{"id":92800,"date":"2015-06-05T00:21:22","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T07:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=92800"},"modified":"2015-06-04T07:48:55","modified_gmt":"2015-06-04T14:48:55","slug":"pushback-against-the-anti-abortion-but-not-prolife-mentality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2015\/06\/pushback-against-the-anti-abortion-but-not-prolife-mentality.html","title":{"rendered":"Pushback Against the Anti-Abortion-But-Not-Prolife Mentality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

There have been a number of pre-emptive strikes against Francis and his imminent encyclical. \u00a0So\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n

This time, they messed with the wrong woman \u2013 Margaret Archer, world-renowned social theorist and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In the context of an all-too-typical hit piece from\u00a0First Things<\/em>, she issued a\u00a0defiant response<\/a>. She asks a sequence of questions, starting with this one:<\/p>\n

\u201cIs your sole concern with human dignity confined to the period between conception and live-birth<\/em>? If so, this is a travesty of Catholic Social Teaching, whose concern is not confined to the newborn but extends to the development of all those potentialities and powers that exist only in potentia at birth (such as walking and talking) that develop or can be irreparably damaged throughout life.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve had people get mad at me when I\u2019ve pointed out that things like the death penalty gun violence, unjust war, torture, or poverty are prolife issues too. \u00a0One reader furiously demanded to know why prolife activists were expected to drop everything and go protest some shooting in Detroit that killed a couple of people while a million and a half were dying from abortion, etc. \u00a0I was, I was told, placing an impossible demand on people with limited resources to do everything and be everywhere.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not what I\u2019m saying. \u00a0I get that people have their focuses and can\u2019t be everywhere doing everything. \u00a0Well and good. \u00a0If you are devoted to working against abortion full time and can\u2019t fit anything else into your schedule then thank you for your hard work and may God bless and prosper it. \u00a0You are one of my heroes.<\/p>\n

Yet here\u2019s the \u00a0thing. \u00a0An awful lot of the \u201cprolife\u201d subculture, protesting that it has no time to expand its energies beyond\u00a0protesting abortion, *does* have a huge amount of time and energy to work *against* the clear and obvious guidance of the Church on the issues I mention above. \u00a0Indeed, they often give every indication of having more time and energy for working against the Church on such issues than for actually doing prolife work. There\u2019s all kinds of time for writing and reading that Catholic Social Teaching is a myth, and\u00a0rationalizing the war in Iraq, and\u00a0defending torture, and\u00a0lobbying for the death penalty, and\u00a0defending Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and\u00a0struggling to show that Sandy Hook was a conspiracy by evil parents of the victims to make gun culture look bad, and\u00a0show that paying a living wage is impossible, and\u00a0labor to make everybody denounce Francis\u2019 encyclical on the environment before anybody knows a word it says.<\/p>\n

And when you point out that they are working against the Church\u2019s clear and obvious guidance, they brandish a Precious Feet pin, shout \u201cBut abortion!\u201d and continue laboring to get people to ignore the Church on everything from the death penalty to punishment of the homeless\u2013as though the Church\u2019s guidance on these things is\u00a0the opposite of being prolife instead the bleeding obvious corollary to being prolife.<\/p>\n

This has to end or it will kill the prolife movement and drain away its waning credibility by convincing people it is a merely a convenient front for a sector of the Culture of Death that has figured out how to use the unborn as human shields.<\/p>\n

Bottom line: listen to the Church\u2019s whole teaching<\/a>. \u00a0Be Consistent.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been a number of pre-emptive strikes against Francis and his imminent encyclical. \u00a0So\u2026 This time, they messed with the wrong woman \u2013 Margaret Archer, world-renowned social theorist and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In the context of an all-too-typical hit piece from\u00a0First Things, she issued a\u00a0defiant response. She asks a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[40,650,442],"class_list":["post-92800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholic-social-teaching","tag-na","tag-prolife-means-more-than-anti-abortion"],"yoast_head":"\nPushback Against the Anti-Abortion-But-Not-Prolife Mentality<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There have been a number of pre-emptive strikes against Francis and his imminent encyclical. \u00a0So... 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