Welcoming and Praying, in season
and out of season
This week, The New World will post a preview of The Cardinal's
Column for our Web Site. The following column will be printed
in the July 25/August 1 newspaper. The New World is committed
to providing distinct stories and insight of particular interest
to our Internet readers.
In the fourth and fifth century, theologians in Constantinople
complained that they couldn’t get their hair cut without hearing
an argument about the Blessed Trinity from the barber and the
people in the shop. Trinitarian theology was at the center of
people’s lives because God was at the center of their lives, and
their understanding of God affected everything else they did or
stood for.
In a post-Freudian culture, we don’t hear many popular arguments
about the Trinity, but there is a lot of discussion about sex.
Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, trained several generations
of intellectuals to believe that sex is at the center of human
life and affects or even explains everything we do or stand for.
The American search for happiness seems now to have become less
closely bound to the desire to love, and be loved than to a sometimes
relentless quest for genital sexual experiences. What is most
popularly contested today, therefore, is not the Church’s understanding
of the Triune God but the Church’s teaching on the use of God’s
gift of human sexuality.
Newspapers and talk shows on radio and TV make Church teaching
an sexual morality the stuff of stories, although there’s not
much new about it. The teaching goes back to the book of Genesis
and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What is new is the political and
cultural context in which people receive the teaching and share
the gift of their sexuality. What’s new is the need to defend
in the popular media positions on marriage, homosexuality, family
life and the protection of unborn children that have been the
underpinning of our ways of relating for many centuries before
Freud’s work in the last century and that are well defined in
the Church’s teaching.
It should have been no surprise to me that my decision to participate
in a peaceful prayer service before an abortion clinic a week
and a half ago would be featured in the local media. But I’m still
getting used to public reaction to what seems to me a normal pastoral
response. The Church always accompanies the dying with prayer.
People die in an abortion clinic, and it is good to pray for them
and for the living they leave behind. It is also good to pray
when faced with tragedy; and most people, even those who regard
abortion as a necessary evil, understand that abortion is a tragedy.
Prayer is an appropriate response.
Praying before an abortion clinic is, however, praying in a public
place about a contested action and the laws that protect it. Attention
is inevitable, even though the attention was greater than I would
have expected. My decision to participate was based on the track
record of the group organizing the event. They promised that the
only words spoken would be prayers and that everything would be
peaceful. It seems to me necessary to reclaim public speech on
abortion in such a way that any act of violence will be clearly
understood as an act of someone outside the pro-life community.
Coming together only to pray makes that point. During the homily
of the Mass, I asked everyone to lay aside and leave behind all
anger, emotional pain and fear, any signs or posters or bull-horns
They did, and I am grateful we were there only to welcome and
to pray.
It seems to me important as well that a bishop be with the poor.
Eighty percent of abortion clinics in the Chicago city limits,
I’m told, are in poor neighborhoods, like the clinic before which
we prayed after Mass in St Sylvester Church. Most of the people
using the clinic’s services are poor; and the people praying in
St. Sylvester’s were, for the most part, not wealthy. The police
guarding both those praying and those protesting our presence
are not rich. Bishop Manz and Bishop Perry, who concelebrated
the Mass, both live modestly. Who profits from an industry that
makes many billions of dollars each year? Who gets the money taken
from the poor?
The management of the abortion clinic is aware of the problems
of the neighborhood. They wrote a public letter asking me to assist
in keeping the streets safe by eliminating the drug trade, single
motherhood, and violent gang and poverty issues in the community.
That is a fair request, since those are problems all of us should
be concerned about. I would hope that some of the profits of the
abortion clinic might be used to solve them. They are the problem
of a culture that systematically replaces living people with dead
things and calls that a solution. Some of these problems the Archdiocese
is able to address not only because of the work of Catholic Charities
and of Maryville and Catholic youth ministry but also because
of a maternity fund begun by Cardinal Bernardin and administered
by Catholic Charities. This fund enables us to offer help to any
mother contemplating the death of her child as a solution to her
problems.
The handling of the event by the media was well done and helped
show the peaceful nature of our praying. The questions asked me
were those I would expect from people trying to figure out why
I was there and struggling to put our peacefully praying together
into the terms of the public debate on abortion. One reporter
thought the Church’s teaching led to an impasse. Because artificial
contraception is immoral, abortions will increase, which is more
immoral. The problem with that argument is that the United States
is a society where contraception and abortion go hand in hand.
In a culture that believes unwanted children should not be conceived
in the first place and have no right to life if they are conceived,
abortion is necessary as a back up when contraception fails, as
it inevitably does at some time. Playing off contraception against
abortion also seems to presuppose widespread sexual activity outside
of marriage, since repression in a post-Freudian culture is a
greater sin than promiscuity. Finally, however, it must be admitted
that the Church is no more pragmatic than her Lord. The moral
use of the gift of human sexuality requires a certain self-sacrifice.
"Why are you here?" I was asked many times. I was there because
it must be said again and again that our society cannot indefinitely
sustain the playing off of a mother’s freedom against the death
of her child. The country itself will eventually come apart. And
I was there because no mere argument, no matter how well crafted,
will convince those who sincerely believe in a civil right to
abort a baby. What is left, along with peaceful and respectful
discussion in the public forum, is prayer, in season and out of
season. I was there along with hundreds of others, to whom I am
grateful, in order to pray.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
