The Anti-Abortion Movement Can’t Use This Myth Anymore

Covid-19 may end up inadvertently speeding up abortion progress in America — and exposing conservative hypocrisy along the way.

May 13, 2021

By Jessica Valenti

Ms. Valenti is the author of six books on feminism.

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration announced that people seeking abortion pills during the Covid-19 pandemic will no longer have to visit a doctor’s office to get a prescription. Under the Trump administration, patients were required to receive the first of the medication’s two doses in person, a mandate upheld by the Supreme Court in January. The new policy instead allows for telemedicine consultations and pills sent by mail.

The decision is a practical one for the Covid era: It reduces unnecessary face time in doctor’s offices, which cuts down the potential for exposure. It could also be a huge blow to the anti-abortion movement. Groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have been pushing the Biden administration to make the F.D.A.’s decision permanent. Last week, in a legal filing, the agency announced it was reviewing their restrictions on the medication.

For years, anti-abortion activists have tried to impose their morality under the guise of women’s health and protection. Legislators have proposed anti-choice bills with names like “woman’s right to know,” which sound compassionate but in reality force doctors to falsely claim that women who end their pregnancies suffer physical and mental harm. The primary political strategy of abortion foes relies on the claim that abortion is brutal and dangerous, a myth that is much harder to perpetuate when people can easily access medicine to safely end their pregnancies at home.

Early abortion and medication abortion are already the norm. As of 2017, almost 40 percent of women who ended a pregnancy had chosen pills over an in-office procedure. Medication abortion is safer than over-the-counter ibuprofen, with serious complications occurring in about 0.5 percent of patients. Multiple studies have also confirmed the efficacy of abortion consultation via telemedicine.

Every abortion advancement — from earlier, less invasive procedures to increased access to medication abortion — forces anti-choice activists and legislators to show their most extremist hand: Their goals have almost nothing to do with health, safety or even babies but everything to do with controlling women.

Those who continue to insist that ending a pregnancy is terrifying and gruesome don’t have science — or common sense — on their side. Though anti-choice activists contend that medication abortion puts women in grave danger, waiting for your pregnancy to end at home after taking a few pills doesn’t fit into that narrative. Nor does telling the truth about abortion more broadly.

In 2018, nearly 78 percent of women who had abortions ended their pregnancies in the first nine weeks (before the embryo becomes a fetus), and nearly 90 percent of abortions occurred in the first 13 weeks. In early abortions, the procedure usually takes less than 10 minutes; in the earliest weeks, women can opt for a nonsurgical manual aspiration procedure, which uses the suction of a simple syringe. Complications are more common in getting a wisdom tooth pulled than in ending a pregnancy.

And so abortion opponents focus on the false or the rare — anything to bolster the assertion that ending a pregnancy is brutal business. It’s why Republicans (like former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence) have falsely claimed that women are getting abortions up until the moment of birth and that states allowing compassionate withdrawal of care from terminally ill babies are actually legalizing infanticide.

It’s also why conservative lawmakers are so intent on passing 20-week bans — as they’ve done in multiple states — even though the small number of abortions performed after that point are almost always owing to severe fetal abnormalities or to save the life or protect the health of the mother.

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What’s most troubling, though, is that because the anti-choice movement relies on a grisly political message, it would seem the movement has a political interest in stopping the safest and earliest kinds of abortion. In fact, the kinds of procedures Republicans claim to be the most appalled by also happen to be the abortions their policies are most responsible for. These are hurdles put in place by lawmakers who block Medicaid funding for abortion and put clinics out of business through onerous and arbitrary regulations, such as mandating that clinics have specifically sized hallways.

And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two of the three states with the highest percentage of abortions performed after 15 weeks also happen to have some of the toughest anti-choice laws in the country: Arkansas’s governor signed into law a near-total ban on abortion in March, even in cases of rape and incest; Missouri has only one abortion clinic left in the state.

If conservatives truly wanted to curb later abortions, they wouldn’t make it so incredibly difficult for so many women to get earlier ones. Of course, if their concern were actually about women’s health and safety, they wouldn’t be trying to make abortion illegal at all.

The F.D.A.’s new rule on telemedicine consultations and abortion by mail will soon arm pro-choice organizations with more studies reiterating the safety of medication abortion and show how shipping pills poses no risk to patients. It will also make it that much more difficult for opponents to make specious arguments about unsafe practices.

Exposing this hypocrisy doesn’t come without a risk. If current trends continue, people ending their pregnancies will increasingly do so at home — circumventing the restrictive policies focused on clinics. Without the ability to use science, reason or even scare tactics in their messaging and legislation, Republicans will, as they have in the past, resort to punitive measures. Already, multiple women who have used medication abortion without going through a doctor have been arrested — and in some cases charged.

For women who live far from clinics or who can’t take extended time off work to travel, access to this medication could be the difference between being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy and making safe choices about their own lives and futures.

That’s why it’s so important that those who care about abortion rights redouble their efforts to make medication abortion permanently legally available by mail.

Jessica Valenti is the author of six books on feminism and publishes the newsletter All in Her Head.

 

The Long, Cruel History of the Anti-Abortion Crusade

Abortion opponents don’t care what happens to an unwanted child, and they’ve never cared about the mother.

June 23, 2019

By John Irving

Mr. Irving is a novelist and a screenwriter.

Amid the anti-abortion measures being pushed through state legislatures, consider the mazy history of abortion in the United States. Women, capable of determining and managing their reproductive rights, have been undermined by men in power before.

Prior to the 1840s, abortion was widespread and not illegal in our country. In the time of the Puritans, America’s deeply religious founding fathers, abortion was allowed until the fetus was “quick” — when the woman could feel the fetus move. Before modern diagnostic ultrasound, abortion was permissible beyond the first trimester — up to four or five months. Our founding fathers got this right; the choice to have an abortion or a child belonged to the woman.

Beginning in the 1840s, and continuing over decades, abortion was outlawed state by state, becoming illegal everywhere in the United States by 1900 — until 1973, when the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision held that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion. For more than two centuries, after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, abortion was largely permitted. Why was it prohibited for almost a century?

In the 1830s, women having babies at lying-in hospitals ran a far greater risk of dying from puerperal sepsis than women having babies at home. With the help of midwives, women had been having babies and abortions at home — since colonial times. Had midwives been as busy performing abortions as delivering babies? Beginning in the 1840s, doctors sought to gain control of the reproduction business. Doctors were establishing their new profession; midwives and homeopaths were their competition. But why did doctors lobby for abortion to be illegal? What was their logic? Did doctors underestimate how great the need for abortion was? We know what the doctors wanted, and they achieved it; they became the arbiters of women’s reproductive health care. We don’t know the doctors’ reasons for making abortion illegal. In the 1840s, the fetus wasn’t yet sacred. Fetal life was still defined by “quickening” — when the woman felt the fetus move, not before the fourth or fifth month. From the 1840s to 1900, we know the results of what the doctors did — not their thoughts.

One job of a society with a social conscience is to rescue its citizens who are trapped, who are painted into a corner. I see my job as a fiction writer with a social conscience as the opposite. As a storyteller, I look for worst-case scenarios; my job is to trap my characters. I began “The Cider House Rules,” my sixth novel, in the early 1980s. I purposely wrote a historical novel, beginning in the 1920s, when abortion was illegal, unsafe and (for the most part) unavailable. Maine was one of the first states to make abortion illegal; I put the orphanage I called St. Cloud’s in Maine. I purposely painted my protagonist, Homer Wells, into a corner. Homer is an orphan; his several adoptions don’t work out. Homer keeps coming back to the orphanage — St. Cloud’s is his only home. Dr. Larch, the orphanage physician (and abortionist), teaches Homer to be a doctor. In Dr. Larch’s opinion, Homer has near-perfect obstetrical and gynecological procedure. But Homer doesn’t want to perform abortions. He’s an orphan; his mother let him live.

Homer has no argument with Dr. Larch’s decision to give women what they want, but Homer has a personal reason (and a good one) not to perform abortions. Here’s the corner Homer is painted into: How can Homer not feel obligated to help women, when women can’t get help from anyone else? If women have no choice, how can doctors have a choice? Homer will leave St. Cloud’s; he refuses to perform abortions. What he will encounter, in the world outside the orphanage, is a woman who can’t get help from anyone else. The death of Dr. Larch will bring Homer back to the orphanage — this time, to be the physician (and the abortionist) at St. Cloud’s. In a no-choice world, Homer is trapped.

It took 14 years to make the film of “The Cider House Rules.” I won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Over time, it’s more meaningful to me that the movie also won a Maggie Award — named after Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, in recognition of “exceptional achievement in support of reproductive rights.”

I respect your personal reasons not to have an abortion — no one is forcing you to have one. I respect your choice. I’m pro-choice — often called pro-abortion by the anti-abortion crusaders, although no one is pro-abortion. What’s unequal about the argument is the choice; the difference between pro-life and pro-choice is the choice. Pro-life proponents have no qualms about forcing women to go through childbirth — they give women no choice.

Before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, the opposition to abortion wasn’t widely referred to as right to life. Pope Pius XII used the “right to life” term in a 1951 papal encyclical — an “Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession.” “Every human being, even the child in the womb, has the right to life directly from God and not from his parents, not from any society or human authority,” the pope told the midwives. Poor midwives — first doctors stop them from helping women, then the pope. I must remind the Roman Catholic Church of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In other words, we are free to practice the religion of our choice, and we are protected from having someone else’s religion practiced on us. Freedom of religion in the United States also means freedom from religion.

The “pro-life” term was adopted by anti-abortion crusaders after the Roe v. Wade decision. The anti-abortion cause didn’t promote itself as “pro-life” until the more punitive-sounding “anti-abortion” label failed. In 1976, with the passing of the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting the use of federal funds for most abortions, opposition to abortion gained support among Republicans. The Christian right was on the rise; their socially conservative policies are inseparable from today’s Republican Party. In 1980, aided by the Baptist minister Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, the pro-life zealots took control of the Republican Party’s platform committee. Four anti-abortion presidents followed — Ronald Reagan, George H. W. and George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Isn’t it as clear now as it was in the Reagan years? Aren’t the same people who sacralize the fetus generally opposed to any meaningful welfare for unwanted children and unmarried mothers?

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The prevailing impetus to oppose abortion is to punish the woman who doesn’t want the child. The sacralizing of the fetus is a ploy. How can “life” be sacred (and begin at six weeks, or at conception), if a child’s life isn’t sacred after it’s born? Clearly, a woman’s life is never sacred; as clearly, a woman has no reproductive rights. The Roman Catholic Church, and many evangelical and fundamentalist churches, willfully subject women to mandatory childbirth and motherhood — procreation is deemed a woman’s primary purpose and function. I’m not overstating. In his 1951 “Address to Midwives,” Pope Pius XII states that “the procreation and upbringing of a new life” is the primary end of marriage.

When “The Cider House Rules” was published, some of my younger friends and fellow feminists thought it was quaint that I’d written a historical novel about abortion. They meant: now that abortion rights were secure, now that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. At the time, I tried to say this nicely: “If you think Roe v. Wade is safe, you’re one of the reasons it isn’t.” Not surprisingly, my older women friends — women who were old enough to have had sex before 1973 — knew better than to imagine that Roe v. Wade would ever be safe. Men and women have to keep making the case for women’s reproductive rights; women have been making the case for years, but more men need to speak up.

Of an unmarried woman or girl who got pregnant, people of my grandparents’ generation used to say: “She is paying the piper.” Meaning, she deserves what she gets — namely, to give birth to a child. That cruelty is the abiding impetus behind the dishonestly named right-to-life movement. Pro-life always was (and remains) a marketing term. Whatever the anti-abortion crusaders call themselves, they don’t care what happens to an unwanted child — not after the child is born — and they’ve never cared about the mother.

John Irving is writing his 15th novel, and is adapting his fourth novel, “The World According to Garp,” for television.

 

The Catholic Church’s Reproductive Fight Is About Controlling Women’s Freedom

May 27, 20

By Jamie Manson

Ms. Manson is the president of Catholics for Choice and a former columnist for The National Catholic Reporter.

Last summer, after years of excruciating menstrual pain and anemia caused by excessive bleeding, I saw a gynecological specialist. He ordered an M.R.I., suspecting the cause was endometriosis. I instinctively grab my rosary when I’m anxious. For days after the test, I moved bead to bead, praying that the radiologist would find signs of disease so that I could find appropriate treatment. But the test showed a perfectly healthy uterus.

Normal or not, my symptoms continued to worsen, to the point that the doctor agreed that the answer to ending my pain was a hysterectomy. I was 43 years old. As a longtime advocate for women’s equality and reproductive freedom, I was surprised not to encounter the resistance so many women face from the medical community and society when I made this choice. Women are often told that they will regret losing their ability to have children. My doctor understood I knew what was right for my life, my body and my health. It felt like a miracle.

And yet after I scheduled my surgery, I was haunted by a Catholic teaching about women formulated by Pope John Paul II as part of his larger “theology of the body.” He was deeply concerned about the rising threat of feminism — particularly the growing movement in Protestant denominations to ordain women to the priesthood — and needed to articulate why Catholic women could not enjoy roles equal to men’s. He formulated the phrase “feminine genius” to explain that women’s most essential purpose and their fulfillment are based on their biological capacity to nurture, gestate and give birth. By extension, then, a uterus is God’s way of showing a woman that her primary role is to be a mother, literally and figuratively.

I have spent nearly 20 years of my life as a Catholic theologian, lay minister and activist struggling against these insidious papal teachings. I was the last person, I thought, who would ever be vulnerable to John Paul II’s attempt to limit women’s power and potential with theological gymnastics. Yet I still struggled to shake that deeply ingrained notion that I was throwing away God’s most important gift.


Even among those of us who boldly proclaim our dissent from Catholic teachings on abortion, the church still holds great power. That power has been on display since President Biden, a devout Catholic, won the 2020 election. The U.S. bishops immediately fell back on the trope of threatening to deny him and other elected officials, like the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, access to communion because they support abortion rights. Though these punishments have long existed as idle warnings, the issue recently escalated: The U.S. bishops plan to vote at their next assembly in June on whether they can formalize this response. To its credit, even the Vatican, under Pope Francis, has expressed reservations about the American bishops’ latest maneuver.

The U.S. bishops’ abuse of the sacraments as a tool of intimidation has major political repercussions. It’s no accident that Mr. Biden still has not uttered the word “abortion” since his election and his administration often uses euphemisms like “women’s health care,” “choice,” “bodily autonomy” and “reproductive rights.”

This is unfortunate, because Mr. Biden is in good company. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey affirmed that 68 percent of U.S. Catholics don’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. And Catholic Americans get abortions at the same rate as other Americans.

Abortion isn’t the only issue where there is a chasm between what the clergy preaches and what the laity believes and practices. The Catholic Church is the only major religious institution that opposes the use of contraception and reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization. A 2011 Guttmacher Institute study found that 98 percent of sexually active American women of reproductive age who identify as Catholic have used some form of contraceptive at least once in their lives, and a 2013 Pew survey showed a scant 13 percent of U.S. Catholics believe that in vitro fertilization is morally wrong.

The hierarchy’s influence over its flock has been slipping for decades, which why it has cleverly pivoted to lobbying lawmakers. Catholic organizations have spent years in the Supreme Court making claims to religious liberty that have stripped away U.S. women’s rights to free contraceptives, workplace protections and access to health care. When Catholic leaders flex their considerable policy muscle, their doctrines affect us all, Catholic and non-Catholic.

Unlike other religious leaders, members of the Catholic clergy, as an all-male, celibate group, do not have wives or daughters to give them a sense of women’s experience. Yet their pervasive theology shapes policies that cause women untold suffering. It’s the basis for the hierarchy’s demand that a woman be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, even one that resulted from rape or one that threatens her life. It’s also the specter that makes women forgo hysterectomies because, we are told, it’s better to endure suffering than lose the possibility of giving birth. Women, in other words, are reduced to vessels, one in which the potential, theoretical life that might be is privileged over the living, breathing person at risk.

But Catholics should ask themselves whether the church’s anti-abortion fight is less about babies and more about controlling women’s fertility and, with that, women’s freedom. Bishops have notably little to say about methods to control male sexuality. They never turn vasectomies into a culture war issue. Though Catholic health care plans take pains to excise contraceptives from their coverage, treatments for male impotence are not prohibited, even though there is no certainty that men will use those drugs with their wives in order to procreate — the only kind of sex that the church condones.

Understanding the motivations behind these doctrines is important, even for the unchurched, because giving pregnant people the legal right to have control and agency over their bodies translates to other aspects of their lives, namely the capacity to claim political, economic and social autonomy.

Virulent anti-abortion rhetoric from on high has kept the majority of pro-choice Catholics silent — including the president of the United States. Now that the Supreme Court, with its six Catholic justices (five of whom espouse extremely conservative religious views), has decided to take up a case that is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, there has never been a more urgent moment to speak out boldly as people of faith who support the right to access abortion.

We must reject the silencing and stigma that church leaders use to seal off any questioning, dialogue or education around this issue. Catholics, in particular, must push through our conditioned discomfort. Members of a privileged, patriarchal caste of religious leaders are the only ones who benefit when we are afraid to say the word “abortion” in our affirmation of reproductive rights.

When my pathology report came back after my surgery, I discovered that my “perfectly healthy” uterus was in fact riddled with endometriosis and cysts. The initial tests the doctor conducted were unable to detect what I knew instinctively: A hysterectomy was a necessary and potentially lifesaving operation. My prayers were answered through medical intervention.

I’m grateful the pangs of religious guilt did not keep me from a procedure that has transformed my health and my quality of life. But I realized that if someone like me, who has made a career out of boldly proclaiming my dissent from church doctrines on sexuality and reproduction, can still be susceptible to its manipulations, who among us isn’t?

Jamie L. Manson is the president of Catholics for Choice and has a master’s in divinity.

The Ungovernable Catholic Church

The Ungovernable Catholic Church July 27, 2021 By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist

The latest dramatic move by Pope Francis — his recent order abrogating the right of Roman Catholic priests to say their church’s traditional Latin Mass — fits neatly within a historical analogy that’s useful for understanding the larger drama of Catholicism: Namely, the church since the 1960s has been reliving the experience of France after 1789, with the arc of revolution and counterrevolution embodied in each successive pope.

 

This analogy belongs to a writer named Arturo Vasquez, a Catholic traditionalist turned disillusioned observer of the church, who teased it out in a short essay in 2019, expanding on an earlier reference by Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI. In this story, the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and its aftermath is the initial revolutionary moment — the apparent reconciliation with liberalism and modernity, the stripped altars and the reinvented liturgy, and the subsequent struggle of various factions to claim power, with apparent radical victories coexisting with the partial Thermidor of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical forbidding artificial contraception.

 

Then John Paul II is Napoleon: the outsider — Polish rather than Corsican — who favors “rule by charisma and geopolitical power plays,” who trades on the symbols of both the revolution and the previous regime, in a pontificate that displays “characteristics of a traditional mentality (Marian piety, conservative sexual morality, anti-communism)” but also ratifies important parts of the revolution, in personnel and rhetoric and canon law.

 

Then comes Benedict XVI, with a spirit closer to the royalist restoration that followed Napoleon: His appointments are more consistently conservative, his attitude toward the secular world and its “dictatorship of relativism” is more critical and embattled, and he restores not just certain costumes and gestures but also the pre-Vatican II liturgy itself, not in full but as an option with the same validity as the new liturgy, a tangible reminder of an older way of faith.

 

And now his successor — with Benedict alive to see it — seeks to suppress the old Mass once again, distilling in a single act Vasquez’s suggestion that “Pope Francis is the 1848 revolution of the Catholic Church.”

 

What the 1848 analogy illustrates isn’t just Francis’ role as a would-be liberalizer, his attempts to push forward with changes that were ruled out in the church’s Napoleonic and restoration phases — most notably, changes to church regulations on marriage and divorce. It also points to the way that the Francis era has revealed, much as 1848 did to the conservative forces of order in 19th-century Europe, how fully the previous revolution had taken hold, so that a conservative or traditionalist pope can no more simply put the genie back into the bottle than 19th-century monarchists could reimpose an 18th-century political system.

 

Conservatives could ignore this reality as long as they felt they held the Vatican — even when, Vasquez argues, “the actual church in its vast majority was closer to Pope Francis than it ever was to Pope Benedict XVI or even John Paul II.” But now that the majority has a pope in its own image, subverting or sweeping away some of his predecessors’ most important acts, the weakness of the conservative party is laid bare.

 

Notably, though, apart from revealing the failure of the restoration, 1848 settled nothing about the future of France, let alone of Europe. It mostly revealed a political landscape that was ungovernable by either liberals or royalists and set the stage for ideological battles yet to come.

 

In a similar way, if the changes and reversals of the Francis era are breaking a particular narrative beloved of Catholic conservatives, in which the Roman pontiff guides the church through late-modern controversies with near-infallible wisdom, that breakage doesn’t tell us where the church will end up 50 years or 100 years from now. The failure of the restoration is not the final victory of the revolution; it is only a sign of total uncertainty about what now lies ahead.

 

For instance, to say that Francis is closer to the spirit of mass Catholicism than his predecessors is not to say that mass Catholicism directly mirrors his complex mix of 1960s-era and Jesuit and Latin American ideas about the church, let alone the more thoroughgoing liberal Catholicism of some of his advisers. It’s to say that mass Catholicism reflects his turbulent spirit, his impatience with ecclesial forms, his sense of church teaching as a zone of contest and debate, his idea of a decentralized and experimental Catholic system — all of which cashes out as its own kind of ungovernability, with many different forces empowered and contending all at once.

 

The attempted suppression of the old Mass is a good example. On the one hand, Francis is attempting to use centralized authority to complete the revolution of Vatican II, to consign definitively to the past a liturgy that’s often a locus of resistance to the council’s changes. (It’s many other things as well, but Francis is not wrong to see it playing that role.)

 

At the same time, precisely because of the development of the revolution, his authority may not be strong enough to achieve this goal. The decentralization that liberals desire on doctrinal issues, the disillusioning impact of the sex abuse scandals, the doubts about a Vatican that keeps changing its mind from papacy to papacy, the role of the internet as a rallying point against disliked authority — these factors will make many bishops reluctant to act as Rome’s enforcers and probably allow the old Mass to persist.

 

To put it another way, some of Francis’ moves have seemed designed to restore the church as it looked in 1975, after the revolutionary decade and before John Paul II and Benedict. But the church of 1975 could actually suppress the old Mass, for a time, for the same reason that the church of 1975 could suppress, for a time, the evidence of priest sex abuse: It still had enough of its old authority, and the technological disruption was not yet ripe. Whereas in the church of 2021, conservative Catholic journalists just exposed the secret sex life of a notable American monsignor who was active on Grindr while he was responsible for formulating sexual-misconduct policy. Whether you’re theologically left or right, it’s disruption all the way down.

 

Then there is also a crucial way the 1848 analogy breaks down. The grand ideological contests of the 19th century were battles to control an institution, the modern state, that was strong and growing stronger and from whose power and reach it was difficult for dissenters to escape. The contest for control of Catholicism is a battle for an institution that’s been dramatically weakened by all sorts of trends and that people can simply exit — without having to emigrate or even dramatically change their weekday life — when they’re disillusioned or defeated or just tired.

 

This creates a deep unpredictability about what counts as long-term strength within the church. Traditionalists proclaim that their Masses are full while many modernized parishes and dioceses decline, and accuse Francis of trying to choke off a growing and often youthful movement. Liberals counter that old-rite Massgoers are a tiny minority in the United States and Europe and an even tinier one in the context of the global church and that all the trend stories about young traditionalists mistake anecdotes for data.

 

Both have a point. The liberals are right that there is no great traditionalist groundswell among everyday Catholics. But the trads are right that there is a diverse cadre of younger Catholics, priests especially, who are traditionally inclined and likely to be increasingly influential in the otherwise diminished church of 2040, assuming the pope’s attempt at suppression fails.

 

It’s a condensed example of a larger trend, in which conservative Catholicism is weaker than conservatives imagined in the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict, but liberal Catholicism shares in the crisis of confidence afflicting secular-liberal institutions and struggles to turn sympathy and soft affiliation into full religious zeal.

 

“Finding young candidates for the priesthood,” a liberal Jesuit, Father Thomas Reese, wrote recently, “who support Francis and want to be celibate is like looking for Catholic unicorns” — an exaggeration but directionally correct. Which in turn explains why the most liberal precincts of Catholicism, the German church especially, feel that Francis hasn’t gone nearly far enough toward a less priestly and more Protestantized church and that the only way to really serve the revolution is to push onward, from 1848 to 1871 or 1917.

 

In the divisions of the church, the pressure toward traditionalist and progressive extremes, both Latin Massgoers and German Protestantizers recognize the fact of Catholic decline. Both believe the other’s vision would break the church in order to save it. Both have weaknesses and very different sorts of strength. The outcome of their struggle is — as good Catholics know — somehow foreordained. But more than at any other point in my lifetime, neither past analogies nor present trends supply much clarity about the church’s future, and the better part of wisdom is to simply say, “God knows.”

Pope Francis Is Tearing the Catholic Church Apart

For my friends who can't access NYT content due to the paywall, I herewith do a bit of "cut and paste". These are opinion pieces which demonstrate to me a considerable amount of thought, and not just knee-jerk reaction.

Pope Francis Is Tearing the Catholic Church Apart Aug. 12, 2021 By Michael Brendan Dougherty [Mr. Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review, has written extensively about faith and the Roman Catholic Church.]

 

In the summer of 2001, I drove up to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to find what we called “the traditional Latin Mass,” the form of Roman Catholic worship that stretched back centuries and was last authorized in 1962, before the Second Vatican Council changed everything. Back then, conservative Catholics called people who sought it out “schismatics” and “Rad Trads.”

 

The Mass-goers there weren’t exactly a community; we were a clandestine network of romantics, haters of Pope John Paul II, people who had been jilted by the mainstream church and — I believe — some saints.

 

There I learned that the Latin language was not the only distinguishing feature of this form of worship. The entire ritual was different from the post-Vatican II Mass. It wasn’t a mere translation into the modern vernacular; less than 20 percent of the Latin Mass survived into the new.

 

It took me a month to adapt to its rhythm. But in that thick August air, the long silence before the consecration of the host fell upon my heart, like sunshine landing on the bud of prayer for the very first time.

 

Years later, Pope Benedict allowed devotees of this Mass to flourish in the mainstream of Catholic life, a gesture that began to drain away the traditional movement’s radicalism and reconcile us with our bishops. Today, it is celebrated in thriving parishes, full of young families.

 

Yet this Mass and the modestly growing contingent of Catholics who attend it are seen by Pope Francis as a grave problem. He recently released a document, Traditionis Custodes, accusing Catholics like us of being subversives. To protect the “unity” of the church, he abolished the permissions Pope Benedict XVI gave us in 2007 to celebrate a liturgy, the heart of which remains unchanged since the seventh century. For those of us who travel long distances to participate in it, its perseverance is a religious duty. For the pope, its suppression is a religious priority. The ferocity of his campaign will push these young families and communities toward the radicalism I imbibed years ago in Poughkeepsie, before Benedict. It will push them toward the belief that the new Mass represents a new religion, one dedicated to the unity of man on earth rather than the love of Christ.

 

In the Latin Mass, the priest faces the altar with the people. It never had oddities, as you sometimes encounter in a modern Mass, like balloons, guitar music or applause. The gabby religious talk-show host style of priest is gone. In his place, a priest who does his business quietly, a workmanlike sculptor. By directing the priest toward the drama at the altar, the old Mass opens up space for our own prayer and contemplation.

 

In the years after Pope Benedict liberalized the old rite, parishes began to bring back the mystical tones of Gregorian chant, the sacred polyphony written by long-dead composers like Orlando Lassus and Thomas Tallis as well as contemporary composers like Nicholas Wilton and David Hughes.

 

These cultural offshoots of the Latin Mass are why, after Vatican II, the English novelists Agatha Christie and Nancy Mitford and other British cultural luminaries sent a letter to Pope Paul VI asking that it continue. Their letter doesn’t even pretend to be from believing Christians. “The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has also inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts — not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians.”

 

But the Vatican Council had called for a revision of every aspect of the central act of worship, so the altar rails, tabernacles and baldachins were torn up in countless parishes. This ferment was accompanied by radical new theologies around the Mass. A freshman religious studies major would know that revising all the vocal and physical aspects of a ceremony and changing the rationale for it constitutes a true change of religion. Only overconfident Catholic bishops could imagine otherwise.

 

The most candid progressives agreed with the radical traditionalists that the council constituted a break with the past. They called Vatican II “a new Pentecost” — an “Event” — that had given the church a new self-understanding. They believed their revolution had been stalled in 1968 when Pope Paul VI issued “Humanae Vitae,” affirming the church’s opposition to artificial contraception, and then put it on ice in 1978 with the election of Pope John Paul II.

 

To stamp out the old Latin Mass, Pope Francis is using the papacy in precisely the way that progressives once claimed to deplore: He centralizes power in Rome, usurps the local bishop’s prerogatives and institutes a micromanaging style that is motivated by paranoia of disloyalty and heresy. Perhaps it’s to protect his deepest beliefs.

 

Pope Francis envisions that we will return to the new Mass. My children cannot return to it; it is not their religious formation. Frankly, the new Mass is not their religion. In countless alterations, the belief that the Mass was a real sacrifice and that the bread and wine, once consecrated, became the body and blood of our Lord was downplayed or replaced in it. With the priest facing the people, the altar was severed from the tabernacle. The prescribed prayers of the new Mass tended never even to refer to that structure anymore as an altar but as the Lord’s table. The prayers that pointed to the Lord’s real presence in the sacrament were conspicuously replaced with ones emphasizing the Lord’s spiritual presence in the assembled congregation.

 

The prayers of the traditional Mass emphasized that the priest was re-presenting the same sacrifice Christ made at Calvary, one that propitiated God’s wrath at sin and reconciled humanity to God. The new Mass portrayed itself as a narrative and historical remembrance of the events recalled in Scripture, and the offering and sacrifice was not of Christ, but of the assembled people, as the most commonly used Eucharistic prayer in the new Mass says, “from age to age you gather a people to Thyself, in order that from east to west a perfect offering may be made.”

 

For Catholics, how we pray shapes what we believe. The old ritual physically aims us toward an altar and tabernacle. In that way it points us to the cross and to heaven as the ultimate horizon of man’s existence. By doing so, it shows that God graciously loves us and redeems us despite our sins. And the proof is in the culture this ritual produces. Think of Mozart’s great rendition of faith in the Eucharist: “Ave Verum Corpus” (Hail True Body).

 

The new ritual points us toward a bare table, and it consistently posits the unity of humankind as the ultimate horizon of our existence. In the new Mass, God owes man salvation, because of the innate dignity of humanity. Where there was faith, now presumption. Where there was love, now mere affirmation, which is indistinguishable from indifference. It inspires weightless ditties like “Gather Us In.” Let’s sing about us!

 

I believe the practice of the new Mass forms people to a new faith: To become truly Christian, one must cease to be Christian at all. Where the new faith is practiced with a zealous spirit — as in Germany now — bishops and priests want to conform the religion’s teaching to the moral norms of the nonbelieving society around them. When the new faith was young, after the council, it expressed itself in tearing up the statues, the ceremonies and religious devotions that existed before.

 

I don’t know if bishops will adopt Francis’ zeal to crush the Latin Mass. I don’t know how painful they are willing to make our religious life. If they do, they will create — or reveal — more division in the church. The old slogan of the traditional Latin Mass movement comes to mind: We resist you to the face.

 

I have faith that one day, even secular historians will look upon what was wrought after Vatican II and see it for what it was: the worst spasm of iconoclasm in the church’s history — dwarfing the Byzantine iconoclasm of the ninth century and the Protestant Reformation. Pope Benedict had temporarily allowed us to begin repairing the damage. What Pope Francis proposes with his crackdown is a new cover-up.

 

Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review and a visiting fellow for the social, cultural and constitutional studies division at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home.”

The Vatican Refuses to Agree to Deny Biden Communion over Abortion Issue

 Reprint of "Vatican Warns Bishops Not to Deny Communion" for those who hit the paywall

ROME — The Vatican has warned conservative American bishops to hit the brakes on their push to deny communion to politicians supportive of abortion rights — including President Biden, a faithful churchgoer and the first Roman Catholic to occupy the Oval Office in 60 years.

But despite the remarkably public stop sign from Rome, the American bishops are pressing ahead anyway and are expected to force a debate on the communion issue at a remote meeting that starts on Wednesday.

Some leading bishops, whose priorities clearly aligned with former President Donald J. Trump, now want to reassert the centrality of opposition to abortion in the Catholic faith and lay down a hard line — especially with a liberal Catholic in the Oval Office.

The vote threatens to shatter the facade of unity with Rome, highlight the political polarization within the American church and set what church historians consider a dangerous precedent for bishops’ conferences across the globe.

“The concern in the Vatican,” said Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest and close ally of Francis “is not to use access to the Eucharist as a political weapon.”

Pope Francis, who has explicitly identified the United States as the source of opposition to his pontificate, preached this month that communion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.” His top doctrinal official, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, wrote a letter to the American bishops, warning them that the vote could “become a source of discord rather than unity within the episcopate and the larger church in the United States.”

The result is a rare, open rift between Rome and the American church.

Opponents of the vote suspect a more naked political motivation, aimed at weakening the president, and a pope many of them disagree with, with a drawn-out debate over a document that is sure to be amplified in the conservative Catholic media and on right-wing cable news programs.

Asked about the communion issue, Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said, “As the American people know well, the president is a strong person of faith.”

Pope Francis, along with the rest of his church’s hierarchy, explicitly opposes abortion, which they consider among the gravest sins, and incessantly speaks out against it. But that is not the same as punishing Catholic lawmakers with the denial of communion, which many here believe would be an intrusion into matters of stAmong those leading the effort is Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who has been passed over repeatedly by Francis for elevation to the rank of cardina“The focus of this proposed teaching document,” Archbishop Gomez wrote in a memo, “is on how best to help people to understand the beauty and the mystery of the Eucharist as the center of their Christian lives.”

The conservative American bishops are largely out of step with Francis and his agenda of putting climate change, migrants and poverty on the church’s front burner. But Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest, and a senior analyst with Religion News Service, said conservatives constitute at least half of the American bishops’ conference and could have the votes to begin the process of drafting a teaching document about who can receive communion.

It is unlikely the conservatives would be able to ultimately ratify such a document, which would require unanimous support from all the country’s bishops, or two-thirds support and the Vatican’s approval. But the debate promises to keep the issue alive and present a nagging headache for President Biden and other Catholic politicians who support abortion rights.

A good portion of the bishops want to avoid the question altogether. Already, 67 American bishops, about a third of the conference, and including top cardinals aligned with Francis, signed a letter on May 13 asking Archbishop Gomez to remove the item from the virtual meeting’s agenda.

One of those signees, Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, has the ultimate decision on whether to deny communion to President Biden in the archdiocese of Washington. He has made it abundantly clear he will not.

Continue reading the main story

Cardinal Gregory’s authority in the matter is a result of a compromise in 2004 when he himself led the bishops’ conference.

That year a group of conservative bishops sought to deny communion to then Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry for his support of abortion rights. Conservatives had more support in the Vatican then; the top doctrinal official, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who soon after became Pope Benedict XVI, wrote that politicians who persistently supported abortion rights were unworthy to receive the sacrament.

But at a meeting in 2004, the American bishops chose instead to let individual bishops decide on a case-by-case basis.

The whole situation took a political toll on Mr. Kerry, who lost the election and now, as President Biden’s climate envoy, would rather not relive those days.

On a recent visit to Rome, during which he saw the pope, Mr. Kerry preferred to talk about the Biden administration and Francis’ shared commitment to combat climate change.

In an interview, Mr. Kerry argued that the political climate in the United States had “matured a lot” since his run-in with the conservative bishops, and that there is tolerance for “people to act on their faith in ways that do not somehow cross a line into politics.” He suggested that it was a misstep for the conservative bishops to try again.

“It’s been there and done that,” he said. “And it doesn’t always work out well for people.”

But if anything, America’s church politics have become more polarized in the last 17 years. Some clergy close to Francis in the Vatican say privately that elements within the American church have become political and extremist.

Francis himself has said it is “an honor that the Americans attack me.” But on this issue, he, like Mr. Kerry, would prefer to talk about something else.

Sandro Magister, a Vatican expert with L’Espresso magazine, said that the issue was uniquely American, and was basically unheard of in Europe. He said, “The pope himself would rather not have this vivid debate.”

But the conservative American bishops have for weeks made clear they want to do more than talk.

On May 1, the archconservative bishop of San Francisco, Salvatore J. Cordileone, issued a letter arguing that “erring Catholic” politicians who supported abortion rights should be excluded from communion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic and staunch supporter of abortion rights, is a parishioner in his San Francisco diocese.

Soon after, Archbishop Gomez sent a letter to the Vatican’s chief doctrinal office informing it that the American bishops’ conference was preparing to tackle “the worthiness to receive Holy Communion” by Catholic politicians who support abortion rights at their June meeting.

The Vatican apparently had seen enough. On May 7, Cardinal Ladaria wrote Archbishop Gomez urging caution. He said it would be “misleading” to present abortion and euthanasia as “the only grave matters of Catholic moral and social teaching.”

If the American bishops were going to crack the door open on the communion issue, Cardinal Ladaria added ominously, they should be prepared to consider extending the policy to all Catholics “rather than only one category of Catholics.”

The matter seemed settled. It wasn’t.

On May 22, Archbishop Gomez sent a letter to the American bishops defending the decision to schedule a vote, arguing — critics say with shocking disingenuousness — that doing so “reflects recent guidance from the Holy See.”

Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Rome.

Biden’s Silence on Abortion Rights at a Key Moment Worries Liberals

May 27, 2021

In Biden’s Catholic Faith, an Ascendant Liberal Christianity

Jan. 23, 2021

Pope Francis: ‘I Pray There Are No Schisms’

Sept. 10, 2019

Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe. He previously covered the 2016 presidential campaign, the Obama administration and Congress, with an emphasis on political profiles and features. @jasondhorowitz

A version of this article appears in print on June 15, 2021, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Abortion, Communion and a U.S. Rift With Pope Francis.

What's Missing in this Picture?

The newest member of the Metpatpetet grand extended family, a two month old Shih Tzu puppy named Taki, doesn't have his own tablet or smartphone.   Yet.