"Pro-Life" Has Always Been Their Misnomer. Integralism: What's In the Trojan Horse ? Take 2, Part 4

Abortion and Vatican Optics, Who are the true Catholics? Bishops' "spoon full of sugar" approach to neofascist incursion in secular government, perils of new evangelization/ Catholic "unity" fever...

Supporting Legal Medical Abortion does not make a person less (Roman) Catholic.

I left off at the end of Part 3 pointing to the way the abortion issue has become “a calling card” for right wing secular politics. Peruse X / Twitter or any of the other social media platforms in in which Catholics discuss the condition of the Roman Catholic Church and one finds that many clerics, women religious, and lay Catholics are comfortable undoing the baptisms of fellow Catholics on the basis of the (former’s) belief that favoring legal medical abortion somehow disqualifies Catholics from being Catholic. Being pro-choice very much does not make a person un-Catholic or even less Catholic — at least, not according to their rules, by which I mean Canon Code, Magisterium, Catechism of the Catholic Church.

One is unlikely to see a United States bishop or any “liberal” lens louse priest correct those who argue that supporting the legal right to an abortion makes a person less Catholic or renders them non-Catholic. Why? What is the reason for this duplicity by omission? Catholics’ ignorance of official Catholic teaching, works in the bishops’ favor. It’s better for business if Catholics in the pews do not know that voting for pro-choice candidates and disagreeing with the official teaching on this topic does not make a Catholic less Catholic.

While a person who obtains an abortion does, under Catholic law, self-excommunicate, that excommunication can be, and regularly is, ‘corrected,’ by participation in the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession) and the obtaining of absolution. It is important to say here that from a theological perspective, any benefits the Sacrament of Reconciliation offers only apply when a Catholic making the confession believes abortion is sinful. Many Catholics do not see abortion as a sin.

A Catholic who chooses abortion may also, view the “law” relative to abortion that that automatically results in self-excommunication as unjust. Any law self excommunicating that Catholic essentially fails to bind. Many otherwise devout Catholic women embrace a lex inusta non est lex (“an unjust law is no law at all”) view on abortion. That’s Augustine. Many otherwise devout Catholic women reject official teaching as a matter of conscience. Many devout Catholic women discern that terminating a pregnancy is the correct moral course, and do not see terminating their pregnancies as sinful. The Roman Catholic man-made law has no real hold on them. Their putative self-excommunicated status carries no spiritual weight for them. The rule lacks force.

It was not until late in the 19th century that the Vatican really began to package the abortion as murder message. In the United States, the Vice Laws and Comstock Act catalyzed this emerging campaign and in the 1960s in part, due to concern that artificial contraception would imperil the (misogynist) ideal of the large Roman Catholic family, Humanae Vitae was released. Somewhat ironic is that Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) by increasing emphasis on priest as a preacher enhanced the capability of priests to use pulpits to boost the “abortion as murder” message.

Even according to the most strict of Roman Catholic regulations; neither voting for pro-choice candidates, nor believing abortion is a private matter, nor advocating strongly for abortion rights, makes a person not Catholic. Nor does it make them less Catholic.

The abortion issue has proven to be a good Trojan horse into which a Christian world view can be packed and rolled into secular consciousness and government in the United States.

So, again, why do the men in charge of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States allow so much misunderstanding about official magisterial teaching about abortion to prevail in contemporary Catholic discourse? One reason is that the Roman Catholic Church is in schism.

The abortion issue has proven to be a good Trojan horse into which a Christofascist world-view can be packed in order that the whole bundle can be rolled out into the public square in order to be sold. The objective of the anti-abortion campaign is not just to sell forced birth on the Catholic and non-Catholic American public, but to impose the entire Christofascist personal and political package on a populace, and to infuse our government with its justifications for predatory capitalism, white supremacy, homophobia and transphobia, and misogyny; and its theocratic, integralist and authoritarianism rule.

The United States Bishops have contempt for women and don’t appear to care much about children either. Some of the members of this conference are admitted clergy child rape accomplices! Many of them — especially their Vice President — are actively engaged, currently, in cheating survivors of the systematic child-rape they perpetrated and facilitated of justice and damage awards.

Most have struck up an alliance with the same folks who want to slash programs for food insecure children and demolish public schools. Many supported a serial rapist for president twice. With few exceptions, they are in cahoots with the Federalist Society and other politically arch-conservative groups — ALEC, the gun lobby for-profit prisons, and the prison industrial complex. There are a few exceptions (who tend to remain way too silent on this matter) but for the most part the U.S. Bishops stealthily anti-migrant as well.

The so-called “pro-life” campaign has never really been about “the babies.” One thing it’s about is the need to keep women happy with spawning Christians and Catholics at the expense of all else.

The so-called “pro-life” campaign has never really been about “the babies.”one thing it’s about is the need to keep women happy with spawning Christians and Catholics at the expense of all else. It’s been about the sentimentality of the men in charge of the church who are often driven to become clerics because of deficient or arrested psycho-sexual development, culture-based inability to accept being gay, and de to “mommy problems.” One need to look no further than the imagery many so-called “Pro-life” zealot priests use in their social media: images of refulgent camera-ready (almost always caucasian) Mary gazing at her infant, her perfect chaste love flooding forth without restraint. I notice so often in so-called “pro-life” advocacy voiced by Catholic men, the longing for that mother who falls head over heels in love with her baby.

The ghosts the origins of abortion as a sexual sin (versus infanticide) abound in so-called “pro-life” activism. When abortion appears on a vice list in the Didache, it is listed with numerous sins, along with the sin of murder. Until the rise all around the western world of women’s suffrage movements and the abolition of American Slavery — and the Comstock Laws — abortion was a private matter, and the Roman Catholic magisterium, no doubt wrestling with it behind the scenes, saw it as more of a sexual sin — in a category with adultery.

A cursory look at the way some more traditional Catholics discuss abortion on social media indicates quite immediately that the myth that single “sluts” have abortions in order to to continue on with their sexually promiscuous lives uncomplicated by spawn persists. If such women only knew the joy of the baby quickening in their womb or that neonate in their arms, they might never choose to “kill” their “children”… But the truth is that most women who have abortions are already mothers, and that people who have intimate knowledge of what rearing children conscientiously entails sometimes choose abortion out of concern for their existing families.

The teaching body of the institutional Roman Catholic Church did not always see abortion as it does today. Bishops in the United States have had to fight hard and not always honestly to sell the idea that abortion is murder. The impetus for making abortion “murder” and for the fallacious and hyperbolic language anti-abortion zealots use in this contexts today was necessary to avoid what happened with other facets of Catholic teaching on family and sexuality. The artificial contraception ban has been rejected by an overwhelming majority of faithful Roman Catholics. The bishops did not want that to happen with abortion.

Today much of the financial and political support for the institutional Roman Catholic Church in the United States currently comes from ultra-wealthy right-wing white men who view bringing secular law in line with Catholic law as one of their chief religious imperatives. This contingent wants the United States to be a Christian nation. They believe secular and Christian law should be aligned. They embrace a male supremacist order. They are increasingly throwing their support to educational approaches that preserve “patriotism” and look away from the great sin of American slavery, its aftermath in the United States) and the white supremacy on which the Roman Catholic Church was built.

Every day I read something in some media outlet that advances the argument that one cannot be Catholic and pro-choice. That’s a fiction, but the United States Bishops have used it, will be using it again soon…

For some very traditional Roman Catholics (and non-Catholic Christians) the thirst to evangelize the world arises from a conviction that saving souls is a kind of ultimate generosity. For some this mindset is more temporal and, at its root, hateful. In any case abortion issue today operates as a vehicle into which Christian conviction and the means (including financial means) for saving the world by making everyone Christian are bundled. Every day I read something in some media outlet that advances the argument that one cannot be Catholic and pro-choice. That’s a fiction, but the United States Bishops have used it, will be using it again soon, to push for the election of a so-called “pro-life” president.

Abortion does not just sell Catholic integralism; it helps to sell the campaign for Roman Catholic religious freedom as well. It goes like this: First we don’t want our hospitals to be forced to kill babies. The wedge is in the door. Next, we don’t want to provide surgical contraception, hormonal protocols for trans patients. The bishops went after Marriage Equality for even non-Catholics marrying in civil ceremonies. Protecting the babies is a wedge in the door. If every Catholic is so-called “pro-life,” requiring tax-payers to include forced birth in their menu of services become an anti-Catholic discrimination issue.

It’s good to notice how smart the “saint pope,” John Paul II, was about this. He saw this complication developing, and this led him to advocate for increased emphasis on media, Roman Catholic televangelism and “New Evangelization” as an aggressive alternative to increasing the fold.

The so-called “pro-life” Trojan horse is packed full of all of this selective bigotry the Roman Catholic Church promulgates under the heading of separate but equal gender complementarity. Complementarian doctrine is the basis for and source of all of Roman Catholic teachings relative to sexual identity, gender, sexual conduct, the patriarchal structure of its institutional church leadership and the economic homeostasis of the institutional Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church in its current form cannot grow without the subjugation of women. The “saint pope,” John Paul II, was so very smart about this! He saw this complication developing and this led him to advocate for increased emphasis on media, Roman Catholic televangelism and “New Evangelization” as an aggressive strategy for increasing the fold.

Religious arguments are powerful, but unless one religion dominates, these freedoms can backfire. The Roman Catholic push for integralism aims to minimize the risks posed by religious freedom practices and legal precedents. The Leonard Leo project is focused on making sure that conservative Catholicism is worked well enough into the fabric of both the Supreme Court of the United States and the fabric of American consciousness that it and not non-Christian churches enjoy Religious Freedom. Leo is currently supporting a move to use public money in Oklahoma for a Catholic public charter school. He probably would not support a Church of Satan charter school. So the integralist campaign has two parts. Revival of Christian/Catholic hegemony in civil government and a strengthening of laws that increase religious freedom protections. Increasing the Catholic fold is one way, among other ways, to keep the United States government Catholic enough.

Salvatore Cordileone, bishop, failed ex-communicator

When the deranged bishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, tried to abuse his powers as her “ordinary” to excommunicate Catholic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for her position on abortion, he not only embarrassed himself, but he also hurt his own cause by inviting the kind of scrutiny United States bishops don’t want to invite.

The United States Bishops learned after aligning themselves with Trump and the United States right wing, that they would have to change the sales pitch and finesse the optics. They saw how Dobbs played out. They saw that having supported the Catholic right’s purchase of the Supreme Court of the United States could wind up costing them a generation of Catholics. When the deranged bishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, tried to abuse his powers as her “ordinary” to excommunicate Catholic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for her position on abortion, he not only embarrassed himself, but he also hurt his own cause by inviting the kind of scrutiny United States bishops don’t want o invite. As it turned out, Cordileone’s brother priests were happy to administer the sacraments to Pelosi, who is a faithful Catholic, and Codileone’s temper tantrum wound up making the doltish prelate look look impotent and foolish. Pelosi’s experience also offered a public object lesson on primacy of conscience as it relates to Catholics and abortion. We will see the United States Bishops try other approaches.

It is critical to recognize that the institutional Roman Catholic Church avails itself of the best Public Relations money can buy. This idea did not evolve. It was designed. Abortion has proven itself to be an effective means for selling safe for late capitalism, strong leader, white Christofascist integralism to voters in the United States. The so-called “pro-life” campaign is a delivery system. It’s the cart — or as I suggested earlier here, the Trojan horse — that carries all of the “New Evangelization” messaging: male supremacy, white supremacy, homophobia (opposition to marriage equality and assault on trans people’s medical rights) weakening/dismantling of public education and a the idyll of a two-parent complementarian Catholic home in which the maximum number of children are born and begin Catechesis at an from early age. The institutional leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States needs bigger Catholic families, fiscal sponsorship, converts, and the perpetuation of a more chauvinistic approach to Catholic belonging in order to maintain its economic homeostasis in the United States if it wants to see millenniums and the families they build remain in the pews. For a long time, they threatened Catholic politicians with excommunication. They know that that can’t work. This is one of the reasons President Biden has not been pubicly ex-communicated. The bishops cannot see Biden’s local ordinaries —one of the few possibly clean bishops in the United States, William Edward Koenig, and the not-quite-so-clean Wilton Gregory — try and fail at this.

Belgian Catholics are not only requesting “debaptism” of late, but, also, they are requesting that data held by the Roman Catholic Church receive appropriate safeguarding.

I generally confine my discussions on this platform to Catholicism in the United States, but it is impossible for dissenting Catholics not to notice the effects of Roman Catholic episcopal tyranny problem outside of the United States. Catholics in Western Europe seem to be bringing more fortitude to challenging the corruption, clericalism, clergy child rape crisis and cover-up, than their Catholic counterparts in the States are able to muster. Belgian Catholics are not only requesting “debaptism” of late, but, also, they are requesting that any personal held by the Roman Catholic Church be legally safeguarded.

In Germany, some Roman Catholics are dissenting boldly in a way one rarely sees in the United States. That Germans are required by law to pay a church tax explains some of the boldness of their activism. Germany is the birthplace of the women’s ordination movement. The Danube 7, the first women ordained into the apostolic succession of the Roman Catholic Church were ordained by a German bishop. The "Synodal Path," a German progressive movement, aims to give lay Catholics a say on some doctrinal matters as well as the appointment of bishops. Some of the German bishops have been calling for full discussion of ordination of women and reforms relative to same-sex marriage blessings for a few years now.

The United States Bishops do not want to see American Catholics calling for debaptism. They do not want to see Catholics organizing to end the clergy sex abuse cover-up. They do not want to see wallet campaigns to push for ordination of women. They do not want American Catholics to just defect in droves as they are doing in Irish cities. They don’t want what happened in Spain — the turning over of the Catholic Church to Opus Dei — to happen to in the United States. For this reason we can expect to see more unholy alliances formed to safeguard American Catholic “unity” in order to protect it from schism and to protect the Vatican’s wealth. The problem with guarding against schism is that we are already there. The Roman Catholic Church as a whole — it’s the Tradcaths and Opus Dei adherents’ church to lose at this point.

The normalization and encroachment of Opus Dei in the United States Roman Catholic Church kicked off what I have come to think of as the selling of the Vatican II church. Perhaps it started with the beatification (1992) and canonization of Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva (2002). Even Francis held open the door to Opus Dei by appointing a few Opus Dei bishops to lead dioceses in the United States, but later moved to limit Opus Dei’s powers by declining to make its top priest a bishop in summer of 2022. Cardinal Dolan gave Opus Dei worshipers a parish in midtown Manhattan in 2016. The United States bishops and even formerly “liberal” Catholic orders — the Jesuits, for example — may not like Opus Dei, but signs of their money troubles (?) and determination to bend over and backwards for that Opus Dei lucre are easy to see.

As the presidential election 2024 nears, the United States Bishops will continue to try for a “spoon full of sugar approach.” A spoonful of sugar to make the integralist, neofascist medicine go down. “Unity” will serve as code word and artificial sweetener.

As the presidential election 2024 nears, the United States Bishops will continue to try for a “spoon full of sugar approach.” A spoonful of sugar to make the integralist, neofascist medicine go down. “Unity” will serve as code word and artificial sweetener. Those who follow Catholic media’s post Dobbs reporting have already noticed how this strategy that often takes the form of walking abortion talking points back arguments back. In the wake of Dobbs, I noticed far fewer references to women who have abortions as “murderers,” and more focus on the “love the sinner hate the sin” diaper-dispensing “pregnancy centers.” The exhortations to vote for pro-life candidates died down for a spell as the bishops hit the mattresses.

William Lori Archbishop of Baltimore, VP of United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Career Clergy Abuse Facilitator

But in November of last year, the William Lori, the never-to-be-a-cardinal Archbishop Baltimore making the announcement on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, announced that “the threat of abortion” would be “their preeminent priority” and their intention to publish a voting guide for Catholics. That it fell to the preeminent clergy child rape accomplice, accessory, and apologist, who attempted recently to strike down the Child Victims Act in his state, to make this “abortion as preeminent priority” announcement has the look and feel of a cruel prank.

MMS

NYC

February 6, 2024

Revised, March 24, 2024

*This essay is still in progress.

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