Abortion and Catholic Social Doctrine

How Integral and Solidary Christian Humanism fell Victim to the Culture Wars

I recently wrote about how I began my work in the Church as a moral theologian amidst the hopes if the Great Jubilee Year 2000 as Pope John Paul II led the Church into the new millennium. He did so by calling the Church to a “New Evangelization,” which—he insisted—“must include among its essential elements a proclamation of the Church’s social doctrine” (Centesimus annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum novarum, no. 5). In response to a question from a young-adult Catholic interlocutor regarding why I thought the hopes for the new millenium had been disappointed, my previous post discussed some of the reasons I offered.

My response centered in the view that especially American Catholics—with their disproportionate influence in the global Church—got diverted from the vision of the Second Vatican Council and from Catholic Social Doctrine. Rather than making incarnate the “integral and solidary humanism” that we find in the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, too many Catholics—especially those who make up the institutional infrastructure of the Church—became Reagan Republicans. In so doing, we supported—at least implicitly—a socio-political vision that reflected the tripartite “fusion conservatism” of the Reagan Administration. A comprehensive explanation of this shift would necessarily include many factors, including developments in the Democratic Party that alienated Catholics. I would argue that a decisive but largely underappreciated factor in making Catholics Reagan conservatives was a broad campaign of persuasion by conservative—and especially libertarian—institutions funded by those seeking to increase their wealth and power. Although I realize that many committed Catholics might be uncomfortable with criticisms of “conservatism,” I think it is impossible to understand or live Catholic Social Doctrine without maintaining a critical distance from all political ideologies.

The first element of this rival social vision for Catholics was seen in the “socially conservative” alliance with Evangelical Protestants around culture war issues starting with abortion. Although Catholic Social Doctrine provides no basis for single-issue politics or the culture war style fostered by this version of social conservatism, opposition to abortion was presented as the primary principle guiding Catholic political participation. The second was a neoliberal economic vision promoted by libertarian think tanks, which advocated a “market fundamentalism” centered in tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.¹ Again, nobody who was competent in Catholic Social Doctrine would support this. The third element of “fusion conservatism” was military assertiveness, which was originally directed against Soviet communism.² Once again, such militarism is not reconcilable with Catholic Social Doctrine. These last two pillars of fusion conservativism were largely discredited by the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Given the way the authoritarian right has employed the culture wars to overthrow American democracy and the postwar international order, I would hope those conservative Catholics who do not support neo-fascism are ready to embrace the actual social doctrine of the Church.

Although this is not the place to make an extensive argument, I think this shift of many Catholics toward supporting the Republican Party’s fusion conservatism helps to explain—at least for the United States—why the New Evangelization sought by John Paul II never materialized. That is, because we were increasingly distanced from the social doctrine that—for the Polish pope and our broader social tradition—were essential to an authentically Catholic understanding of evangelization. Worse than that, we were supporting policies that are not only contrary to human flourishing but have brought the whole human family to the precipice. That is no way to evangelize!

Since the answer to my interlocutors emphasized how I came to see things the way I do, I could have said more about why I came to increasingly oppose the understanding of abortion as the preeminent social issue, leading to single-issue politics, and the corresponding distortion and neglect of the authentic Social Doctrine of the Church. Doing so in that previous post would have made it too long, however, so I pick up on that below, from my perspective of a JPII Catholic working as a moral theologian at the dawn of the new millennium.

The Gospel of Life, Public Opinion, and the Antidemocratic Temptation

We JPII Catholics welcomed the 1995 publication of his encyclical Evangelium Vitae: The Gospel of Life (EV), which we generally saw as confirming our “pro-life” politics. In my circles during graduate school, I didn’t know of anyone who expressed interest in Catholic Social Doctrine, which didn’t seem to reflect our desire to prioritize abortion. Given this emphasis, however, we were confronted by the fact that voters in democracies consistently supported at least some access to abortion, especially in cases of rape and incest. Most voters in democracies, moreover, did not want to prosecute those who had abortions in the early months of pregnancy, and voters were inclined to leave the decision to the woman and doctor. Frustration with the inability to persuade fellow citizens to oppose abortion—or other culture war issues like same sex relations, for example—helped to make conservative American Catholics and Christians increasingly ambiguous about democracy.

[ Vatican News Archive photo from the 2022 March for Life in Washington, D.C.]

Avoiding the Antidemocratic Path

I was never tempted to go down this antidemocratic path for multiple reasons. First, it seemed obvious to me—long before I did graduate studies—that the likely alternative to democracy was some kind of autocracy. Perhaps this is because I always liked watching movies and documentaries about the Second World War and the defeat of the Nazis. Subsequent events in many countries provide further evidence, as if that were needed. I couldn’t believe that some of the most erudite Catholics scholars—including one of my professors—were articulating radical criticisms of “liberalism,” understood in a way that included constitutional democracy. No alternative political system was proposed, however, nor was a means of transitioning to one if it even existed. I thought these radical critiques of liberalism were irresponsible, would discourage Catholics from participating in the political process, and—if widely accepted—would lead to dictatorship. Subsequent events have shown this to be true, as if we shouldn’t have realized this from the past experience that is reflected in modern Catholic Social Doctrine.

Second, from my initial studies of St. Thomas Aquinas in graduate school, I was familiar with the basic distinction between the moral law and the civil law. This fundamental distinction is rarely mentioned by pro-life advocates, which always puzzles me. An intellectually serious discussion needs to begin by specifying the purpose of the moral law, which is to provide the rule and measure of human acts. It tells us, for example, that what the Catholic Church calls elective or procured abortion is evil. Other aspects of moral theory—such as those considering the relevance of the various circumstances—help us to rank the degree of moral disorder in particular bad acts. Sound moral theory, and familiarity with the Catholic moral tradition, would also alert us to the fact that the morality of particular acts is a complex and disputed matter. Even the question of which acts should be understood as “elective” abortions has been disputed by Catholics for well over a century. Even after we have done the non-trivial task of distinguishing which acts are and are not “elective abortions,” there is more work to be done.

An intellectually serious discussion would also need to distinguish this moral law from the civil law, the purpose of which is to order the community toward the common good.³ It would seem unhelpful, moreover, to enact civil laws under which a democratic population is unwilling to live, because this would undermine public support for the rule of law. Unless one wants to enforce the moral laws without majoritarian support, which seems to be a path towards authoritarianism. It seemed obvious to me since graduate school, therefore, that Catholics who want to defend the lives of unborn persons should do so by participating in social and political life in service of the common good, including by building consensus for the policies that would best advance it. This assumed, of course, that Catholics would avoid what I think is the obviously immoral path of teaming up with aspiring tyrants and oligarchs to coerce their fellow citizens.

Such societal participation might include manifesting the goodness and beauty of sacramental marriages at the service of the responsible transmission of human life. It might also include fostering the provision of the social supports that make it easier for women to choose to bring their children to term. It would also include advocating an appreciation for the need to respect the dignity and rights of every human person, and of why Catholics—and many others—think the unborn are persons meriting such respect. Instead, Catholics increasingly supported an almost single-issue politics centered on abortion, becoming an integral part of the Republican coalition that continued to chip away at the social safety net and favor the rich. Now we have an authoritarian state that is trying to deconstruct the social safety net. We also have coercive abortion laws in especially Red States, enforced—ironically—by a party that daily demonstrates utter disdain for the rule of law.

A third reason why I didn’t go down the antidemocratic path is that I was closely following the debates surrounding the good and evil of human action as it was addressed in John Paul II’s moral encyclical Veritatis splendor: The Splendor of the Truth (VS). This text was published in 1993 while I was in graduate school, and I took any available courses that might help me to understand the relevant matters. This gave me the occasion to write a paper on the good and evil of human action, which I later shared with the senior moralist of the Roman Session of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Msgr. Livio Melina, for whom I had great esteem. As I understood it, he had been close to the discussions in Rome during the years surrounding the encyclical, so I was very interested in his opinion.

Avoiding the Physicalism in Moral Theory that Aligns with Integralism

My paper had taken a more “traditionally Thomistic” and “physicalist” approach that was often advocated by moralists who tend to identify as “conservative.” As I quickly came to suspect—and would later understand in greater detail—such physicalist approaches were not only incoherent, but departed from Aquinas’s teaching in various ways, and were significantly to blame for the postconciliar crisis in Catholic morality. These departures from Aquinas’s moral theory included deficient understandings of:

• 1. reason—neglecting the properly moral order of practical reason that directs human acts to ends, by instead working from the perspective of speculative reason;

• 2. human action—failing to treat properly human acts, precisely as they are directed by reason and will to an end, instead tending to treat physical behavior patterns from a speculative and metaphysical perspective;

• 3. metaphysics—confusing the order of natural philosophy that reason discovers in things—and of metaphysics—with the order that reason puts into human acts, directing them to their ends;

• 4. nature—neglecting the “reason” that specifies human nature for St. Thomas Aquinas, so that to act according to human nature for him is to act according to reason (his understanding of natural law is not a doctrine about respecting the “natural ends” of human faculties);

• 5. virtue—failing to understand how the order of right reason that rules and measures human acts is the order of virtue (as I have discussed in various places), such that properly moral analysis should be done based on the relevant virtue.⁴

Msgr. Melina took out a small piece of paper and wrote on it the name “Martin Rhonheimer,” telling me I should carefully study his works which would help me to understand the debates surrounding VS and the recovery of Aquinas’s approach to the good and evil of human action. He also highlighted the importance of Rhonheimer’s work on practical reason. Immediately after leaving Msgr. Melina’s office in Rome, I went downstairs to the bookstore of the Pontifical Lateran University, and purchased some books by Rhonheimer, including one that Melina edited called Etica della procreazione: Contraccezione—Fecondazione artificiale—Aborto (Milan: Edizioni PUL, 2000). This work applied a retrieval of Thomistic “action theory”—such as that encouraged by Veritatis splendor (VS)—to some of the most complex questions of sexual and life ethics.

Reconciling Defense of Human Life with Constitutional Democracy

Several years later, I edited the English translation of Etica della procreazione as Ethics of Procreation and the Defense of Human Life (Washington: Catholic University of America, 2010). This was one of four volumes of Rhonheimer’s works that I brought into English, to help American moralists and others to understand the thought behind the magisterium’s intervention into the debate on the good and evil of moral action. The last of these volumes of Rhonheimer’s work I edited was The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching (CUA, 2012). Ethics of Procreation included an essay called “The Legal Defense of Prenatal Life in Constitutional Democracies,” which bridged the gap between life ethics on the one hand, and political philosophy and Catholic social doctrine on the other.

As suggested by the title, this essay offered a detailed account of how one can understand the Church’s teaching on abortion in Evangelium vitae in light of the prior teaching of VS on human action, and presupposing the Church’s support for constitutional democracy. This essay argues that VS should be understood as defending human life in a way consistent with constitutional democracy, which is through the political process and by persuasion. This is distinct from a reversion to the now popular “integralism” according to which the Church teams-up with the state whose coercive power is employed to enforce a particular—but distorted— understanding of the moral law. At that time, integralism was primarily advocated by followers of the schismatic Archbishop Lefebvre. More recently, however, what was once understood as an obsolete theory has become mainstream among the American Catholic right.

[Cover for M. Rhonheimer, Ethics of Procreation and Defense of Human Life, 2010]

Even though Rhonheimer reflected the viewpoint of Veritatis splendor, and even though he applied that approach to various contested questions to assist the Vatican, a wide range of conservative American moralists generally opposed his work.

More Catholic than the Pope

Several “conservative” journals published frequent attacks against Rhonheimer’s work, for example, but would at best rarely publish defenses of it. The apparent reasons for this alliance of American Catholic moralists against Rhonheimer’s work included that it departed from the “physicalist” moral theory they preferred, while doing so from the texts of Aquinas. More importantly, his work rejected the more rigorist positions they held on some disputed cases that the Vatican considered to be opened, while apparently preferring moderate positions. These mostly American moralists were apparently unaware of—or unconcerned about—how the physicalism they preferred ironically led to the revisionist theory that VS tried to correct. These moralists, therefore, rejected the more moderate positions on some disputed test cases that followed from Rhonheimer’s work. His work, however, was often done to assist the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under then prefect Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. These American moralists naturally aligned, not surprisingly, with the conservative side of the culture wars.

In emphasizing metaphysics in a way that neglects the properly moral perspective of of practical reason, American conservatives—for lack of a better term—also tended to downplay the distinction between the moral law and the civil law. This leads not only to more rigorous conclusions than the magisterium, but also to a tendency to insist that such rigorist positions be reflected in civil law. From these tendencies, there should be no surprise that conservative American Catholics tend to support a neo-integralism that joins the Church to the state so the state will impose a conservative understanding of Catholic morality on the population. A recent example is strict abortion laws in Red states that lack public support, discourage physicians from going into obstetrics and gynecology, and lead to increased maternal mortality among other problems.

As a moral theologian working out of the Thomistic tradition, I value metaphysics, especially in providing a sapiential perspective. I think, however, that the contemporary revival of speculative and metaphysical thought must be coupled with a robust appreciation for the role of practical reason and Catholic Social Doctrine if it is to be properly Catholic. To the extent that it fails to do so, it will tend toward integralism in social ethics, which departs from the discernment of the magisterium, also entailing a departure from properly Catholic thought. The failure to do so can be seen in the lack of interest among such speculative thinkers for not just Catholic Social Doctrine, but the preservation or strengthening of our public institutions as encouraged by Pope Benedict XVI. The limited scope for practical reason among speculative thinkers generally doesn’t envision using it to build an institution to provide public goods, like environmental or financial regulation. As I discussed in previous posts regarding earlier interwar thinkers like Billot, Descoqs, and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, this speculative / metaphysical focus and neglect of practical reason led them to prefer integralism, which typically allied them with proto-fascists or fascists.

Rhonheimer’s work, on the other hand, provided resources for Catholics who supported the reconciliation of the Second Vatican Council and Catholic Social Doctrine with constitutional democracy. It thereby enabled them to work in harmony with the magisterium rather than an American right that was becoming increasingly illiberal, which they justified by reference to the allegedly greater illiberal excesses of the left. This perception of a threat from the illiberal left was initially seen in “liberal” court rulings such as those allowing abortion and preventing the enforcement of sodomy laws. More recently the supposedly grave offenses of the illiberal left include things like “political correctness” and “wokeness.” Although I think the legitimate goods sought by such aspects of the left—for example, addressing the legacy of racial injustice—would be better addressed in the context of Catholic social teaching, I don’t think such threats from the left are comparable to that of losing American democracy to authoritarianism.

The Radicalization of the American Catholic Right: 1996 till Today

Whereas radical criticisms of liberalism—reminiscent of those of the generations following the French Revolution—were back in circulation by the mid 1990s, this was a minority position, even if I got an early look at it in graduate school. Although the conservative magazine First Things under Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus supported American democracy, they provocatively questioned the consensus for it in 1996. This occurred in a highly controversial symposium entitled “The End of Democracy: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics.” Of course, this early exploration of a post democratic future blamed the left. The flirtation with embracing antidemocratic tactics on the right, however, led to resignations from the board, especially by those who remembered the horrors of fascism. Within two decades, moreover, illiberalism would be the majority position on the American right, with the “illiberal Democracy” of Hungarian Strongman Victor Orbán providing a model for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, regarding which conservative Catholics have been decisive contributors.

Throughout the 1990s and into the new millenium, the Republican Party was increasingly breaking from democratic norms, with this departure rapidly accelerating after 2016 with virtually no defenders of democracy among today’s Republican office holders. A recent book by John Ganz sees the year 1992 as pivotal in this shift.

Although few saw it at the time, Ganz reminds us of how the emergence of a demagogic culture war politics within the Republican Party was clear during the 1992 Presidential election season. It was exemplified in figures like the eccentric Texas billionaire Ross Perot and the “Paleoconservative” Catholic traditionalist, Patrick J. Buchannan, with his infamous convention speech that encouraged Republicans to see themselves as combatants in a religious culture war. [To view, Click box in lower left corner, not red button in middle.] In full disclosure, I watched Buchannan for years on his show Crossfire, and was at the time much closer to his views than his liberal opponents. The radicality of his views was not evident to me, however, until I had done further study, so I can empathize with the many Catholics who came to identify as conservative, even if I think this is a big mistake.

By 1994, Newt Gingrich had become the Republican Minority Leader in the House of Representatives by employing a vicious mode of partisan warfare, inspired by an appreciation of the behavior of rival chimps. Gingrich’s style involved leveling a continual stream of insults and verbal attacks, drawing upon a lexicon of slurs designed to make the Democratic Party and “Liberals” radioactive. Gingrich would soon find a home among a new generation of Catholic conservatives, and—together with Buchannan—would foreshadow the combative style that is now the norm on the right. Catholic conservatives were increasingly united with Evangelical Protestants like Jerry Falwell—through the machinations of Republican political operatives like Paul Weyrich—into a culture war style of politics centered on opposition to abortion and “gay rights.”

This kind of politics was in stark contrast with the “integral and solidary humanism” of Catholic Social Doctrine, but it spread rapidly in the 1990s with the emergence of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, and later by “Fox News,” followed by Facebook trolls and armies of Russian “bots” deployed across the internet. This was the cultural context in which my generation did our graduate studies, and far too many Catholics came to identify with the political right. Even if they never read the German Catholic jurist, political theorist and Nazi supporter Karl Schmitt, they would naturally come to see the socio-political realm as one marked by the Schmittian logic of “us versus them.”

Conclusion

In this post, I have sketched some of the key elements of how I think the integral and solidary Christian humanism of Catholic Social Doctrine fell victim to the culture wars. I did so not as an exercise in self-promotion, but to illustrate how there was—and remains—an alternative path through which American Catholics, and the broader Church, can recover the vision of the Second Vatican Council and of the authentic social doctrine of the Church. As we face the real threat of a dystopian future, I think an understanding of how we went wrong is a necessary step towards charting a more fruitful path forward. My hope—as a Catholic who believes in and looks forward to the fruits of the resurrection—is that we can become key collaborators in building a world marked by the social friendship that is the fruit of the authentic social doctrine of the Church, and an anticipation of God’s eschatological reign.

1. Although it was only clear to the better-informed citizens of the Reagan era—who had grown up under the New Deal paradigm that appreciated public institutions—this deregulation was part of a broader anti-government agenda. It foreshadowed the rapid destruction and partisan capture of our institutions that we have witnessed in recent months, which is being funded by aspiring autocrats to increase their power and wealth.

2. As I mentioned in my previous post on the disappointed millennial hopes, however, this support of militarism among Catholic conservatives also led to embarrassing examples of indefensible warmongering. Ironically, today’s Republican Party now parrots Kremlin talking points, aligns with them geopolitically against our former allies, and has fired those working to protect us against Russian cyber attacks.

3. Thomas holds that “the end of human law is temporal peacefulness in society, an end for which it is sufficient that the law prevent those evils that may disturb the peaceful conditions of society.” Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 98, a. 1. Civil law, moreover, does not intend to suppress all human vices “but only the most serious ones, from which even the majority of men are able to abstain, and above all those that harm others, without the prohibition of which the preservation of society would not be possible—just as human law forbids murder, theft, and similar things.” ST I-II, q. 96, a. 2.

4. See, for example, https://wherepeteris.com/ethics-of-life-synodality-and-untying-knots-in-moral-theology/, which cites the broader literature.