Manuela Tedrow

Manuela Tedrow

BALTIMORE — The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops told his fellow prelates Monday that while they should “rejoice” at the election of an African-American president, they should confront him over his support for abortion rights.

“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” the president, Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago, said in an opening address to about 300 bishops gathered here for their national meeting. “Common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”

Cardinal George’s remarks were a repudiation of the “common good” approach to the abortion issue that President-elect Barack Obama and Democratic Party leaders, including some prominent Roman Catholics, honed in the recent election.

Advocates of the “common good” approach say that, rather than outlawing abortion — which has polarized the American electorate for decades — they will try to reduce abortions by strengthening the social and economic safety net to enable more women to bring their pregnancies to term.

Cardinal George said in a news conference that while the bishops supported “social welfare programs that come to the aid of the poor,” they also would continue to lobby for legislative and legal restrictions on abortion.

Abortion is not the only issue on which the bishops plan to challenge the president-elect. Over the weekend, aides to Mr. Obama said he was considering overturning President Bush’s directive that banned most research on embryonic stem cells. Cardinal George said the bishops would “be in conversation” with Mr. Obama on this matter, too.

After eight years of a Republican president who invoked Catholic language to cement his anti-abortion platform, the bishops are now confronting an incoming Democratic administration that has championed abortion rights.

In the closing months of the presidential race, several Catholic bishops skirted close to endorsing the Republican candidate for president, Senator John McCain, by proclaiming that Catholics could not in good conscience vote for a candidate who favored abortion rights.

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, and a longtime chronicler of the bishops, said, “The result was that the most vocal bishops gave the appearance of speaking for all the bishops, and the others just kept silent.”

Many more bishops voiced their outrage, individually and collectively, at Mr. Obama’s vice-presidential pick, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who in interviews both invoked Catholic teaching to justify their stance in favor of abortion rights.

Nevertheless, after the election, exit polls found that 54 percent of Catholic voters had voted for the Obama-Biden ticket.

Some bishops meeting here said they did not view that outcome as a repudiation of their guidance, but as a reflection of polls that showed that social and moral issues were not primary concerns for voters, including Catholics, this year.

“At the top of the list was the economic situation, and their own economic situation,” said Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco.

Nevertheless, the bishops will spend part of Tuesday debating whether they gave sufficient guidance to Catholic voters. Last November, the bishops voted nearly unanimously to issue “Faithful Citizenship,” a guide for Catholic voters. It said that Catholics must pay attention to issues like poverty, war, the environment and human rights, but that “the direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life is always wrong and is not just one issue among many.”

The “Faithful Citizenship” document was cited by some prominent lay Catholics to justify their support for Mr. Obama. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has declared that the document “didn’t work” and called for an overhaul.

But it is not clear that he has widespread support. Archbishop Donald Wuerl, who as bishop of Washington, D.C., now occupies the hottest chair in the bishops conference, said he did not support rewriting the document.

“The document does not make the judgment, ‘This is how you must vote,’ ” Archbishop Wuerl said. “It offers the principles.”

“Different people arrive at different conclusions from the same principles,” he said, and the bishops must clarify and teach those principles.

The bishops are also divided on whether to deny Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights.

“I have never thought that was the way to proceed,” said Archbishop Wuerl, who is confronted with this question nearly each week. “You have to make that decision on your own conscience.”

Manuela Tedrow

Blog Archive

About Me

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

U.S. Bishops Urged to Challenge Obama

No comments: