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Tide may be turning with Catholic bishops, says Hudson

When Deal Hudson, publisher of the conservative Catholic magazine Crisis, spoke to 130 dedicated pro-lifers at a Knights of Columbus Communion breakfast in Silver Spring January 18, he did not title his talk.

But he might have called it, "How To Be a Happy Pro-Lifer in Spite of It All."--in spite, to be more explicit, of Catholic bishops who have failed, for the most part, to exercise leadership in the pro-life cause, and an ostensibly pro-life president who sometimes disappoints.

"When I first came to Washington in 1995, 50 to 60 bishops rallied on the Capitol steps," protesting abortion, Dr. Hudson recalled.  "I asked, why has it taken them 20 years to do this?  Nobody could give me an answer."

Some bishops have been outstanding, he said:  "But on the whole, their visibility level has not been high, when you see how high they can turn up the volume when they want to."

Why have they been so reluctant over the last 30 years since Roe v. Wade to speak out against abortion--more specifically, to chastise Catholic politicians who scandalize the faithful by advocating and voting for abortion?

Dr. Hudson cited two reasons:  first, the bishops rely very heavily on federal appropriations to run their charities and hospitals; over 70 percent of their funding comes from the government.

"That's the Realpolitik," he explained.  You don't want to go around making a senator or congressman angry because you stood up in front of voters and said he wasn't a good Catholic."

Secondly, bishops are often dependent on big contributors in their own diocese who are "soft" Catholics.

"They have made it clear that if the bishops push that [anti-abortion] button too hard, their money will go to the March of Dimes."

But, said Dr. Hudson, "I think the best news over the past year has been the small prairie fire among the bishops in their treatment of pro-abortion politicians."

He cited Bishop Robert Carlson of Sioux Falls, who told Sen. Tom Daschle he could no longer call himself a Catholic because he is pro-abortion; Bishop William Weigand of Sacramento, who said that then-Gov. Gray Davis could not receive Communion; Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, who said voters should judge Catholic politicians based on their stance on abortion; Archbishop Alfred Hughes of New Orleans, who said pro-abortion politicians should not receive Communion of their own volition; and "the incredible courage" of Bishop Raymond Burke of La Crosse (now of St. Louis), who said pro-abortion politicians in his diocese may no longer receive Communion.

Adding to the morally squishy climate in which the bishops operate, said Hudson, is the fact that, for far too long, Catholic education has taken the easy route on what to teach.

Catholic teaching has boiled down to saying that everybody should love everybody:  "They've avoided the hard teachings about homosexuality, contraception, abortion, marriage and divorce.  They've reduced Catholicism to maintream Protestantism."

The level of debasement of our culture is epitomized in the recent adulation, even by Catholics, of the bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, which describes Jesus as fathering children with Mary Magdelene.

"Watch and see which bishops are willing to take up the fight," he advised, optimistically predicting, "They will be the future leaders of the Church; in the next 10 years, you're going to see a major change in the [make-up of the] Bishops' Conference."

Turning to President Bush, the former philosophy professor cautioned, "I want to reveal my bias from the start."

Hudson advised then-Gov. Bush and presidential adviser Karl Rove in their outreach to Catholic voters in the 2000 presidential campaign and is doing the same in the 2004 campaign.

But although the President may sometimes fall short of pro-lifers' expectations, Hudson said that "you gotta like the fact that Bush has appointed Protestant fundamentalists by the truckful, who are implementing pro-life policies in every department in the administration."

It is now a policy in the Department of Health and Human Services to treat an unborn child as a person, he reminded his audience.  And Bush has tried to appoint conservative judicial nominees, although they have been rejected by the Senate.

Dr. Hudson gently chided pro-lifers for in-fighting over their differences.

"Why is it that conservatives always have to be testing each other's purity?  Eight years of Clinton made us realize we have a bigger enemy than each other."

He also encouraged pro-lifers to avoid being constantly negative.

In the nine years that he has published Crisis, he said, "I have tried to take it out of the nyah, nyah, nyah category:  if you're only a critic all the time, you lose credibility.  When a bishop does good things, pat him on the back!"

Dr. Hudson closed his talk by recounting his own personal reason for optimism:  his 6-year-old adopted son, Cyprian.

He had been hesitant to adopt, he said, but at the urgings or his wife and daughter, agreed to adopt a Romanian boy who had been kept in a crib for three years at at Bucharest orphanage, and had some developmental problems.

Now, he said, he can't imagine life without "Chippie."

Among the good news, he concluded, is that "We have people like me who are growing up, and realizing that the gift of ourselves is the greatest gift we can give.  That's the gift God will judge us by and nothing else."

The Communion breakfast, held at the Knights of Columbus Rosensteel Council hall, was a Montgomery County Right to Life fundraiser for the Gabriel Project.