Bishops, Politicians and the Abortion Crisis

By John Elson

As if street crime and the plight of the homeless were not enough, New Yorkers now have something really big to worry about: Is Mario Cuomo going to hell? From his Albany County jail cell, where he had been serving ten days for taking part in a militant antiabortion protest, Auxiliary Bishop Austin Vaughan of New York recently warned that the state's Democratic Governor "is in danger of going to hell if he dies tonight" unless he changed his stance on abortion. Cuomo, a Roman Catholic, accepts his church's teaching that abortion is wrong. But he argues that it would be imprudent to impose his personal views on the state.

The matter, of course, could not end there. After Cuomo sardonically noted that he had been "cursed . . . even to hell," John Cardinal O'Connor, Vaughan's superior, declared that the bishop had the duty to warn any Catholic against pursuing a gravely evil course of action. Thus Vaughan's statement was in the tradition of saints like John the Baptist and Thomas More -- one of Cuomo's acknowledged role models -- who also reproached public figures from prison for misconduct.

To some disinterested observers, the warnings about damnation seemed rather medieval, like a penitent monarch shivering in the cold at Canossa. But something quite substantial is involved here. In another much publicized conflict, San Diego Bishop Leo Maher denied Communion to Lucy Killea, a pro- choice Catholic candidate for the California senate (who predictably won her race after the bishop's ban was announced).

Such cases -- and others abound -- raise anew an issue that many hoped John F. Kennedy had laid to rest with his famous speech to Houston's Protestant ministers in 1960. His candidacy had disinterred the old charge that a Catholic could not be trusted with the nation's highest office because of his allegiance to the Vatican. Kennedy's response was direct: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act." As President, he would decide issues "in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates."

J.F.K.'s speech was rhetorically effective, but it appeared to beg the issue. Granted that a politician's duty is to pursue, conscientiously, the public interest without fear or favor. But why should not the church play a role in forming and guiding the conscience of its adherents? For example, non- Catholics have seldom complained when bishops took politically progressive stands, like excommunicating Dixie satraps who fostered racial discrimination.

In Kennedy's defense, it can be argued that his declaration of independence was necessary. After all, not too many years earlier U.S. Catholic textbooks were stating unambiguously that "error has no rights," and that if Catholics ever became a majority in America, freedom of religion would be allowed to Protestants and Jews only out of political necessity. To many Catholics, nonetheless, Kennedy's argument that a President's religious views are "his own private affair" created what theologian James Burtchaell of Notre Dame University calls a "violent separation between morality and public policy."

A more nuanced exploration of the issue Kennedy spoke to can be found in Cuomo's 1984 landmark address at Notre Dame. The Governor argued that his refusal to campaign actively for a ban on abortion was analogous to the cautious stance of U.S. Catholic bishops on slavery prior to the Civil War. They declined to endorse a constitutional amendment banning the practice. Then as now, Cuomo argued, the issue was not the moral validity of Catholic teaching but whether, when and how to translate that teaching into public policy -- a problem for which there can never be one simple solution.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has argued that if Cardinal O'Connor and Bishop Vaughan had been sounding off when Kennedy was running for President, he would not have been elected. True, but irrelevant. Whatever lingering suspicions exist about supposedly divided loyalties ought to have been dispelled by the number of lay Catholics, including former Democratic vice- presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who have taken a pro-choice position on abortion.

As citizens, O'Connor and Vaughan have as much right as any pro-choicer to seek legislative endorsement of their views on public issues. (They are also entitled to ask Cuomo why he is so quiescent on abortion but so aggressive on another complex moral matter -- seven times vetoing bills that would bring back the state death penalty.) Still, some caveats are in order. One is that charity as well as justice should guide the hierarchs into correctly stating positions they condemn. Both O'Connor and Vaughan accused Cuomo of advocating "the right of a woman to kill a child." A fairer statement would be that the Governor did not see how he could legally deny a woman what the nation's highest court has decreed to be her right. Second, the bishops have acted as if it were universally accepted that human life from the moment of conception is a person requiring legal protection. But that is a moral judgment, not scientific fact, disputed even by religious leaders who no more favor murder than do the Catholic bishops.

It seems possible to wonder whether so intense a concentration on the sinfulness of abortion does not in some way diminish the church's self- proclaimed role as teacher and guide. Is there any other offense, even the defrauding of widows and orphans, for which a Mario Cuomo would today be warned about the risk of eternal punishment? To ask this is not to deny that abortion is a serious matter, or that its casual use as an ex post facto contraceptive is a national scandal. But to decide whether an individual is guilty of committing an act deserving of hell, one needs to know whether the deed was done with malice and full consent. As O'Connor wisely observed, only God can know that.

With reporting by Michael P. Harris/New York