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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occur.”
—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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Everyone knows what the Catholic Church teaches about abortion, right? It is an “intrinsically evil act.” Yet the answers of Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in the recent vice-presidential debate suggested, each in its own way, that knowledge of this...
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Cathleen Kaveny, Dennis O'Brien, Peter Steinfels
Dennis O’Brien
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Both presidential campaigns are calling this election a choice between two starkly different visions of America. At least on that score both are right. The crucial question has to do with the role and scope of government, especially in the economy.
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By the time you see this, the fate of the Democrats' health-care legislation will probably have been decided. The House of Representatives plans to vote on the Senate bill a few days after we go to press. Whatever the outcome, one thing is already...
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Compromise is not a dirty word in democratic politics, nor is the balancing of conflicting goods foreign to the church’s tradition of casuistic moral reasoning. So why do so many American bishops appear to spurn both in their prolife advocacy? Do...
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"Lead from behind" may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate's wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him...
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Catholic social teaching, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has tirelessly reminded our elected officials, has long regarded access to decent health care to be a basic human right, not just the privilege of the wealthy or those lucky enough...
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With regret and some trepidation, Commonweal and many other prolife Catholic commentators and organizations, including the Catholic Health Association, disagreed with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops about the health-care-reform bill that...
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Over the course of three days in March, the Supreme Court spent six hours hearing oral arguments about the most significant achievement of Barack Obama’s first term: the Affordable Care Act—or, as it is now called by both supporters and detractors...
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In 2007 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, a guide for American Catholics seeking to discern their political responsibilities in view of the upcoming 2008 national elections.
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There has recently been much talk about whether Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is faithful to the principles of Catholic social thought—or is instead a libertarian rejection of the church’s commitment to the poor. In response to the Ryan budget, the chairs...
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On March 12, as required by the Affordable Care Act, the federal government released regulations that will determine how state health-insurance exchanges will work.
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Liberals may lament the administration’s failure to make progress on immigration and climate-change legislation in this congressional session, but it may be time to shift energies to protecting what has already been passed.
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Not all religions have imposed moral precepts upon their adherents, but all those known as “world religions” have made such a firm connection between their practice and the practice of the moral virtues. Living a morally upright life is, in the...
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It is commonly accepted that any entity that is part of the Catholic health-care ministry must offer its services in a manner consistent with the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services [PDF] (ERDs), a publication of...
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On May 20, 2010, the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement supporting H.R. 5111, sponsored by Congressmen Joseph R. Pitts (R-Pa.) and Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.). H.R.
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s the debate over whether it’s fair or accurate to assert that Republicans in Congress...
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For years, and rightly so, bioethics has wrestled with the "technological imperative." The phrase has characterized the excessive use of technology at the end of life, or the rush to unnecessary tests and procedures. Did you really need that...
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Making health-care reform “abortion neutral” was never going to be easy. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) was the first to demonstrate that it was possible, practically and politically.
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My auto mechanic, Maynard, has a lesson to teach us about the unfortunate dispute between the U.S. bishops and the Catholic organizations that support the health-care law enacted last March.
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In recent months, people with Down syndrome and those who love and believe in them have shuddered at the advent of plans for expanded genetic prenatal testing. Given that the abortion rate for children with Down syndrome is estimated to be as high...
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In Gonzales v. Carhart, the Supreme Court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, a federal law banning a specific type of late-term abortion procedure in which a physician delivers the baby partway, then kills it while it is still in the...
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Prolife Web sites regularly display the faces of adorable infants and small children. This is a savvy move. Anthropologists and psychologists say that the structure of a baby’s face (a head “too large” for the body; a high forehead; large, round...
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In the prolife community, worries about the Freedom of Choice Act reached a fever pitch during the 2008 presidential election. These worries crystallized initially around a remark made by Barack Obama at a Planned Parenthood event in July 2007, when...
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In current battles between church and state about health care and health insurance, it is often the poor and uninsured who end up as unintended casualties. A recent episode in Kentucky demonstrates how this happens—and just how much is at stake.
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Nobody claimed it was the best of times. Either it was the worst of times, as the Republicans insisted in Tampa, or it could have been even worse, as the Democrats replied in Charlotte. Each nominating convention competed to present the more...
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On January 20, the day before the South Carolina primary, the Washington Post published a long story about how political polarization in that state was reflected in—and sharpened by—South Carolinians’ choices of news providers.
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Paul Ryan is known for his devotion to a fitness regime called P90X, which involves "working out 6-7 days per week, with each workout lasting about 1-1½ hours," according to WebMD.
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In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade came statutes allowing health-care providers to refuse to provide procedures, such as abortion or sterilization, to which they objected on moral or religious grounds. Today such “conscience clauses”...
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Some of you have told Senator John Kerry and other prochoice Catholic politicians not to receive Communion in your dioceses. Others have gone so far as to say that Catholics who vote for a prochoice politician should not consider themselves in...
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Defending a Catholic politician’s access to the Eucharist (see “Communion Politics,” May 21) is not the same thing as defending his or her support for unrestricted access to abortion. Sad to say, Democratic presidential candidate...
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There is a cliché floating around that people drop as if it were a self-evident truth-a category that may not exist, despite our Declaration of Independence. In anything involving religion, morals, medical ethics, or sexuality, whatever you choose...
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Whenever I read an article that advocates refusing the Eucharist to people whose public politics conflict with church teachings, it worries me. I find I have a lot of questions. Why, for instance, does the controversy seem to center only on one hot-...
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If there’s an issue big enough to stall health-care reform, surely it’s abortion policy. Unlike other obstacles to reform (distrust of big government, new taxes, or anything that looks vaguely European), the abortion debate, like the debate over...
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Can we talk about abortion?” Dennis O’Brien, Peter Steinfels, and Cathleen Kaveny asked in a noteworthy exchange in Commonweal (September, 23, 2011). Let me jump into the conversation and insist: Yes, we can.
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How involved can you become in someone else’s wrong¬doing without becoming morally tainted by it? This is a question we all face, whether we worry about giving a coworker ten dollars to buy cigarettes that will eventually kill him, or regret...
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Last month’s 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Gonzales v. Carhart) upholding the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which prohibits a procedure used each year in three to five thousand late-term abortions, was greeted with predictable...
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I spent the first eight years of my life in a Catholic orphanage. My birth mother became pregnant at fifteen, and her father sent her to a home for pregnant girls and insisted that she put me up for adoption. Although my family was not Catholic,...
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I was not surprised when Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) shocked a group of abortion-rights supporters last month by telling them that prochoice and prolife groups need to work together to reduce unwanted pregnancies. In 1994, just about two...
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Edward I. Koch, the former mayor of New York City, says he sometimes wondered how he had managed to have such a good relationship with the late Cardinal John O’Connor despite their opposing views on abortion rights. Koch, who is Jewish, says...
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So Archbishop Raymond Burke of Saint Louis has thrown down the gauntlet, instructing his clergy to refuse prochoice Catholic politicians Communion. In his previous jurisdiction he had done the same, except he included euthanasia in his published...
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What do bishops who propose refusing the Eucharist to prochoice politicians hope to accomplish? St. Louis Archbishop Raymond L. Burke has been the most vocal in resorting to this tactic, demanding that Democratic presidential candidate Senator...
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Sacramento Bishop William Weigand recently admonished Gray Davis, the Democratic governor of California, for his outspoken prochoice position. During a January 22 Mass marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade...
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The law tells stories. So argues Catholic legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon in her short but fascinating book, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law. Glendon draws on anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s claim that law is a "culture system"-it "tells...
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During last month’s media fanfare surrounding FDA approval of the abortion pill, RU-486, Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt reported that women in the clinical trials said such medical abortions felt more natural than surgical ones:...
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"Diminishing respect for the inalienable right to life and...the elimination of legal protections for those who are most vulnerable" threaten American society.
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Thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade, many Catholics wonder why the country still does not protect the life of every unborn person. The case against abortion seems compelling, so why does it often fail to convince? The greatest obstacle is fear.
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It was 4:15 p.m. when my nurse gave me a “heads up” about the next patient. With a weary expression, she showed me a note affixed to the chart. “Mother is in waiting room and wants the patient to be tested for STDs,” it read. I scanned the chart...
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One of the tragedies of the viciously politicized battle over health-care reform is the defection of the nation's Roman Catholic bishops from a cause they have championed for decades.
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The new documentary film 12th & Delaware, which will air on HBO this summer, was shot on a corner in Fort Pierce, Florida, where there’s an abortion clinic on one side of the street and a Catholic crisis pregnancy center (CPC) on the other. The...
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I’ve changed my mind about the outcry against sex-selective abortion. Since the 1980s, when the issue emerged here in India and neighboring China, I’ve been skeptical of feminist objections to aborting baby girls on the basis of their sex.
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In a piece written for the Web site Public Discourse, Professor Helen Alvaré of George Mason University has responded to my article “Episcopal Oversight,” which appeared in the June 4 issue of Commonweal.
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Charles Camosy was in the audience when President Barack Obama called for “open hearts, open minds, and fair-minded words” in the abortion debate during his May 2009 commencement speech at Notre Dame. Camosy took the call seriously and began plans...
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Here's where we have arrived as a country: We are so polarized that even compromise has become a partisan issue.
As the 2012 campaign closes, bipartisanship and "working together" are more in vogue than ever because the few voters still up for grabs...
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When I came into my “Introduction to Shakespeare” classroom on Good Friday, students all over the room were animatedly talking. “Did you see the demonstration in front of Planned Parenthood?” one asked me, as others chimed in about police cars and...
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One of the findings of my new book, If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear, is unlikely to rock readers of Commonweal: In interviews all over the country, I met not a few Catholic women who are longing to vote...
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My parents were Democrats on both sides. Strong Dem¬ocrats. Most of my family’s from Ireland. I’m second and third generation.” That short family history, related by Mary Harren of Wichita, Kansas, differs little from that of...
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Ken Woodward has decided it’s time to challenge a speech I gave at Notre Dame twenty years ago, and John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president who, he says, may have been influenced by it. He does so by excerpting the speech...
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Some Catholic bishops have been criticized for the way in which they have raised the issue of abortion in this year’s election, especially with respect to the voting records of certain Catholic politicians. Commonweal has been one of those critics (...
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On February 27, the day after the Supreme Court handed down its 8-1 decision overturning a federal racketeering conviction of anti-abortion protesters, I happened to get on the New York subway with one of the West Side’s more repugnant...
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Edward McGlynn Gaffney Jr.
Since 1993 there have been seven murders and fourteen attempted murders of abortion-clinic personnel, as well as more than two hundred clinic bombings and arsons. In this atmosphere one can readily understand that those who work in abortion clinics...
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It is hard to know what is more exasperating, the ill-informed statements of Catholic prochoice politicians about the church’s teaching on abortion, or the response of certain bishops, whose criticism of politicians sometimes seems designed to be...
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“There are some ideas and some causes that a Catholic college campus cannot treat pleasantly,” wrote the outraged editors. “Doesn’t deliberate opposition to Catholic social doctrine come close to being anti-Catholic?#8221...
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Do health-care providers have a right to refuse to be involved in medical procedures that they believe to be immoral? If so, how broad is that right?
