David Quinn
True compassion helps someone carry their burden until the time hopefully comes when it doesn’t feel like a burden anymore, writes David Quinn
A friend who is good at number-crunching tells me that 37% of weekly Mass-goers voted for abortion on May 25. He gleaned that figure from exit poll data. It is a horrifying statistic.
More than 1.4 million people voted ‘Yes’, versus 724,000 who voted ‘No’. Of the 1.4 million who voted ‘Yes’, about 200,000 were regular Mass-goers. If they had all voted ‘No’, as they should have done, the ‘Yes’ side’s margin of victory would have been 300,000 votes, not 700,000 voters. The right to life would still have been repealed, but not by a two-to-one landslide. The margin of victory would have been roughly 56/44, not 66/34.
Voting for abortion is clearly completely against the Catholic Faith and against Christian morality. That is especially so given the nature of the law the Government intends passing and the fact the unborn have now been stripped of all explicit Constitutional rights. Almost no abortions will be refused under the legislation the Government wants to pass.
Succour
A Catholic who voted to repeal the Eighth either doesn’t understand their own Faith properly, or else comes to Mass as a form of spiritual succour and the contents of the specific faith of the specific Church they attend doesn’t matter all that much to them. They think they can call themselves ‘Catholic’ no matter what they think, do or say.
Thus, we had various politicians proudly announcing themselves to be both ‘Yes’ voters, and Catholic, which would be a bit like insisting on saying you are a Fine Gaeler while regularly voting with Fianna Fáil.
Fine Gael politicians were particularly fond of announcing themselves to be Catholic and in favour of repeal. The Catholic Church was almost dared to do something about it. Fine Gael itself has no hesitation imposing the party line when it suits it. After all, it expelled six members of its parliamentary party in 2013 for voting against the abortion bill of that year. This is the political version of excommunication.
Some of the ordinary Mass-goers who voted ‘Yes’ will have done so out of a misguided view of compassion. That makes their vote understandable. But the compassion has to extend both to the mother facing an unplanned pregnancy, and to the unborn baby. Nothing less will do.
On Monday on Today with Sean O’Rourke, Bishop Kevin Doran said it was a sin for a Catholic to vote for abortion. Strictly speaking, that is correct, depending on the state of a person’s conscience. (It is possible for someone in perfectly good conscience to do absolutely the wrong thing.)
But if a Catholic, knowing and understanding what their Church believes about abortion, still voted ‘Yes’, then that is a sin, especially if they know deep down that abortion is wrong but voted for it anyway.
For the record, here is exactly what Bishop Doran said, because it is more nuanced and subtle than the headlines would have us believe, He said that if a practicing Catholic “voted ‘Yes’, knowing and intending that abortion would be the outcome, then you should consider coming to Confession, where you would be received with the same compassion that is shown to any other penitent”.
Needless to say, Bishop Doran has been roundly attacked for what he said. But then again, those of us who are pro-life have been roundly condemned as miscreants and much worse on social media for daring to stand against ‘progress’.
Pro-choicers have their own version of sin, and for them it is a sin to resist ‘progress’ and both the sin and the sinner must be expunged from society. Hence there are calls for the likes of Sen. Rónán Mullen, The Iona Institute, Cora Sherlock and John McGuirk among other leading pro-life voices to be silenced and never allowed in the media again.
This is incredible stuff. The pro-choice side lost the 1983 referendum by a two-to-one margin, which is the scale of their victory this time. But I don’t remember anyone that mattered telling anti-repeal campaigners that they should withdraw from public life.
In fact, the campaign against the Eighth back in 1983 had nearly the entirety of the media on their side, just like now, and there were immediate calls for the Eighth Amendment to be repealed.
This makes clear that the battle to repeal the pro-life amendment from our Constitution began not last year, but 35 years ago, and the media have thrown absolutely everything at it in the time since then.
This probably goes a long way towards explaining the size of the repeal side’s victory. The conditioning of public opinion in a pro-choice direction has been going on for decades.
Swing voters
In addition, for many people, including very clearly many swing voters, abortion is now regarded as a part of modern life, a ‘necessary evil’.
Many voters will have reasoned that Irish women are having abortions anyway and that it would be better to simply legalise it. If that means repealing the right to life of the unborn, then so be it. That’s very sad, but it is the ‘lesser’ of two evils.
It didn’t seem to occur to them to properly question the social conditions that seem to make abortion such a widespread part of modern life, to wonder about the morality that says we have a right to eliminate unchosen burdens.
It is now vitally necessary that the pro-life movement become a long-term dissenting voice in society, one that says we should not do away with unchosen burdens like an unplanned pregnancy.
‘Choice’ is not the be-all and end-all. True compassion helps someone carry their burden until the time hopefully comes when it doesn’t feel like a burden anymore. That is the task of all Christians who take their Faith seriously. This should go without saying.
Finally, the Catholic Church needs to do a far better job educating its members in the basics of their own Faith because if so many were so willing to vote down the right to life of the unborn, then something has gone very badly wrong.