"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
Joe and Jill Biden at Mass |
For a long time now the Catholic bishops in the United States have dabbled in politics, mostly in a manner that we would call "virtue signaling" today: a statement about nuclear war in the 1980s, expressions of concern about capital punishment in the 1990s, some hand-wringing about immigration in more recent years. All issues with legitimate moral dimensions, it's true, but all likewise issues on which serious Catholics can have legitimate differences of opinion. In none of them were the bishops confronting Catholics or others who were clearly advocating anything directly contrary to the moral law, or promoting an intrinsic evil. And for what it's worth, none of them are areas in which Catholic bishops have particular competence.
Over the same stretch of time there has been another issue looming, one which is indeed a matter of intrinsic evil, about which there is no room for prudential judgment, and which is very much within the competence of the episcopacy: abortion.
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