William BorstI recently read an essay in my diocesan newspaper about Joe Biden, still officially our president, and his recent basket of pardons, including several commutations of the death penalty. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops implored our second Catholic president to make good on his pre-election pledge to do this. Like the good and faithful Catholic he posits he is, Biden fulfilled his promise and 40 men on death row had their sentences reduced to life imprisonment without parole. Where is there any word of having this president somehow pardon the unborn, who are all vulnerable to the abortionists knives?
I addressed this issue 11 months ago in my essay The Silence of the Shepherd. I know Pope Francis, who has just celebrated his 88th birthday, has generated a lot of contention during his papacy. I just wish he were much more consistent. He turned a lot of ears when he said there were other issues in the Church than abortion and also with his call for tolerance of gay people– with whom am I to judge as he put it. Yet, he has shown no such patience for our president-elect when he harshly condemned Donald Trump for vowing to do his job and deport those who came here illegally. The pontiff called deportation a grave sin.
While Pope Francis has occasionally voiced opposition to abortion, where is his grave sin rhetoric for our sitting or is it napping president? Joe Biden has been the most pro-abortion president in our country’s history. Personally, I think the pope wears rose-colored glasses on these issues. Where is the justice for the millions of Americans who have suffered because of Joe Biden’s blatant irresponsibility for encouraging millions of illegals to invade our southern borders? Justice is a two-way street.
For the last half century, the Church’s life issues have been governed by what they call a consistent life ethic which is defined as All human life is sacred from conception to natural death.* This seems to allow for no exceptions. My Catholic Ethics textbook in college listed three specific exceptions, namely a just war, self-defense and the death penalty.
The Catholic Life Ethic (CLE) was created out of the whole cloth of the seamless garment, a term Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago used in his speech at Fordham University in 1983. It is a reference to John 19:23, where the Roman soldiers left Jesus’ robe seamless rather than dividing it after His execution.
Two years ago, I published a lengthy essay on these pages about the Cardinal and his seamless garment, which I called The Loss of Innocence. Rather than repeat my major points, this essay merely urges Catholics to apply logic and reason to the faith with regard to the abortion and immigration issues.
According to Wikipedia, the seamless garment is an ideology which opposes abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. The late Cardinal believed that all human life is sacred and should be protected by law. Its wording attracts pacifists of all kinds, and social justice warriors to balloon its popularity in the Church.
Many social justice issues were added, such as nuclear disarmament, racism, and I trust we can add immigration now. The article also dates its origins as far back as 1971. It was Archbishop Humberto Medeiros of Boston and Catholic pacifist Eileen Egan, who actually coined the phrase Cardinal Bernardin used. It has become obvious that the Garments’ chief advocates and defenders have been largely from the liberal side of the political and moral spectrum.
Consequently, the Cardinal’s seamless garment involves much more than specific threats to human life by including social justice. I believe when the term is heavy on the social but has a poor understanding of what justice is, Catholics should beware.
The late Chicago Cardinal later stated that while these issues were distinct, nevertheless they were linked to the value and defense of human life, which are at the center of all these issues. When human life is considered ‘cheap’ or easily expendable in one area, eventually nothing is held as sacred and all lives are in jeopardy.
While on the surface, this makes some sense, but in the real world, it is abortion, not the death penalty that cheapens all human life, especially innocent lives. Some argue that anything less than the death penalty cheapens the lives of the victims. These thoughts also lend explanation as to why so many think it is commendable to assassinate a future president and the CEO of a large health insurance company.
This also begs several questions. Are Catholics required to follow this apparent change or alteration of traditional teachings? Does it mean we all have to be pacifists or refuse to serve in our country’s military where it could require us to fight and kill other humans? Does it also mean policemen should no longer carry guns or any other weapons of lethal capabilities?
I believe the authors of the CLE omitted one vital word from their definition that would have immediately cleared up any ambiguity. The word is Innocent. It should have read …All innocent life is sacred from conception to natural death. Without the word, innocent, all historical villains, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro and so forth would in theory be protected from anything but disease and accident. In truth, just how many reasonable people would have found their lives sacred? That one missing word marks the major inconsistency in the CLE.
Look at our major metropolitan areas who have elected radical judges and district attorneys to stop prosecuting violent felons and open the gates of our jails. Could one not say that our streets are more violent because of the confusion caused by the CLE, which implies that the guilty should often go unpunished? Might this explain why thousands of criminals and mentally ill roam our city streets, robbing, killing and raping thousands of innocent people? I seriously doubt any Catholic with a reasonable conscience can believe the CLE doesn’t militate against faith and reason.
Egan addressed another inconsistency in the CLE when she argued that all life must be protected. She chided anti-abortion advocates who also favored the death penalty and those who favored the death penalty but supported abortion rights.
I have always wondered how someone could defend the death penalty for children in utero being conducted in some unsanitary abattoir, more appropriate for a butcher shop, yet still be against the executions of people for who had willfully brutalized and murdered innocent human beings. After years of study, I finally found the thread that binds both sides.
Abortionists butcher the innocent whose only crime is being conceived by the wrong woman. They do this without any due process because, unlike killers, the unborn have no constitutional rights, though they should be implicit in the right to life in our Declaration of Independence. Alleged murderers, on the other hand, have all the rights good citizens have. But in their case, a jury of their peers found them guilty of the most heinous of crimes, the taking of an innocent human life. Justice demands payment in kind.
Pro-abortionists lobby for the alleged rights of women to abort innocent life, without a thought to the child’s humanity with its distinct DNA. As in the case of convicted murderers, again they identify with the guilty over their innocent victims. One side stands for all the innocent, while the other sides with all those who have blood on their hands.
While I never have been a cheerleader for executing violent criminals, I believe capital punishment has a two-fold role in our justice system. The first is as a disincentive for murderers. I think statistics from the seventies and eighties when the death penalty was outlawed, showed a significant rise in murders. I believe that one can easily say that the death penalty saves thousands of innocent human lives. The other one is that it is a great bargaining chip to secure, at best, life imprisonment without parole.
On a similar issue, I was taken back by a survey on social justice in my parish. It simply used the word immigrant, which has a much more complicated meaning in today’s parlance. This was not people like my wife who migrated here in 1970 from Sicily with her late husband and their four small children. Years later after some study of some basic American and constitutional history, they were sworn in as US citizens, as was Melania Trump early in this century after 10 years in this country.
I believe the Church is wrongly siding with the illegals who often paid thousands of dollars to skip the required lines of due process for entering America. I am talking about millions of people whose presence and backgrounds are little known to ICE, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It has also been estimated that among their numbers there have been thousands of felons, drug dealers, and drug cartel members, who have wreaked havoc on our border states and now appear all across the country. Many American citizens have been robbed and even murdered by several of these illegals. ICE has also counted over 25,000 Chinese males arriving through our smashed gates. Any guesses why they are here?
These illegal immigrants amount to an invasion force that in some cases have been granted rights and assistance that our own citizens do not have or have seen their tax payments used in aiding and abetting a crime. Where is the justice for our citizens? This prompts some additional questions: should our Church be involved in breaking our laws? Are there any other laws that they should encourage the faithful to break? How about the abortion laws, which support the murder of a million unborn babies each and every year? There are no more heinous or evil laws on our books than these. Yet the Church’s silence has been deafening.
I remember a decade ago when our St. Louis Archbishop required each Mass to include a reading of his letter on undocumented immigrants. In retrospect, it was uncharitable of me to have put the messenger priest on the spot but after Mass, I asked him if there were any difference in the words illegal and undocumented? I was not surprised that he never answered me.
The Bible has always taught us that bad things happen in the darkness. Jesus Christ is the Light of the World. Darkness belongs to the devil. The aforementioned undocumented are an example of what lexicologists would call euphemisms. Our speech police invented several phrases to hide the reality of stupid, shoplifting, homeless and housewife with such euphemisms as unschooled, shopping, outdoor urban dwellers and domestic engineer.
These words are used to hide the truth of a person’s place in reality, ostensibly to protect them from shame, humiliation and derision. In the case of the undocumented, I believe it is a blatant attempt to hide the illegality of their status. Does this mean even the Church leaders believe they are basically wrong and they must hide the truth from us?
One phrase that we heard ad nauseum during the last election, was the rule of law. I know that the issue is not on the same scale, however, the respect for American law seems to be lacking in the Church’s support for illegal immigration. To paraphrase Cardinal Bernardin: disrespect for one law, often translates to disrespect for all laws.
How can sending the illegals back where they came from be a grave sin for us? Maybe this grave sin was more the work of the leaders, on both sides of our borders, who encouraged them to come and those moneychangers who profited from their plight but not the US border patrol nor its Executive leadership. If a country cannot protect its own borders, it is not a free country.
The central problem with the CLE is that it does not take into consideration our human nature. If all men were saintly, there would be no reason for prisons and gallows. Hitler, Stalin and the other historical villains could not have lost their sanctity by sinning gravely against their fellow human beings.
As President James Madison so eloquently put it: if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. We need laws that will protect all innocent life and punish the guilty. The alternate is to give reign to violence and social chaos, similar to Paris in 1789.
*Many scholars emphasize that the Fifth Catholic Commandment** actually translates to Thou shalt not murder, which would imply all the exemptions.
**In many Protestant denominations their numeration differentiates so that the stricture Do not kill is their sixth commandment.
Vincent Ryan Ruggiero
