What is particularly maddening is that this is the result of a 50-year trajectory that was there for everyone, including the bishops, to see. Kennedy started the trend, but the outcome wasn’t inevitable. What if bishops had recognized that politicians who supported abortion had removed themselves from the Catholic community and responded accordingly? What if bishops or religious superiors had ousted priests who excused abortion advocates? It is not hard to imagine that bishops taking a harder line with pro-abortion politicians would have stemmed the conversion of the Democratic Party to a cult of death.
The church leadership’s failure over the past 50 years has been fatal. Some misapplied Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life,” mistakenly seeing the principle as a so-called seamless-garment approach that raised social justice and other pro-life issues to the same importance as ending abortion. Others, such as the disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, called for a gentle approach to garner support for other issues.
Ultimately the Democratic Party, once a natural home for millions of Catholics, has become unwaveringly hostile to the Catholic citizen. Yet pro-abortion Catholic Democrats act as if they are in good standing with the church, and that is somewhat understandable because there has been no ecclesial consequence to their support for abortion, the pre-eminent social issue of this era.
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