How Trump gets Christians to distort their own teachings

As I have argued in this space before, the only actual fruit of Catholics throwing their lot in with cynical “prolife conservative” politicians like Donald Trump is that the Catholic twists himself into a pretzel to please Trump and then devotes all his actual energy to battling prudence and the Church, not fighting for the unborn.

Case in point: Fr. Peter West, who announces his support for Trump this way:

I believe people can change. Trump was once pro-choice. Now he’s pro-life, but not perfectly so. I supported #Ted… https://t.co/8NCh86Z3iv

— Father Peter West (@fr_pwest) May 12, 2016

Here’s reality: “not perfectly so” means, in fact, that Trump’s views on abortion are the same as Hillary’s. Fr. West urges support for Trump on the theory that he “believes people can change” when, in fact, there is no evidence for change at all, not only on abortion, but on other serious assaults on human life by Trump.

As a confessor, Fr. West should know that “change” involves some kind of expression of contrition for, say, urging death on innocent men. But Trump is on record as saying he has never seen the need to ask God for forgiveness for anything. More than that, he has only doubled down on his impenitence about leading a media lynch mob against the innocent Central Park Five.

So what we, in fact, are seeing is not Trump in any way manifesting some supposed “change” to a prolife position (a position, some may recall, which defends *all* human life from conception to natural death), but Catholics willing to distort the Church’s teaching on contrition (and reality) in order to go to bat for somebody who is so “prolife” that he wants to murder innocent men and is still striving to justify it.

That’s how it always works when “prolife” people enslave themselves to the GOP Culture of Death: they wind up supporting stuff directly contrary to the faith and they get *nothing* in return. They dance to Trump’s tune, not he to theirs.

Instead of doing that, just listen to the Church’s teaching about the death penalty (and about contrition) and don’t waste time trying to defend the transparently indefensible.