Citizen Chaput takes on Catholic distortions

Although he’s the Archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput spoke out as a citizen the other day to rebut some very public statements by Professor Douglas Kmiec on being Catholic and backing abortion politics. Specifically, backing the candidate who stands on a platform of extreme abortion politics.

Chaput was speaking to the ENDOW women’s dinner, and…never verbose or evasive….called abortion ‘Little Murders’.

The truth is that for some Catholics, the abortion issue has never been a comfortable cause. It’s embarrassing. It’s not the kind of social justice they like to talk about. It interferes with their natural political alliances. And because the homicides involved in abortion are ”little murders” – the kind of private, legally protected murders that kill conveniently unseen lives – it’s easy to look the other way.

So for decades, some ‘peace and social justice’ Catholics have either looked the other way or actually supported ‘abortion rights’ as part of a social agenda. That’s not new. What is, Chaput says, is the “packaging” of Catholic arguments in the current group supporting Obama for president. They are “seeking to neutralize the witness of bishops and the pro-life movement by offering a ‘Catholic’ alternative to the Church’s priority on sanctity of life issues”, Chaput says. He calls that “intelligent”, but also “wrong and often dishonest.”

Chaput took this occasion to make a juxtaposition between his newly released book Render Unto Caesar and Kmiec’s book that makes a “Catholic” case for Sen. Obama.

I wrote Render Unto Caesar with no interest in supporting or attacking any candidate or any political party.

The goal of Render Unto Caesar was simply to describe what an authentic Catholic approach to political life looks like, and then to encourage Americans Catholics to live it.

In spite of his “strong record of service to the Church” in his past, Kmiec is sowing confusion among Catholics, Chaput says.

In his own book he quotes from Render Unto Caesar at some length. In fact, he suggests that his reasoning and mine are ”not far distant on the moral inquiry necessary in the election of 2008.” Unfortunately, he either misunderstands or misuses my words, and he couldn’t be more mistaken.

I believe that Senator Obama, whatever his other talents, is the most committed ”abortion-rights” presidential candidate of either major party since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973. Despite what Prof. Kmiec suggests, the party platform Senator Obama runs on this year is not only aggressively ”pro-choice;” it has also removed any suggestion that killing an unborn child might be a regrettable thing…

To suggest – as some Catholics do – that Senator Obama is this year’s ”real” prolife candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse.

These kinds of arguments, Chaput says,

…have done a disservice to the Church, confused the natural priorities of Catholic social teaching, undermined the progress prolifers have made, and provided an excuse for some Catholics to abandon the abortion issue instead of fighting within their parties and at the ballot box to protect the unborn.

NRO Bench Memos posted this brief response, that Kmiec’s view is not any kind of “pro-life view”.

Nor, until a few months ago, would Doug Kmiec have regarded this as the pro-life view. It is emphatically not the case — at least, it is not the case for those who hold the views that Prof. Kmiec always professed to hold — that the regulation of abortion involves a burden on the religious freedom of those who do not believe that unborn children are entitled, as a matter of human rights, the protection of the law. To protect unborn children is to vindicate human-rights commitments.

That’s the argument from reason alone. That once you declare a whole class of human beings (and from conception, it’s a biological fact that what’s conceived is a human being) unworthy of rights, then you cannot make a coherent argument for any other issue of social justice or human rights.