I wasn’t angry when I wrote this essay, but neither was I singing ‘Gloria in exceisis Deo.’ The heart of the problem is that most American bishops don’t inspire confidence in the church’s desire to confront serious issues other than abortion. For them, abortion is do or die, and in the 21st century, we’re beginning to die.
I read this article about the results of the recent meeting of the America Synod of Bishops more than once, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it points to a potentially dangerous influence on the 2020 elections. The letter the article references is intended to guide American Catholic voting decisions (I missed that on my first read), and I fear that, if read from the pulpit, it will drive Catholics who attend mass regularly to vote for conservatives and re-elect Trump.
According to a recent PEW report, most Americans want the pulpit out of politics; the bishops’ letter indicates they don’t agree, and on this point I agree with the bishops. What do they want bishops and priests and sisters talk about? The evils of masturbation? I heard that very topic in a passionately preached sermon the first Sunday after the U.S. invaded Iraq for the second time. It occurred to me, as I idly contemplated onanism in the pew, that a discussion of the church’s teaching on just wars might be in order (thankfully, the church is moving away from the theory, but still). While I don’t want priests endorsing candidates, I don’t think it’s possible for the church to remain silent on social and political issues: as the radical historian Howard Zinn quipped, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” How do you form consciences without a robust discussion of social issues? I certainly haven’t heard many complaints about the church’s openly political and only minimally non-partisan Right to Life activities.
How do you form consciences without a robust discussion of social issues?
Among church-going Catholics, 52-percent of whites who attend mass every Sunday have a favorable opinion of Trump, as do 45-percent of white Catholics who don’t regularly attend mass. Strikingly, only 26-percent of non-white Catholics like Trump. The implied approval of the bishops, largely because of Trump’s conservative judicial appointments, will confirm church-going Catholics in their righteousness, and it may attract low information Catholic voters to Trump’s satanic hotel, the “doom with a view.”
From my perspective, that means the American Synod of Bishops, as a corporate body, has perversely become an enemy of the people.
Let’s call it the Bishops’ War
The bishops argue that abortion is currently killing people in greater numbers than climate change, so ending abortion is the preeminent concern of the American church. In the U.S. that’s temporarily true, and the global death toll from abortion is indeed grimly high. But following this logic, the value of a life is, then, relative. The current unborn are valued more than the already born, who are valued more (maybe?) than the future unborn.
Pope Francis warns against Christians who are so righteous they worship themselves.
To be fair, the bishops’ letter does quickly run through a laundry list of social issues, but it’s clear the fight against abortion will garner most of their time, energy, money, and bully pulpit. But if the goal is to reduce the carnage from abortion, as it should be, then why aren’t the bishops advocating for condoms and safe sex education, both of which are shown to reduce unwanted pregnancies? Instead, the bishops fight those initiatives. Why aren’t aggressively pursuing publicly-provided prenatal care for women and more income support for families? Again, strategies that reduce abortions. Why aren’t they addressing WHO’s list of legal and social barriers that lead to unsafe abortions, causing the deaths of the mother and the unborn child? The barriers include removing restrictive laws, increasing the availability of affordable services, and ending unnecessary requirements (mandatory waiting periods, providing misleading information, medically unnecessary tests, etc.). The bishops, in fact, support most of those barriers.
Over the next 40 years, 6 to 7 billion people will die due to the effects of climate change. How is that not an issue of the highest moral importance?
The bishops’ belief about climate change deaths is weak and temporary, at best, if we consider the severe droughts and storms that are destroying crops and inducing starvation. The people of Yemen, for example, are starving because of climate change-affected drought. The war waged by the Saudis, with weapons provided by the U.S., led Houthi rebels to restrict access Yemen’s ports, so the outside world can’t adequately supply 10 million Yemenis with food. Over 5 million people in Zimbabwe are in danger of starvation because of climate change-affected crop failures; 3.5 million people are food insecure in Sudan, and other 3.6 million are considered stressed, because of climate change-affected drought. Climate change has exacerbated the already precarious reality of subsistence agriculture in these and many other countries. And there are other examples of the havoc caused or intensified by climate change, including the hurricanes that have destroyed Haiti and Puerto Rico. Where, in the bishops’ heavenly calculus, does the suffering of these millions find a number? How long is the wait before they’ll receive attention?
As the radical historian Howard Zinn quipped, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
What I really object to is privileging one life over another. What authority do the bishops have to value the unborn over the already born? None. They’ve stolen the patina of God’s authority to advance their own conservative biases. Of course, God’s authority has no patina, so the bishops are simply asserting that we must privilege their somber voices over the cries of the already born who are suffering and dying. If the bishops want to be the voice of the voiceless, what of the 10,000 people who died last year because Trump relaxed air pollution standards? They don’t have a voice.
Life is not an and/or proposition; all life must be defended. Efforts to protect life can and must be spread across a myriad of issues. The American church is large and has an ample treasury, so it has the resources to do the work of the Gospels, but the myopic focus of the bishops on abortion condemns the American church to moral irrelevance.
Noam Chomsky: I find it psychologically impossible to discuss the 2020 election without emphasizing, as strongly as possible, what is at stake: survival, nothing less. Four more years of Trump may spell the end of much of life on Earth, including organized human society in any recognizable form. Strong words, but not strong enough.
Bishop Cupich of Chicago knows this, as do the 68 bishops who voted with him. Pope Francis knows this. But the majority of bishops refused to insert a paragraph from Gaudete et exsultate on the moral equivalency of other social issues into their letter, even though the pope considers it an “ideological error” to focus exclusively on one issue. Nor did they mention the results of the recent Amazonian synod, which contains strong language supporting action on climate change and preserving the lives of Indigenous peoples. Traditionally, the American bishops have noted the results of recent synods in their letters.
Life is not an and/or proposition; all life must be defended.
Are the bishops opposing U.S. arms sales to the Saudis? Not really. Except for pro forma statements, issued once and then forgotten, they’re silent about the many U.S. wars of imperialism, all of which have negative climate impacts and have, without a doubt, included the unborn among their victims. Priests, sisters, and the laity have actively opposed wars of imperialism, but few bishops.
Local bishops have worked at our southern border since the refugee crisis began (priests, sisters, and many of the laity have also responded). A few bishops have given impressive witness to the travesty at our border, but it has not roused the entire synod to action against U.S. laws or U.S. imperialism. The primary reason for the exodus of people from southern nations to the north are the corrupt actions of U.S.-backed right-wing governments. These violent regimes make it unsafe for ordinary people to remain at home. Mothers and fathers don’t walk a thousand or more miles carrying a child in their arms for the convenience of shopping at Walmart! They are fleeing right wing and narco-trade death squads, armed with U.S.-provided weapons, whose leadership is trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas.
Their governments have also adopted the aggressive U.S.-style of capitalism beloved by corporations and financial speculators, because it leaves them free to pillage. This unholy trinity – corrupt Latin American governments, unaccountable corporations, and the expertise of the U.S. Army – are destroying the Indigenous homelands that are the lungs of the earth.
If anything cries out for action by the bishops, it’s the suffering we’re causing along our borders and in our concentration camps; racist and xenophobic rhetoric also endangers people in the U.S., many of whom are citizens. Perhaps Trump will finally receive his Nobel Prize for work in childhood and adolescent psychology, because we’ve kidnapped 70,000 children to conduct a gruesome experiment on the effect of trauma on developing psyches, just to verify what we learned in Nazi concentration camps. The bishops should have a large and continuous presence at the border and around the concentration camps, to say nothing of an intense lobbying effort in the halls of Congress, demanding an end to the atrocities committed by the U.S. government. The laity should be mobilized to oppose these anti-life precursors of fascism in the U.S., but the American Synod is largely silent. The bishops will, with alacrity, lend their prestige to Right to Life rallies, and their minions lobby state and federal officials for anti-choice laws, but the already born deserve no such effort.
Like a rope used to thread a needle, consciences are deformed when forced through a narrow lens.
Nearly 800 million people are suffering because of climate change, and in the very near future millions will die because of it. “It’s not happening now,” which is the American Synod’s position, is a gross violation of the Precautionary Principle and a statement unworthy of serious moral consideration.
Climate change denial is rampant among conservatives, many politicians, left and right, support U.S. imperialism (although non-politicians are less enthusiastic), and we’re updating and expanding our nuclear arsenal. These are lethal problems of grave moral import, so why are they playing second fiddle to abortion? Why are the bishops playing a solo when we need the full orchestra?
You may have noticed that I wrote, “From my perspective, that means the American Synod of Bishops, as a corporate body, has perversely become an enemy of the people.” I didn’t write “the people in the U.S.,” because the bishop’s refusal to issue a call to action on climate change and human migration has global repercussions, affecting billions of people.
The Bishops’ War is a prophecy of global catastrophe.
We’re the nation waging the environmentally damaging wars in at least seven countries. We’re the primary nation protecting fossil fuel extraction. We’re the nation with the largest consumption per capita, throwing away so much non-degradable plastic that we can’t even pay other nations to take it anymore. We have 5 percent of the world’s population, but we consume 24 percent of the world’s energy. We’re the nation refusing climate accords and dismantling our own environmental laws, so once again we’re fouling the air and polluting the water.
We are physically and morally wallowing in filth, and human civilization is in jeopardy. But the bishops have decided that nothing else matters until one country, the United States, changes its laws on one issue, abortion.
Milton, encouraged perhaps by signs of revolutionary success, briefly entertained a higher opinion of the “commoners” of England than was his norm. Milton asserted, in Areopagitica, that commoners were capable of reading, discussing, and deciding things for themselves.
Of course, those activities (except the daily labor) were as rare among English commoners then as they are among Americans now. But Milton, a commoner, did exactly that, rising early each morning to labor on his political pamphlets (his form of garroting), then setting aside his mundane and worldly cares to grapple with the Bible or soar to unseen realms as he read ancient authors. At the time, he generously believed all of us were capable of learning half-a-dozen languages and appreciating the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, and Plato’s Symposium in Greek. Even beyond that, he dared to think that each of us was up to the task of integrating ancient wisdom into our day-to-day decisions.
Puritan by any stretch of the imagination, Franklin’s quest for self-improvement was as urgent as Milton’s, even if Franklin read the Hebrew scriptures in English and the ancients in translation. And, for Franklin and the other Founding Fathers, Milton work was also an object of study. The revolutionaries were impressed by Milton’s argument for liberty and a free press, and they would eventually garrote Royalists, literally and figuratively, during the American Revolution.
At the end 
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