British bishops and elections.

In the period leading up to the general election, the British Catholic bishops were often in the headlines. Their December 1996 statement on the economy, The Common Good, showed how hazardous it is for prelates to endorse specific proposals for economic reform: they were virtually encouraging Catholics to vote Labour.

In their first paragraph, they made use of a quotation from Margaret Thatcher, of all people, to call into question the free-market policies of the Conservatives:

Can managers treat employees any way they like? Is the law of the jungle the right one for human beings? Is there really "no such thing as society"? Does the secret of success in life have to be "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost"?

Like the Labour party, they called for more trade unionism, more controls on industry, more European integration, and more redistribution of wealth. Finally, as if wanting to ensure that Catholics were not put off voting for a Labour candidate because of his stand on abortion, they discouraged voting "on the basis of one policy alone." As Robin Harris in Crisis magazine observed, "the Catholic bishops in this way, and in one sentence, undermined all those courageous pro-life activists who have insisted that candidates take a public stand on abortion and face the full electoral consequences of doing so."

Abandoning pro-life

As a result The Common Good was subjected to a barrage of criticism, especially from the country's most distinguished Catholic journalists. Lord Rees-Mogg in The Times complained that the bishops muddled matters of political opinion with matters of moral principles, and concluded that the document was "a serious error of episcopal judgement."

Scotland's Cardinal Winning, on the other hand, decided to bring the Labour policy on abortion into the centre of discussion once again. Besides nothing that Labour had been officially pro-abortion since 1985, he pointed out that Tony Blair's voting record had been very poor. The Labour leader is married to a Catholic, sends his son to a Catholic school, is a professed Christian, and says that he is personally opposed to abortion; yet he has supported pro-abortion measures in parliament thirteen times and abstained fifteen times.

Blair weakly replied that "he doesn't think that as a legislator he should use the criminal law to outlaw decisions of agonizing complexity for women."

Pro-life party

Meanwhile the new Pro-Life Alliance Party announced that it was fielding 50 candidates and thereby securing the right to national television time, which it would use to show footage of babies being killed in abortions and thus reveal the truth about it. It pointed out that most of the Labour Party cabinet hopefuls were pro-abortion, that when a list of favored women candidates was being compiled, pro-life women were not admitted, and that at Labour Party functions in Scotland, pro-life campaigners had been denied elementary rights of freedom of speech.

Cardinal Basil Hume 

England's leading Catholic prelate, Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, also did his part to ensure that abortion would become an election issue. Saying that abortion is evil and strikes at the bedrock of society, he declared that all Catholics have to take account of it when deciding for whom to vote:

"If Catholics come across a candidate who is strongly pro-abortionist or actively pro-abortionist, then they should not vote for them."

He insisted that he was not telling Catholics how to vote, but that "there are firm principles which have to be taken into consideration. I hope people will pay attention to my guiding principle, which is that all life is sacred and must be respected from conception to its natural end."

Predictably, pro-abortion groups sniffed that abortion was a matter of personal choice, and that the day was long past when prelates could tell their parishioners what to do.

One further result

Cardinal Winning, in his own phrase, put his money where his mouth was, by pledging his Archdiocese of Glasgow to provide financial assistance to any woman who was considering an abortion and needed financial help. The numbers of people who offered care and money to help was astounding; unsolicited donations poured into the office of the Archdiocese at the rate of 2,000 pounds a day. A church spokesman said that media interest in the Cardinal's initiative had been unbelievable. The Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Luigi Barbarito, called Cardinal Winning "a hero of the Church."