The Mystery of Abortion

Without engaging the discussion about the context of the viral video or placing the blame entirely on these adolescents, it astonishes me that any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies.

We cannot uncritically ally ourselves with someone with whom we share the policy goal of ending abortion....While the church’s opposition to abortion has been steadfast, it has become a stand-alone issue for many and has become disconnected to other issues of human dignity....The association of our young people with racist acts and a politics of hate must also become unthinkable.

This is an excerpt from a pastoral letter written by the Rev. John Stowe, bishop of the Diocese of Lexington, concerning the kerfluffle at the recent March for Life.

Now, I don't entirely disagree with the good bishop's sentiments. Certainly, it is true that no good Catholic can support Trump's politics, Trump's wall, or Trump's insistence on characterizing immigrants as subhuman criminals. We can never forget that Donald Trump happily signed off on a bill, produced by a Republican House, a bill that gave one-half BILLION dollars to Planned Parenthood. We can never forget that Trump won his presidency, in part, by publicly attacking Pope Francis. What was Francis' sin in Donald's eyes? Well, Pope Francis had CORRECTLY pointed out that no Catholic can support the building of walls to keep out immigrants and refugees.

Just as the MSM used the Covington high school kids to trash the whole March for Life, so Trump used the Pope's preaching of the Gospel to successfully leverage America's anti-Catholic, anti-papal culture to his own electoral benefit. Outrage is all about the clicks, you see.

No, my concern in the bishop's letter is the bolded sentence. Bishop John Stowe is not remarkable in constantly being concerned about the Catholic laity's singular upset over abortion.

So here are a couple of rhetorical questions for America's bishops:

1. Why, bishops, might it be the case that, out of all the life issues, so many Catholics consider the abortion issue pre-eminent?
2. Why do Catholic laity place the issue of abortion higher than issues like racism, care for the poor, the immigrant, the elderly, the ill, etc?

Well, this small chart may (or may not) be instructive:

Sin	Canonical Penalty
Racism	None
Sexism	None
Neglect of immigrant	None
Neglect of poor	None
Neglect of refugee	None
Neglect of ill	None
Neglect of elderly	None
Rape	None
Murder	None
Abortion	Automatic excommunication

So, why do Catholics view abortion as a sin that is worse than pretty much any other sin? I'm sure I don't know. But maybe, if we study the documents of the Church, we can eventually figure that one out. 

Scott Hahn is Wrong on Laicized Priests.

Scott Hahn has now decided to become his own Magisterium, lecturing the Pope and the bishops on how priests accused of molestation should be treated. Surely, Scott knows best, right? He thinks all priests accused/convicted of molestation should be excommunicated, because simple laicization is too light a punishment, and therefore "an insult" to the laity.

Dr. Scott Hahn has spoken, the matter is closed, right?

Get a copy of canon law (here's the original,  here's a summary), and look up the offenses which automatically impose excommunication. It is essentially imposed only for offenses against, or denial of, the sacraments. Abortion and physical attack on the Pope are the only real exceptions to that rule of thumb. Rape is terrible, but it certainly doesn't qualify as an excommunicable offense according to the rules of canon law.

But Scott Hahn, the ex-Protestant minister who still doesn't quite get how Catholicism works, doesn't agree. He knows more than the Church, an amazing skill, really. Has anyone who agrees with Scott's stupidity ever MET a laicized priest and talked with them?

Get over your personal decision to excommunicate the laicized priest accused of molestation, and try talking to some of them sometime. These men typically have zero prospects in life. They have no useful skills, they have little or no experience in the workplace, as former priests, they have no resume they can list... what are you going to put down? That you were kicked out of the Catholic priesthood for suspicion of molesting children? Yeah, THAT will go over well in an interview.

These men end up doing manual labor or lucking into a job at Walmart as a greeter. Or, they just kind of wander around, hoping some former friends maintain enough of a friendship to let them sleep on a couch. Some will find temporary refuge amongst heretical or semi-heretical religious orders as spiritual advisors, but even there, they are lucky to get bed and board.

They have no prospects, no support, no future.

Laicization is an absolute destruction of everything they ever thought they would have. It's not unlike being released from prison after a murder sentence... Yeah, you're "free", for all the good it will do you.

Don't underestimate how harsh the current sentence is.
It is DEFINITELY punishment.

Do they deserve it?
SURE, if they committed the crime.

But, just as the secular judgment systems sometimes convict the innocent, so do the Catholic canon law courts. Innocent men are sometimes laicized. And the problem is, as lay people, we have no idea which ones might be actually innocent of all charges, but still punished with laicization and a completely destroyed life.

Scott Hahn is an ex-Protestant minister who essentially excommunicated himself from his old Protestant community. He thinks of laicization in terms of what HE has experienced. He leveraged his excommunication into literally a multi-million dollar empire, monetizing his own life experience in much the same lucrative way that Zuckerberg monetizes everyone else's life experiences. He has now decided to imitate Facebook and monetize the publicly destroyed lives of these priests, pursue the "culture of outrage" to make a few bucks off of that.

Hahn apparently thinks his personally satisfying and financially rewarding excommunication experience translates to that of laicized priests, that it gives him the right to make money off of their sins and their punishment. It doesn't. He thinks he has the right to lecture the Pope, the bishops, the Church itself, on what is or is not appropriate punishment for priests. He doesn't.

Pretending that he has such rights, and inflicting his pretensions on the rest of us ... THAT insults the laity.

Why FUS Theology is Problematic

There was a recent kerfluffle about an English teacher at FUS assigning a risque book to a group of graduate students. Some people took offense because the book was apparently blasphemous.

In reference to that problem, I have no brief. If adult, well-catechized Catholics can't handle blasphemy, they should probably go live in a cave, far from the madding crowd, and spend their snowflake time in prayer, that God may strengthen them. They certainly aren't cut out for the apostolic work of evangelization.

No, my issue with FUS is rather more substantial.
It simply doesn't teach the whole Faith.

A strong charge requires strong evidence.
This is my personal experience.

During the course of my MA in theology there, I was taught that the missions of the Church were to teach and to sanctify. For two solid years, that was what I heard.

When I graduated and got job with a parish working under a wonderfully orthodox assistant priest, he pointed out that I had been mis-taught. The three-fold mission of the Church is

1. to teach, 
2. to GOVERN and 
3. to sanctify. 

He was right, of course.

So, why was the third mission never taught, never even breathed to me, during my entire time at FUS?  This puzzled me.

After this revelation, I made a point to question other theology grads, both FUS students and non-FUS students, on precisely this point, just to see if this was, perhaps, something I had missed. To a person, every FUS-taught person answered the question EXACTLY the same way that every non-FUS grad answered: the TWO missions of the Church were to teach and to sanctify.

In every case, when I pointed out the third mission, the FUS students were struck suddenly dumb, staring at the third phrase "as a cow stares at a new gate", while one Notre Dame student reacted very badly to the third phrase, going so far as to scratch it out and say, "I don't like that one."

So, again, how is it that the graduate theology program at FUS consistently omitted the third mission? I don't know. All I know is, it did. Consistently. And this omission includes teachers like Scott Hahn and Barbara Ann Morgan. All of them failed to explicitly teach the third mission. For two solid years. To everyone.

Second story.  I had a similar experience in regards to the teaching on the sacraments. When taking the undergraduate Sacraments course, the sum total of the instruction on the sacrament of marriage from the priest who taught it was "you'll learn about that in marriage prep."

That was it. Now, as it happens, I did marriage prep at FUS. I can't call it a waste of time, because almost no time was spent doing any marriage prep. The entire experience consisted of one, diocesan required pre-Cana weekend which was ... underwhelming... in its theology.

In my personal experience, FUS isn't passing on the whole Faith. Omitting one of the three missions of the Church is an incredibly basic mistake, not unlike omitting one of the sacraments. It is absurd. FUS theology instruction may be better than most schools (I have no basis for comparison, so I can't say), but in my experience, it is substandard by any objective measure.

I have NEVER recommended FUS as a place to learn theology.