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What Kind of a Catholic Am I, Anyway?

What Kind of a Catholic Am I, Anyway?

Last updated on: August 26, 2022 at 12:47 am by Mary Pezzulo

What Kind of a Catholic Am I, Anyway? 2022-08-26T00:47:38-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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The other day, an irritating person quote-tweeted me on Twitter with a glib “there isn’t much difference between Libcaths and Catholics for Choice,” is there?”

I haven’t even known what to say to that, frankly, but I feel like I should say something. I have been blogging about all kinds of Catholic issues, including abortion, since 2016. People are often frustrated with my stance and accuse me of being secretly a “pro-abort” who wants to kill babies. I’ve been asked how many abortions I’ve had and called a hypocrite. And right now, with the situation being what it is in America, I feel that I have to clarify my stance.

Yes, I am a Catholic. I am a Catholic who’s been struggling more than a little lately. But I’m Catholic. They can’t suck the oil out of your forehead. I’m Catholic for eternity.

I am a Catholic who, because I am Catholic, is against incarceration except when it’s absolutely necessary to protect the community, which would make me uncomfortable with a lot of the pro-life movement’s rhetoric regardless of my stance on abortion. I marvel at how fast “we have to incarcerate abortionists to save women and children” has turned into “surely a mother who seeks an abortion should suffer some punishment for her crimes.”

I am a Catholic who believes that the correct number of killings is zero and that every death is a tragedy. The death of a baby is especially tragic, and fetuses in the womb are babies. Babies are persons. Babies matter.

I am a Catholic who suffers from a condition that causes infertility and miscarriage, and who longs for another baby, and who would gladly risk my life to bring a baby to term if there was even half a chance.

I am a Catholic who has studied bioethics classes at the graduate level at the stuffiest and most pro-life of Catholic universities. I know Just War Doctrine and the Principle of Double Effect like the back of my hand. These are the rules that teach a Catholic how she is supposed to respond in a violent situation. They are the criteria by which I can know if it’s right to deflect a deadly attack with proportionate force, to save myself or somebody else, or a lot of somebodies. There are some doctrines of Catholicism I only hold as a sort of Paschal’s Wager, right now. I admit that. The teachings on violence aren’t among them. I hold them happily and probably would even if I weren’t Catholic.

I am a Catholic who realizes that the Church has not applied Just War Doctrine or the Principle of Double Effect faithfully in her dealings with other people throughout her history. She has started wars, tortured and killed people including some saints, and I mourn for that and am embarrassed by it. But the teachings themselves are true.

I am a Catholic who has observed, on many occasions, that the Principle of Double Effect isn’t always applied to women in non-combat situations the same way it is applied to soldiers on the battlefield or a father defending his family. I wish that weren’t the case, but it is. I have had my bioethics professors go through the logic of the rules very slowly multiple times, and I’m not satisfied that a soldier sticking his bayonet in an enemy soldier is treated the same as a woman being raped or a woman in an abusive marriage or a woman in a high-risk pregnancy.

I believe that, when we’re deciding how to apply the principle of double effect, we should particularly center the voices of marginalized women who would be disproportionately hurt in a given situation. In America we should be centering the voices of Black mothers and Black healthcare providers, for example, and I strongly advise you to stop for a moment and read this interview with a Black doula.

I believe that crisis pregnancy centers are useless and people who propose them as an answer ought to be mocked.

I believe that, if the Catholic Church worked carefully with more OB-gyns and neonatologists and other doctors, and fewer tweedy philosophy professors and priests, to learn how to apply the Principle of Double Effect to medical procedures, our stance would look a bit different. It wouldn’t be a pro-choice stance but it wouldn’t resemble the current pro-life movement either. It would be its own stance. Women with incomplete miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies come to mind, but also situations you might not have thought of, like what happens to a pregnant woman with a severe psychiatric illness in America. And please do click on that link and read what the social worker has to say about those women.

I believe that the current pro-life movement is headed by untrustworthy, dishonest, abusive and bigoted people who regularly display shocking ignorance and who have been caught red-handed in too many lies. We can’t learn what we ought to do from them. We’ll have to learn our ethics elsewhere.

And I am not a medical professional. I realize I’m ignorant about many things, myself. But I know that I was lied to, about many things, and you probably were as well.

You know that picture that we were all terrorized with growing up, the medical diagram of a “partial birth abortion?” with a baby dangling breech outside the mother’s birth canal and only the head inside, and a doctor poised with scissors to stab the baby in the neck and suck out the brains? I recently learned that that’s a picture of a dead baby. The doctor is not killing the baby by stabbing her in the neck. That procedure is most often performed on babies who died in the womb and need to be removed so the mother doesn’t die too. Sometimes a completely non-viable baby, like a baby with anacephaly, comes out that way as a terrible last-ditch effort to stop a disaster that could end with two dead instead of just one. The baby will either come out in pieces or whole and they choose to do the dilation and extraction so the mother can hold her baby and say goodbye. Every once in awhile, extremely rarely, it might happen to a viable baby if the mother is in a medical emergency, such as when she desperately needs a surgery that will kill the baby anyway. In that case, if there’s any heartbeat, the baby is dispatched with a needle prior to the surgery, and I’m not saying you have to think that’s right. The thought of the needle makes me sick. We can talk about what’s ethical to do in that situation. We can fight and argue about it and get angry. But doctors don’t cruelly kill struggling infants by sucking their brains out. And nobody gets a dilation and extraction so that they can wear a bikini or so that they can get a promotion at work or because they changed their mind. If we’re going to talk about abortion, we have to tell the truth or we’ll never come to ethical conclusions. And I realize that I haven’t been told the truth. And I am angry and offended that I wasn’t told the truth about something so important.

Because I realize I was lied to about something so important, I realize I may have been lied to about a whole host of things, and I’m trying to learn and make up for my ignorance now. The truth is important to me because I am a Catholic.

I am a Catholic, and because I am a Catholic, I want to seek the truth and save as many lives as I can.

I am a Catholic who has given up on the pro-life movement because they don’t want that. They want to punish and abuse people. I choose to defend life instead.

Sorry if I haven’t made that clear.

Image via pixabay

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page.

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