates to itself the right to dispose of the life of the weakest and most defenceless members, from the unborn child to the elderly, in the name of a public interest which is really nothing but the interest of one part. The appearance of the strictest respect for legality is maintained, at least when the laws permitting abortion and euthanasia are the result of a ballot in accordance with what are generally seen as the rules of democracy. Really, what we have here is only the tragic caricature of legality; the democratic ideal, which is only truly such when it acknowledges and safeguards the dignity of every human person, is betrayed in its very foundations: "How is it still possible to speak of the dignity of every human person when the killing of the weakest and most innocent is permitted? In the name of what justice is the most unjust of discriminations practised: some individuals are held to be deserving of defence and others are denied that dignity?"  When this happens, the process leading to the breakdown of a genuinely human co-existence and the disintegration of the State itself has already begun.

To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom: "Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin" (Jn 8:34).

Of course, some will probably argue that Pope John Paul II was just another one of those "single-issue anti-abortion foes/zealots." This is similar to someone arguing that the American armed forces in the summer of 1944 were too fixated on D-Day and Normandy, when that focus was, in reality, a vital part of a larger matter, the Normandy Campaign. Abortion is a focal point for those fighting the culture of death because it is a raw and open assault on those who are most vulnerable, most defenseless, most silent. If abortion is okay, then all bets are off about the protection of any life—a fact that simply cannot be denied in this Brave New World filed with a rapidly growing list of "rights" that are as wrong as they are physically and spiritually deadly.

A professor of sociology recently wrote:

One such major trend is that the Roman Catholic Church in this country, with its prominent, adamant stances on sexual issues (abortion, contraception, a ban on married clergy and also on stem-cell research), is in danger of becoming somewhat marginalized as it is seen as essentially a single-issue institution.

He has it all wrong, of course. Attempts to marginalize the Catholic Church are being made, more openly and aggressively than ever, because the Church dares to defy the single-issue entity John Paul II rightly described as the "culture of death." The Catholic Church is a "single-issue institution" in this sense: her focus is life. Not just physical life, but spiritual life, both of which are gifts from God, are sacred, and are objectively good and worthy of protection and respect. "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy;" Jesus stated, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (Jn 10:10).

As McGurn astutely notes, attempts to make abortion just one of many issues are rooted in a devastating failure of moral vision and in a disingenuous but effective attack on life. After all, the "argument" goes, if abortion is just one of many rights and the Catholic Church is only concerned with abortion, then the Catholic Church is simply making herself irrelevant—so much the better to ignore her teachings on this, that, and everything else. Brilliant. And deadly. Just like the father of lies himself, who is, we should recall, "a murderer from the beginning" (Jn 8:44).

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles, Excerpts, & Interviews:

• Liberal Democracy as a Culture of Death: Why John Paul II Was Right | Dr. Raymond Dennehy | Ignatius Insight
• The Illusion of Freedom Separated from Moral Virtue | Raymond Dennehy
• Contraception and Homosexuality: The Sterile Link of Separation | Raymond Dennehy
• Peanuts and Thomists | Raymond Dennehy
• Human Sexuality and the Catholic Church | Donald P. Asci
• The Truth About Conscience | John F. Kippley
• Pope John Paul II and the Christ-centered Anthropology of Gaudium et Spes | Douglas Bushman
• John Paul the Great | William Oddie
• The Dignity of the Human Person: Pope John Paul II's Teaching on Divinization in the Trinitarian Encyclicals | Carl E. Olson
• The Case Against Abortion | An Interview with Dr. Francis Beckwith

Comments

[Kanakaberaka]

Was Bill Clinton the speaker at Notre Dame back when he first took office? If so why weren't there the same objections that we (justifiably) see against President Obama?

[Dan Deeny]

I spoke with Dan Carpenter, a pundit for the Indianapolis Star, about Pres. Obama's upcoming speech at Notre Dame and about his reversal of Pres. Bush's Mexico City Policy. Mr Carpenter said he supported Pres. Obama's speech because Pres. Obama is not a Catholic and is not bound by Catholic law. He supported Pres. Obama's reversal of the Mexico City Policy because women who have too many children (He used the term "25 children.") do not have a chance for a good life.
A Catholic university can bring a Klansman, a Nazi, a jihadist, or a pro-choice Catholic politician to give a speech and participate in a debate, but offering honorary degrees to such people is too much. Maybe Franciscan University in Steubenville should now be recognized as the premier Catholic university in the U.S.?

[Jackson]

Dan: The University of Dallas.

[gb]

Dear K,
Two wrongs don't make a right. The only silver lining to the mockery that NDU, Georgetown, Xavier U etc are making of the "Catholic" education they offer is that the people-in-the-pews are waking up. And, guess what, they're even waking up some their bishops.
So, while Bill Clinton was simply 'slick' & O is entirely overt about his disregard for life, the Catholic position on life hasn't changed, no matter how inconvenient it is. This speech by McGurn should be nailed Jenkins' door.

[Jeannine]

My understanding is that Notre Dame did not, in fact, ever invite or host President Clinton as a commencement speaker for this very reason: because of his stand on abortion. Am I wrong?

[John Campbell]

If Catholics simply voted their Faith, abortion would remain unthinkable in this country.

Now it is to our everlasting shame that since 1973, FIFTY MILLION FUTURE AMERICAN CITIZENS never saw the light of day.

What will it take for ALL of us who call ourselves 'Catholics' to stand up to this evil and say: "Enough!"

[Emily]

I heard Mr. McGurn give the 2008 commencement address at my sister's graduation from Benedictine College in Atchison, KS last year. It was fantastic. Here's a link if you'd like to read more from this good man.

http://www.benedictine.edu/benedictine.aspx?pgID=1186&newsID=1404&exCompID=358