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The Year of Mercy Confounds New York Times Columnist. Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome Vol. XIII.

The Year of Mercy Confounds New York Times Columnist. Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome Vol. XIII.

Last updated on: March 25, 2018 at 1:50 pm by Scott Eric Alt

The Year of Mercy Confounds New York Times Columnist. Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome Vol. XIII. 2018-03-25T13:50:48-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Christ With the Woman Taken in Adultery (Guercino, 1621)

You cannot conceive, nor can I,” Graham Greene writes in Brighton Rock, “of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” Now, if I can’t conceive it, and you can’t conceive it, and Graham Greene can’t conceive it, imagine how much trouble they must be having at the New York Times.

And so they are. Jill Filipovic, the author of this latest excursion into Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome, goes as far as to call forgiveness “unforgiving.” It must have been pretzel day at Coney Island when she turned in that copy.

She begins thus:

Pope Francis announced this month that for a year, beginning in December, women who had terminated pregnancies could be granted forgiveness from Roman Catholic priests, instead of facing potential excommunication for their sins.

Stop. (We will have to stop often, for the errors in this piece exceed a plenitude of pretzels.)

The Church is not offering forgiveness “for a year.”

News flash: Women who have had abortions have always been able to go to a priest and receive absolution. They will still be able to after the Year of Mercy. And that is all the more true of women who have not been excommunicated; what the pope said changes nothing for them.

Excommunication is not a “potential” result of procuring an abortion.

It is, with some exceptions, automatic. In canon law these are called latae sententiae, or “already passed,” excommunications. The need not be imposed by an official act of the bishop.

Now, there are exceptions to this, and they do matter. (See this discussion as well as The Code of Canon Law §1321-1330.) Among them are if the individual

was under 17;
did not know that an automatic excommunication applied;
was acting under compulsion, or grave threat or fear;
had imperfect use of reason, as in mental retardation or psychological impairment.

So what does Pope Francis’s decision change? In fact, not much. It changes no more than a point of procedure for those who do not fall under any of these exceptions and who have been excommunicated. Under the 1973 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1355), a priest may only absolve such persons once the bishop has lifted the excommunication. That can take time. So what the pope has done is no more than to remove this delay for the Year of Mercy; he has put the entire process in the hands of the priest in the confessional. It is his way of encouraging women to seek forgiveness: Without the usual delay and seeming red tape, more may do so. That would be a good. That would be cause for joy.

http://youtu.be/R8p-qnYWVXk

But it is important to note here how very few women actually do meet the requirements for a latae sententiae excommunication. For one thing, the woman needs to have known at the time of the abortion that this penalty applies. Very few have that much knowledge of canon law. (Not even Ms. Filipovic does, and she writes for the New York Times!) And on top of that, it is very rare for a woman not to have been motivated, even in part, by fear.

For such as these, the pope’s change changes nothing. They could go to any priest before, they can go to any priest after.

But Ms. Filopovic, knotting another loop in her pretzel, goes on:

It sounds like a step in the right direction: Mercy for women who have had abortions certainly seems preferable to condemnation.

Stop. That is not right. In the first place, as I said, it is not as though the Church offers mercy now where it offered none before. Anyone who thinks that does not know what they’re talking about. But Ms. Filipovic gets more wrong than just that. Excommunication is not, no matter what they say otherwise, the same as condemnation. It is medicinal. It is an attempt to shock a person into knowing the gravity of their sin, such that he will want to be reconciled. Far from the opposite of mercy, it is an effort to spur a person to seek out mercy.

“But,” Ms. Filopovic insists, “mercy may actually be worse.” She will tell us why:

While the pope’s announcement has been hailed as evidence of the Church’s new, softer approach, it’s actually the latest example of the modern anti-abortion strategy: Portray women as victims who need to be protected from themselves with laws that restrict abortion rights.

In fact, the pope’s decision has nothing to do with anything “new” or “soft”; it just speeds up a process that already existed in the Church. Ms. Filipovic, though, will not be pleased until the Church is pro-abortion; which is to say, she will remain unpleased regardless.

But I am confused here, since the pope’s decision says nothing about civil abortion law. It speeds up a procedural point of canon law, and stops there. Please try to stay on point, Ms. Filopovic.

Despite the concern for what the pope calls an “agonizing and painful decision,” research shows a vast majority of women who terminate pregnancies in the United States don’t actually feel bad about it.

Well, if they don’t feel bad about it, that would make it worse, in my view. But I am not sure I trust this “research.” Is the truth really that the women don’t feel bad, or is it that they say they don’t? Do these studies take account of psychological defense mechanisms, or do they take women at their word on this point?

But even if these figures were to be trusted, the real point is that abortion is an objective moral evil that cannot be weighed on the scale of people’s subjective feelings about it. So I am not sure what Ms. Filopovic is trying to prove by these studies. If women do not feel bad, isn’t the pope’s call to repentance that much more urgent?

Ms. Filipovic goes on:

Instead of treating women as adults who make their own decisions—

Stop. No. Remember: The whole premise of an excommunication, in this case, is that the woman is a morally responsible adult who has made her own decision. She must be at least 17, and she must not be acting under compulsion. If these factors are not present, then not only is there no excommunication, but in many cases it mitigates her culpability for the sin. (See Catechism of the Catholic Church 1857-1860.)

Of course, what Ms. Filopovic seems to mean by an adult who makes her own decisions is someone who has done no wrong and therefore needs no mercy. For someone who thinks that way, a return to first principles is often in order. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us (1 John 1:8.)

“The threat of excommunication, at the very least,” Ms. Filipovic continues,

makes the Church’s views on women’s rights clear. Offering forgiveness [which the Church has always done] is a safer version of the same judgment: that the millions of women around the world who have abortions every year are sinners.

Yes. They are.

“Inviting women to feel shame and guilt for their abortions,” Ms. Filipovic says, “isn’t a mercy; it’s cruelty.”

Stop. Ms. Filipovic is twisting her pretzels at a furious rate here. Where shall I start?

Well, first let me point out that the Church’s opposition to abortion has not a thing to do with “women’s rights.” We need to get that clear before we take up anything else in this paragraph. It has to do with the right of the innocent and defenseless child, male or female, to live. It is about the right to breathe. Without the right to breathe first, you may talk of no other right. Indeed, you will not be able to talk at all.

Nor is there a right to sin. There is no right to kill. By framing the discussion in the language of “women’s rights,” Ms. Filopovic is simply begging the question. As abortion survivor Gianna Jessen has said time and again, “If abortion is simply a matter of women’s rights, then where were mine?”

Ms. Filipovic simply is unwilling to concede the real point in all this, which is that abortion is sin. Nothing would satisfy her unless the pope said, “Abortion is okay now.” (Which the pope will not say, and which no pope can say.) But if abortion is okay, what else is okay? Are there no sins for which people should feel shame and guilt? Are not shame and guilt the very thing that sinners ought to feel?

On that point, we should note (for Ms. Filipovic seems not to understand this) that shame and guilt are not where mercy ends, but where it begins. The priest does not say, “The Lord has freed you from your sins, go and keep feeling shame and guilt.” No. He says, “Go in peace.” Shame and guilt impel a person to seek mercy, but when mercy has done its work, shame and guilt turn to peace and freedom from sin. That is what the pope really wants.

“The move toward this version of mercy,” Ms. Filipovic says—but, no, it’s not a “version” of mercy, it’s what mercy has always meant—“seems to be less about supporting women and more about savvy politics.”

Stop. Now, the gist of what Ms. Filopovic says here is that all this Year of Mercy stuff is just a PR move along the lines of pro-life marchers no longer shouting “baby killer” and instead offering counseling and support. That is what she means by “savvy politics.”

She continues:

The anti-abortion movement’s refashioning of women seeking abortions from selfish tramps to weak-willed victims has been an effective move—

Stop. Now, I know full well that someone who, like Ms. Filopovic, sees everything through a political scrim is going to think that the rest of the world does too. It seems not to occur to her for an instant that the Church’s opposition to abortion has nothing at all to do with politics. But she really ought to try harder, since it makes what she says here not just wrong but comically wrong.

To take but one example, whatever may or may not be true about the very broad “anti-abortion movement” in the United States, the Catholic Church has never portrayed women as “selfish tramps.” A full twenty years ago, in 1995, Pope St. John Paul II had this to say in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae:

I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. To the same Father and his mercy you can with sure hope entrust your child. With the friendly and expert help and advice of other people, and as a result of your own painful experience, you can be among the most eloquent defenders of everyone’s right to life. Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life. (EV 99)

So twenty years ago, John Paul II was saying the very same thing as Francis. Twenty years ago, John Paul II was pointing out that the Church offers forgiveness and mercy to women who have had abortions. And yet Ms. Filopovic, twisting her pretzels, insists that there’s some new and devious political strategy in all this:

“And the Church’s lobbying against abortion rights,” she says (though it is not “lobbying,” for once more she wants to drape a political pall over all this),

does have horrific outcomes, and not just for the estimated tens of thousands of women who die every year from unsafe abortion procedures and the nearly seven million women who are injured.

This is the old saw: If you do not permit legal and safe abortion, women will get illegal, unsafe abortions from quacks in back alleys. And so forth.

It is logically false. You can put the same argument in a broad way. If you outlaw any action x, people will just do x illegally at great risk. Therefore, there should be no law.

It is morally false. You do not permit an evil in order to avoid some so-called greater evil.

It is factually false. (See here and here.)

Illegal abortion was actually safer. In 1950, before Roe, there were 263 abortion-related maternal deaths. By 1970, still before Roe, that number had dropped to 119.
Even the Guttmacher Institute showed that these maternal deaths had dropped from 200 in 1965 to 110 in 1967.
CDF statistics show that, beginning in 1940, the death rate from illegal abortion fell faster than the overall maternal death rate.
Prior to Roe, as many as 89% of illegal abortions were performed by licensed physicians.
The real reason for the decrease in maternal deaths after the 1950s was not legal abortion but antibiotics.
In Chile, where abortion is outlawed altogether, maternal death rates have drastically decreased.

Ms. Filipovic concludes her piece by recalling the much-misunderstood case of an excommunication in Brazil in 2009:

A handful of women and girls can get legal abortions in Brazil if they’re rape victims or if their lives are threatened by pregnancy. But the Catholic Church sometimes intervenes, as it did in 2009 when a 9-year-old girl, who said she’d been raped by her stepfather and was pregnant with twins, sought a legal abortion. The local archbishop excommunicated the girl’s mother and the doctors who performed the abortion—but not the stepfather. The child couldn’t be excommunicated because she was a minor.

Today that girl is a teenager. The leaders of that same Church that tried to force her as a child to bear her rapist’s children now offer her mercy if she cops to her sin.

Perhaps they should be the ones begging her forgiveness.

With that, Ms. Filopovic graciously stops twisting pretzels, but not without getting a few final facts wrong.

The excommunication was disavowed by the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil.
The child would never have been culpable in the first place, since she was under 17 and acting under compulsion.
Pope Francis’s decision has no application to this case, since it only effects excommunicated persons, as I stated above.

The pope’s decision for the Year of Mercy only speeds up a process that already exists in the Church. While Ms. Filopovic does not do the required homework to find this out—who in the secular media does anymore? they spread their distortions and misunderstandings with a blithe lack of curiosity—she also lacks a basic understanding of what mercy is and how it works in the Church. Mercy does not mean: You have not sinned. For if you have not sinned, you hardly stand in need of mercy.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Sin wounds. But mercy is the balm that heals the wound. It does not mean: Feel shame! It means: Because you feel shame, be forgiven and have no more need for shame. That is how radical mercy is. And the Church always offers it to us—always has, always will. If the pope speeds it up this coming year, and invites us to it, it is because he desires our peace and our freedom from sin.

Clinging to our sin, denying that it is sin, and demanding that the Church no longer call sin, sin, is not mercy. That is the real cruelty, for it leaves us bound, and unfree, and even resentful of mercy. If you resent mercy, it is safe to say you are without understanding.

***

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