The New York Times Ad
July 28, 2014 at 11:52 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 4 CommentsTags: "delayed hominization", "No Turning Back", a Catholic Social Justice Lobby, A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion, abortion, Barbara Ferraro, Geraldine Ferraro, Network, Patricia Hussey, Sisters of Life, The New York Times Ad, U.S. Catholic sisters
As you perhaps know, 2014 is the anniversary of a number significant events: the outbreak of World War I; the liberation of Paris; the signing of the Civil Rights Act; the resignation of Richard Nixon; the launch of Facebook. And a little closer to home–for my Catholic feminist self, at least–2014 is also the twentieth anniversary of the issuing of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter used to argue that that the Roman Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women is infallible teaching. Catholic women’s ordination groups around the world are taking advantage of this anniversary to call on Pope Francis to retract the resulting ban forbidding Catholics to even so much as discuss women’s ordination.
2014 is the anniversary of yet another Catholic sex/gender event, the publication of “A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion” as an ad in the New York Times. The ad itself appeared on October 7, 1984, and argued that “a diversity of opinions regarding abortion exists among committed Catholics,” and that only 11% of U.S. Catholics surveyed disapproved of abortion in all circumstances. The statement also claimed that a large number of Catholic theologians held that “even direct abortion, though tragic, can sometimes be a moral choice.” These opinions, the ad went on to say, had been formed by
- Familiarity with the actual experiences that led women to make the decision for abortion;
- A recognition that there is no common and constant teaching on ensoulment in Church doctrine, nor has abortion always been treated as murder in canonical history;
- An adherence to principles of moral theology, such as probabilism, religious liberty, and the centrality of informed conscience, and
- An awareness of the acceptance of abortion as a moral choice by official statements and respected theologians of other faith groups.
The ad was published, at least in part, to support Geraldine Ferraro, the vice-presidential candidate in the upcoming presidential election; several leading U.S. Catholic archbishops had attacked Ferraro for saying that the Catholic position on abortion was not monolithic. Ninety-seven signatures appeared on the ad, including those of twenty-six nuns, two priests, and two brothers. A week after the defeat of Mondale/Ferraro, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement saying that the ad was nothing more than the personal opinion of the signers because what they asserted was in contradiction to “the clear and consistent teaching of the church that deliberately chosen abortion is objectively immoral.” Two weeks later the head of the Vatican Sacred Congregation for Religious, the same office that ordered the visitation of U.S. Catholic sisters in 2009, requested that the signers who were members of religious congregations retract their statements or be dismissed from religious life. Subsequently the four priests and brothers retracted, and a fairly long negotiation process took place between twenty-four of the twenty-six nun signers with their religious superiors, and between their superiors and the Vatican. These nuns were called “the Vatican 24.” Eventually, twenty-two of the twenty-four came to some sort of agreement that was accepted by the Vatican, though at least seven of these women later stated publicly that they had not aligned themselves with the institutional church’s position on abortion as Vatican officials claimed. Two nuns, Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey, publicly refused to retract their statement and though they were never actually expelled from their congregation for so doing, they eventually left because they felt betrayed by the entire process. Lay signers of the ad sometimes had their jobs threatened if they taught at Catholic institutions and were uninvited as speakers by others.
Let me make several observations about this ad and the controversy that surrounded it. First of all, no Catholic group, feminist or otherwise, seems to be commemorating the event, though supporting the ad was an act of considerable courage on the part of the signers. Secondly, much of what the ad argues is unambiguously true. There really is a wide range of positions on abortion among committed Catholics, unless one agrees with the position of the Vatican and the bishops that anyone who does not conform to their position on sex and gender issues is, by definition, not a Catholic. (Watch for more instances of this argument as the RCC and other religious groups attempt to avoid President Obama’s recent executive order forbidding federal contractors to discriminate against LGBT employees; for the bishops, “gay Catholic” is an oxymoron.)
Third, it is simply a fact that Catholic teaching on abortion has changed over the centuries, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of times the Vatican and the bishops say this is not the case. Thomas Aquinas, whose theology and philosophy were forced upon Catholics as the absolute truth for much of the 20th century, taught something called “delayed hominization” that is, that God inserts the soul into the fetus after conception–forty days after for males, eighty days after for females. Now some would argue that advances in our scientific knowledge of sexuality and conception makes Aquinas’s position no longer credible. Putting aside the fact that the Catholic Church is not known for its adherence to science in such matters (consider the argument, denied by nearly all scientists, that certain contraceptives mandated by the Affordable Care Act are abortifacients)–it is still the case that Thomas Aquinas, the most revered theologian of the Catholic tradition, did in fact teach this at one time, no matter what the bishops say.
Fourth, more “attention must be paid” to the ad’s first bullet point: familiarity with the actual experiences that led women to make the decision for abortion is pivotal. In reading No Turning Back, the inspiring memoir by Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey, the two members of the Vatican 24 who eventually left religious life, I was struck by how their position on abortion changed as they worked with the poor, especially at Covenant House, in Charleston, West Virginia. Initially, they were rather orthodox Roman Catholic nuns, and so opposed abortion, but as a number of poor women told them the stories of their abortions, Ferraro and Hussey had to reconsider the church’s absolute condemnation. This was also the case with John Rock, the Catholic medical doctor who was initially adamantly opposed to contraception, but after practicing obstetrics and gynaecology for a number of years, went on to co-invent the Pill. Is it a coincidence that many Christian churches that allow married and female clergy have broader positions on both abortion and contraception than the institutional Catholic Church, whose leaders, officially at least, live in splendid isolation from pregnancy, child-rearing, and maternal death?
Finally, I am struck by the argument Ferraro and Hussey make in No Turning Back that the crackdown on the priests, nuns and brothers who signed the New York Times ad was as much or more about the assertion of power by the Vatican as it was about abortion per se. Scrutiny of the history of the Catholic Church from the French Revolution to the present reveals that as the church lost more and more civil power, it focused its attention ever more strongly on controlling sexual morality. After the revolutions of 1848, during which Pope Pius IX fled the Vatican disguised as a parish priest, the church for the first time declared early term abortions a mortal sin. Some historians link this with the proclamation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in 1854; as free from sin from the moment of her conception, only Mary, and her sinless Son, were worthy of the vote, unlike those vile revolutionaries. And since Mary was free from sin “from the moment of her conception,” she had to have been a person at that moment. When finally, at the Second Vatican Council, the church acknowledged modern values such as freedom of conscience and the possibility that persons who were not Catholic could be saved, even its doctrinal power was undercut. All that remained as absolute Catholic truth was the universally valid “natural law,” that is, the control of sex and women.
Ferraro and Hussey also make clear that it was the control of the nuns who signed the ad that was of particular importance to the Vatican representatives. Recent events confirm their insight. After the New York Times ad, large numbers of U.S. Catholic sisters shifted their attention from gender issues like women’s ordination, abortion and contraception to social justice; it’s easy to see why. Yet twenty-five years after the New York Times ad, the Vatican launched an investigation of the umbrella group connecting 80 percent of U.S. Catholic sisters and subsequently issued a doctrinal statement accusing the group of “radical feminist themes” and of not putting enough energy into opposing abortion and homosexuality. To fix this, the Vatican put the group under the control of several U.S. bishops. Network, one of the leading Catholic social justice groups in the U.S., founded and led by sisters, was singled out for condemnation. A majority of Catholic sisters hadn’t earned any tolerance at all for changing their direction after the New York Times ad. Perhaps next the boys in Rome will order them to transfer their membership to the Sisters of Life.
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Speaks against the inertia and retrenchment of the ecumenical churches on the loaded issue of the gender of God....Appropriately scholarly and...readily accessible.
—Theology TodayWISDOM'S FEAST is available in paperback on Amazon.
What I’m Reading
The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion, by Julie Byrne (Columbia, 2016).
The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, by Robert W. Bullard, editor (Sierra Club Books, 2005).
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, by Christian Parenti (Nation Books, 2011).
A Council that Will Never End: Lumen Gentium and the Church Today, by Paul Lakeland (Liturgical Press, 2013).
The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, by Margaret MacMillan (Random House, 2013).
“What Our Church Has Inflicted on Judaism,” by Steven Englund. With Responses by Jon Levenson, Donald Senior, and John D. Levenson. (Commonweal, Feb. 10, 2014).
The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, by Robert W. Bullard, editor (Sierra Club Books, 2005).
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, by Christian Parenti (Nation Books, 2011)
A Council that Will Never End: Lumen Gentium and the Church Today, by Paul Lakeland (Liturgical Press, 2013).
The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, by Margaret MacMillan (Random House, 2013).
“What Our Church Has Inflicted on Judaism,” by Steven Englund. With Responses by Jon Levenson, Donald Senior, and John D. Levenson. (Commonweal, Feb. 10, 2014).
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