Just as the Democratic party needs to be yanked from sucking the teat of Big Abortion and Planned Parenthood, the Republican party needs to get the NRA out of its throat. To be pro-life is to be for laws that support women, to be against contraception, to be against racism, to condemn war, and to be against assault weapons getting into the hands of the mentally ill. The Pillar states it well:
"One thing we learned from the conversation was how state Catholic conferences are taking lessons from the abortion debate and applying them to legislative conversation about guns. As one of state leader explained, as with abortion, national polling on guns gives some often misleading headline statistics, but when you drill down just a little you find a broad base of consensus around certain limits people support. And, as with abortion, there often just isn’t the political will to enact them. Working for progress of any kind in these conditions requires of Catholics a certain pragmatism, along with a prophetic witness to life. Read the whole thing."
Catholics are both/and thinkers. We are pro-woman and therefore anti-Pill. We are pro-veteran this Memorial Day and also anti-war, because war is always a defeat. We consider all violations of human dignity- racism or abortion or euthanasia- to be precisely that: an offense against God and therefore unjust for all the same reason.
Again, Ed Condon at the Pillar states it best, almost paraphrasing Mother Teresa:
I cannot but recognize the same irrationality, the same obtuseness, the same inhumanity, in much of the pro-gun discourse after these atrocities as we see so often in pro-abortion arguments.
Indeed, the two realities seem obviously linked — we are a society which has normalized the mass killing of its children as a (most regrettable) byproduct of our conception of freedom and rights. This is our wider context, an individual absolutism that cedes nothing to the needs and good of the vulnerable, and I see no prospect of this changing.
It seems inescapable to me that a society which has so internalized and normalized violence, and at the same time warped and sabotaged the basic concept and worth of family, must result in a generalized crisis of mental health — the acute extremes of which appear to be at the center of these mass killings. This is, surely, the picture of a culture of death whose first victims are, inevitably, its children.
The Pillar also shares a quote from Bishop Flores, who names the problem:
I must say that in some sense, we have kind of sacralized the whole idea of the individual right, such that it trumps any communal concern. It becomes an untouchable aspect in the discourse, that the common concern for the good of the vulnerable is not in any way sufficient to limit the individual right to determine whether or not I want to own this kind of a gun, or that kind of gun, or, you know, a hand grenade for that matter.
So when you sacralize it, you kind of make it basically closed for discussion, because we practically treat it as if it were sacred.
The Common Good.
The Founding Fathers debated this over and over again: where do you strike the balance between individual liberty and the Common Good? The members of Congress who were Catholics from a free-black state erred on the side of the latter in drafting the First Amendment, while Jefferson the slave-owning Deist erred on the side of the former. I wonder whose legacy we should assert more as Catholics?
Many thanks to The Pillar for reporting this. Not many news organizations can do that while comprehending the catechetical absurdity of transferring the Ascension when the Pentecost novena is the oldest prayer of the Church. Please join me in supporting them financially.
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