A New Front in the Church's Civil War

At Catholics in the Public Square, Chris Blosser links to an excellent analysis of the efforts of alleged "pro-lifers" to make a "pro-life" case on behalf of the pro-abortion Catholic Kathleen Sebelius: George Neumayr on Sebelius - "A New Front in the Church’s Civil War".

Here's an excerpt:

Modern liberal Catholics chuckle at the history of casuistry in the Church even as they contribute grimly absurd new examples to it. They use tortured reasoning not to discuss the properties of angels but to cloud the records of abortion proponents.

How many dissenting, not very angelic Catholic politicians can dance with modernists’ approval at the head of a pro-abortion administration? An astonishing number, it turns out, and the list is growing. Kathleen Sebelius is the latest Catholic appointment to seize upon their strained sophistries.

No sooner had President Barack Obama nominated the governor of Kansas to head up the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) than “26 Catholic leaders, scholars, and theologians” started up a petition and website to support her.

The website is riddled with deceptions. The first one is the group’s self-description as pro-life and “faithful” to Catholicism. It isn’t. Most of its members—such as Lisa Sowle Cahill and Margaret O’Brien Steinfels—wish to liberalize magisterial teaching and falsely regard the Church’s pro-life stance as a sectarian claim (with which they happen to agree) and not a truth accessible to the reason of all.

Hence, Doug Kmiec, also a member of the group, can speak of the Church’s stance on abortion as an “opinion,” writing last year that it is proper for abortion law to “leave space for the exercise of individual judgment, because our religious or scientific differences of opinion are for the moment too profound to be bridged collectively.”

This is not a faithful representation of the Church’s teaching on abortion but a species of fideism that renders Kmiec’s “pro-life” credentials largely meaningless.

***
A new, disorienting front has opened up in the Church’s civil war and disguised dissenters rush into it. By comparison to the casuistry of Catholics for Kathleen Sebelius, the faded group Catholics for Free Choice looks almost honest. At least its former head Frances Kissling didn’t bother to work up a fantastical “pro-life” case for pro-abortion politicians. She paid the Church the small courtesy of open disagreement.

[Read the whole thing]

(emphasis added)