Abortion: The Greatest Sin In The Catholic Church?

[ For those interested there is a post today on Gangsters Gambits.]

Is this true? Is abortion the one great sin in the American Catholic Church? When Jesus said the way to heaven was to love God and love your neighbor did he forget to add in anything about abortion? When Moses came down from the mountain with the two tablets given to him by God was there only one commandment on it?

Is George Will right when he started off his column: “What is the worst crime a society can commit? Some people (I among them) would say the Holocaust, the cold methodical murder of six million people just for being Jews. But some Catholics and evangelicals say they know of an even greater crime — the deliberate killing of untold millions of unborn babies by abortion. They have determined that a fetus is a person and abortion is therefore murder. This is a crime of such magnitude that some Catholic bishops are trying to deny the reception of Holy Communion by the president of the United States for not working to prevent it.”

According to Will, the reason they are doing it is: “They hate this pope and this president anyway.” 

Another guy, I don’t know now what his name is, wrote:

“The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for.  They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don‘t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don‘t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.

You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike the people who he actually advocated for. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”

Does that make sense that because it costs nothing to advocate for them one can do it and get the feeling of moral righteousness or superiority?

George will told of a conundrum he face when his wife faced a “severe risk of a miscarriage.” What did the Catholic Church recommend that he should do if it happened. He went to seek advice. There was none other than it should be handled by the hospital. He went on to say: “the church did not prescribe or recommend baptizing a miscarriage as if it were a full human being, nor giving it last rites, nor burying it in consecrated ground.”

The bishops backed off their plan to deny Biden communion when they faced an  enormous backlash from the public. What made their plan to deny him communion so absurd was that Biden is opposed to abortion himself but does not want to force his beliefs on others who have a different opinion.

A question that must be answered first, I would think, is whether the taking of the life of a fetus worse than the taking of a life of a child, or any other person living outside a womb. Unfortunately no matter what answer we come up with the debate will proceed apace, especially now because it has spilled over into the political sphere.