Catholic Excuses: 6-24

Catholic Excuses: 6 – 24
cinops be gone Wednesday, July 16, 2006
We continue with excerpts from Chapter 5 - Catholic Excuses in David Carlin’s book, Can a Catholic be a Democrat? This is tough love and the truth hurts.

47. Social Welfare: “We should be more concerned with children already born.”
Often heard as an adjunct to the “seamless garment” excuse is this argument: “You pro-lifers are tremendously concerned about the well being of the unborn baby, but we notice that you lose interest in the baby once it’s born. You don’t support daycare, welfare, and other programs that would lead to happier, healthier lives for children. Your pro-life philosophy is inconsistent, and you personally are hypocrites.”
Two replies can be made to this charge. First, it’s false. When moral conservatives object to social programs such as state-funded daycare and generous welfare payments, it’s usually because they believe that such programs ultimately harm the children by gradually undermining two-parent families. Who can deny that the institution of the married two-parent family is better for children than daycare, welfare, and the like? P. 125

If anybody is hypocritical in this discussion, it’s moral liberals, who profess to be concerned about kids living in poverty yet endorse the ethic of sexual liberation, which for the last three or four decades has contributed greatly to an epidemic of divorce and out-of-wedlock births, pauperizing women and dooming tens of millions of kids to grow up without fathers.126

48. Anti-Hypocrisy: “Conservatives defy the Church too.”
“You fault me as an inconsistent Catholic because I support the Democratic Party,” a Catholic Democrat might say to a morally conservative Catholic pro-lifer who has turned against the Democratic Party. “But this is the case of the pot calling the kettle black. You favor the war in Iraq & the death penalty, yet both of these are condemned by the Church...
Let’s leave aside the question of whether John Paul II’s calls for peace and diplomacy meant he actually believed the American invasion of Iraq to be immoral. For no matter what he thought about the moral status of the war, who can be surprised that he would make a plea for further diplomacy? Calling for peaceful solutions is one of the things you do if you’re pope. …
The Church has a traditional teaching as to what constitutes a “just war,” but there has been no definitive dogmatic pronouncement that the Iraq war in particular was an unjust war: the Church does not make dogmatic statements about things like that. Some Catholics (perhaps the pope among them) held that the war was unjust by Catholic just-war standards; other Catholics, using the same standards held that the war was just. To disagree with the pope’s putative opinion on the Iraq war doesn’t involve rejection of any Catholic doctrine; but to “disagree with the pope”- John Paul II or Benedict XVI or any pope – on abortion is much more than a personal divergence of opinion….it is to reject the authority of the Church itself by dissenting from one of its ancient moral doctrines…. 127
The ancient teaching of the Church is that capital punishment can, in principle, be justified, and the many anti-death penalty statements made by John Paul II in the last twenty years or so do not constitute a repudiation of that teaching. What the pope did say is that the death penalty, while still acceptable as a matter of principle, is for practical purposes unwarranted in modern societies with effective criminal justice system. As a sign to the world of the preciousness of human life, then, criminals who could otherwise be justifiably executed should instead be imprisoned until natural death…. 128

George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish and Vietnamese.