By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Chicago Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne was raised Catholic, attended Catholic schools, including Marquette University, raised his kids Catholic. But he won’t call himself a Catholic—at least not a practicing one.

“The local pastor would probably consider me an infrequent visitor,” said Byrne, in the den of his Northbrook home.

Nevertheless, he’s being attacked for proclaiming Catholic values.

Byrne’s July 16 column on the Tribune’s op-ed page advocated a firm pro-life stand, opposing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, as do some other positions Byrne has taken in print. For many readers, Byrne’s Catholicism was simply assumed, as was the idea that he was parroting the Catholic party line.

Byrne would prefer to think his line is the right one, and coincidentally—at least this time—in tune with the Catholic Church.

Opponents aren’t likely to be swayed. Byrne wrote about the responses the following week in a column headlined: “Continued persecution of Catholic thought.” The essay quoted reader mail, including a letter calling him “morally repugnant” and a “pathetic excuse for a human being,” apparently because of his “conservative Catholic propaganda.”

In 17 years of writing a column, first for the Chicago Sun-Times, now for the Tribune, Byrne said he has heard the anti-Catholic charge before, but this was the first time he has written about it.

“It doesn’t give me credit for thinking for myself,” Byrne said, shortly after the July 23 column was published. “If I say something that agrees with the Catholic faith, am I to be condemned as a Catholic? Or if I say something that agrees with United Church of Christ or the Methodists? To be put in a category like this is presumptuous.”

To be sure, Byrne said, his Catholic upbringing and education molded his thinking.

“There’s a large influence of Catholic thought in what I write. Thomas Aquinas, Catholic philosophers … I think they have a lot of good things to say,” he said. “But I didn’t come to my pro-life position, for instance, on the basis of what the bishops taught me.”

That pro-life position changed him from a liberal to a conservative, Byrne jokes. It happened years ago when he wrote a response to an opinion piece in the Sun-Times, headlined something like, “A conservative view for choice.”

When he wrote, “A liberal view for life,” he said, “The liberals threw me out.”

Not really. What happened is a far more common story: as he grew older and watched his children grow up, he became more conservative on many social issues.

But many of his “liberal” opinions haven’t changed.

“If we were back in the ’50s, I would still think it would be right to march in Selma,” he said. “If we were back in the ’60s, I would still be for the Voting Rights Act. I’m still for civil rights, I’m still for integration, I’m still for open housing.”

In his mind, liberalism means extending rights ever further to those who lack power: to those without property, to African-Americans, to women, and, eventually, to unborn children.

As to whether an embryo—the 14-day blastocyst from which stem cells can be taken—constitutes a “person” with all a person’s attendant rights—he’s not sure.

“I do know it’s the beginning of human life,” he said. “But I think we need to draw a distinction between ‘human life’ and ‘personhood.’”

Even if that blastocyst is only human, and not a person, he said, it certainly deserves more respect than a mere “bunch of cells.”

“I just don’t see how people could be so callous as to say it’s just a bunch of cells,” said Byrne, a recent witness to the miracle of life when his first grandchild was born in early July.

President Bush announced Aug. 10 that he would allow funding of research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells, where, he said, “the life or death decision has already been made.”

Byrne ended his column by writing, “But most disturbing is the idea that if a human life isn’t useful, it should be used for a purpose beyond what its essential dignity should allow. How sad that so many Americans don’t see the similarities to the ‘logic’ of the Holocaust.”

Since research on adult stem cells, which can be obtained with no harm to anyone, also has shown great promise, he argued in his column, the answer should be clear: focus federal funding on adult stem-cell research.

Much of the column was based on work done by Do No Harm, a group of physicians, researchers and scholars, who advocate for adult stem-cell research. Among the group’s leaders is Jesuit Father Kevin FitzGerald, a cancer researcher and bio-ethicist who recently left Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine for Georgetown University. Byrne’s column, however, identifies FitzGerald by his profession, not his vocation.

Similarly, recent columns on the possible link between abortion and breast cancer focused on the work of researchers who consider themselves pro-choice and say they have found a statistical link between abortion and breast cancer.

Neither column drew overtly on Byrne’s religious views, but even if they did, he said, Catholic views have as much right to be in mainstream newspapers as any other.

“Every view has a right to be represented,” he said. “You can’t just say that somebody’s view doesn’t deserve to be in the newspaper.”



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