The Kennedy Family, Catholicism And Abortion
Anne Hendershott has a great Wall Street Journal piece on the political history of the Kennedy family’s contradiction between their pro-abortion political stance and their Catholic faith. It’s a real insight for many Catholics who who have fought the fight against the barbaric practice of abortion in the name of Christ. Here’s a small part of it…
Even Ted Kennedy, who gets a 100% pro-choice rating from the abortion-rights group Naral, was at one time pro-life. In fact, in 1971, a full year after New York had legalized abortion, the Massachusetts senator was still championing the rights of the unborn. In a letter to a constituent dated Aug. 3, 1971, he wrote: “When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception.”
But that all changed in the early ’70s, when Democratic politicians first figured out that the powerful abortion lobby could fill their campaign coffers (and attract new liberal voters). Politicians also began to realize that, despite the Catholic Church’s teachings to the contrary, its bishops and priests had ended their public role of responding negatively to those who promoted a pro-choice agenda.
In some cases, church leaders actually started providing “cover” for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a “clear conscience.”
The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book “The Birth of Bioethics” (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.
Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that “distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue.” It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians “might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order.”
That last line is interesting – it’s the kind of equivocation made by ideological minds seeking a way around a moral absolute. Can one sanction murder if it is done with good intention? What perils to social peace and order are we talking about? Overpopulation leading to starvation and plundered resources? Crime by the poor and the colored? Would political efforts to repress negative eugenics be grounds for supporting that moral error? The contortions Rev. John Courtney Murray goes through to rip a hole through the moral fabric that separates man from monster reveal his loyalty to God to be one sensitive to the whims of political ideology. Obviously he worships a different God than we do.
In any case, it appears to this observer that the Kennedy’s found themselves in a quandary as the pro abortion platform began to take center stage in the Democratic Party throughout the 1960′s. It was the Camelot era and the height of power for the Democratic Party, the Kennedy’s had a choice that many perceived then as now as complete polar opposites. Their choice was made. It was party over faith.
Did the Kennedy’s sell their souls for political power? That will be for God to judge!
EXTRA: Ted Kennedy: American Traitor. May God have mercy on his soul.
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4 Responses to “The Kennedy Family, Catholicism And Abortion”
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
“That last line is interesting – it’s the kind of equivocation made by ideological minds seeking a way around a moral absolute. Can one sanction murder if it is done with good intention?”
As a devout, practicing Catholic, I am offended — by your crude equivocation between Father Murray’s position and condoning murder.
One who is sincerely pro-life would never “sanction murder.” But one who understands political dynamics — including the effect of an unenforceable law, which a significant number of persons would cheerfully violate as they please — understands that law is never made in a vacuum. Every enactment has consequences. Sometimes those consequences are worse than whatever the law was aimed at.
We who are pro-life as a matter of moral conscience are principally concerned with saving lives. If it would save more lives to accept, however grudgingly, a law that leaves some abortions legal, than to insist that only laws forbidding all abortions are acceptable, we would resign ourselves to the former choice. But it would not change the absolutism of our opposition to all abortions. Neither would it forestall our eternal campaign against abortion.
I have a dear friend, also a devout Catholic, who works as a counselor at an abortion clinic. He does so because he wants to save defenseless lives — and that’s not something you can do unless you’re willing to go where those lives are endangered! By his personal count, he’s prevented more than three hundred abortions. How many have you prevented? How many have been prevented, since Roe v. Wade. by any form of legislative action?
As a pro-life libertarian Catholic, I despise the Kennedy family, a hypocritical group whose only concerns are for power, prestige, and privilege. But you really ought to give more thought to your words — as in, “Have I accurately understood the concerns and position of those I’m about to criticize?” — before making the sort of statement I quoted above.
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
My understanding of the concerns and positions of a religious leader (peritus Father Murray) and a politician (Ted Kennedy) are relative to their responsibilities. When we complain about Ted Kennedy campaigning as a Catholic while dismissing Catholicism’s stance against abortion, we’re talking about a self-serving politician. What’s obvious here is that Kennedy realized that his Democratic party was going in a direction that would put him, and his Catholic beliefs, outside party favor. He wasn’t willing to be a pro-life Democrat, he was looking for a way instead to call himself a Catholic while supporting the Democratic pro-abortion position. He went priest shopping and found himself a Catholic who had found a way he could do that. But to insist that Father Murray’s advice was just good hearted political pragmatism is to misunderstand what should have been his first responsibility are as a moral teacher. Murray’s arguments for distinctions between civil law and private morality are insightful for debates among theologians, but religion is not here to conform to the whims of the population. If the Kennedys had gone to a political strategist to find a way to square liberal positions with Catholic doctrine, we’d declare hypocrisy and move on. But they went to a Catholic priest – one they knew was against the long standing opposition by the church of contraception, and sought political advice. Many Catholics don’t agree with Murray’s argument that since ‘everyone is doing it’ the church ought to acquiesce. Likewise, to suggest that we ought not insist that politicians consult private morality as a guide to public legislation is, I believe, a big reason for the abdication of moral leadership we’ve seen since the sixties. Today we have weak leaders looking to follow cultural trends rather than lead them. Murray’s political advice also did nothing to address the church’s over-riding concern with the protection of life, either – in fact we can argue that Murray’s arguments have been used mostly to undermine fidelity to the church’s moral standard. So it doesn’t matter if his intention was to reduce the amount of back alley abortions or enhance the attractiveness of Catholic religion. His role was never meant to be to bless policy – it was to carry the church’s message of moral responsibility. That’s it.
The debate over private morality v. public morality is a false one – the laws we’re bound by are influenced by our private notions of right and wrong, inspired by religion or not. There are many secular reasons to oppose abortion, it’s not strictly a religious issue. To search for a way to call oneself a Catholic while campaigning as an active opponent to church teaching is the kind of arrogance I expect of the Kennedys. It disappoints me more when I see other Catholics covering for them.
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
[...] Uncle Seth from Political Vindication shares some interesting insights about the Kennedy’s, Catholicism, and abortion. [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 8:57 am
I enjoyed your post and the comments. I write on the topic of abortion regularly on my personal blog. Though not a Catholic myself, I find myself wondering about how Catholics reconcile their church doctrine with their voting tendancies.
Blessings.
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