Election post-mortem.

EDITOR

As you may remember, the federal election's outcome was disappointing: the Chretien regime is back; his opponents have sectioned the country off into regional parcels; and the Catholic vote remains unharnessed. Some may question that last statement, pointing out that there were at least three occasions prior to the election when episcopal leaders "addressed" Catholic faithful. My view is that these three `did not a challenge make.'

Bishops

First, on March 30 the Bishops of Alberta issued a vigorous pastoral letter entitled I set before you life and death: choose life (text in Alberta and B.C. Catholic weeklies). They exhorted Albertans to "stand firm in the defence of life" and then spelled out moral teaching in straightforward language: "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. . . ."

On April 4, Vancouver's Archbishop Adam Exner, Chairman of the Canadian bishops' Catholic Organization for Life and Family, wrote a strong letter to the Prime Minister about the attempted murder of Johnathan Drummond by his mother two days before his birth. The fact that in December 1996 the court acquitted Johnathan's mother from any responsibility, the Archbishop wrote, indicates the need for amending Section 223 of the Criminal Code (which states that under law there is no human being unless it has "completely proceeded in a living state from the body of its mother"). It contradicts science, law and ethics; it is completely out of date (a fact admitted even by the Law Reform Commission of 1989); repeal it and thereby provide protection to pre-born babies. He concluded: "We look forward to hearing from you during the coming election how your government intends to respond."

Finally, on May 8 -- only three weeks before the election -- the five bishops of the national Episcopal Commission for Social Affairs in Ottawa belatedly issued a statement outlining a list of moral issues. It was divided into "respect for the human person"; "preferential option for the poor"; and "the common good." We are not telling people how to vote, the bishops said. "All of us need to make the best possible choice, based on a multiplicity of issues, the programs of political parties and the character of individual candidates themselves."

Why was this insufficient?

We are happy all this was done. Yet we also have to say, as much as an observation as a criticism, that in elections the Church needs to do more. She must recognize abortion for what it is. To place it at the top of a long list of issues is not good enough. A list remains a list, and whether an item appears in the middle or at the top, putting it on a roll with other entries makes them all equally unimportant. And that's the way the politicians treated the pro-life issues. Archbishop Exner never did receive a reply from the Prime Minister before the election.

Even the Catholic weeklies reflected indifference. At least three of them ran a four-page insert of so-called election issues produced by Citizens for Justice and Peace. Its director, Gerald Vandezande, a Protestant, accepts abortion. Neither abortion, nor the aggressive "gay" drive for equality, nor the government's suppressing of Catholic schools in Newfoundland and Quebec, appeared there as an election issue.

Two things, then, crippled the Catholic intervention in the election, making it ineffective: the one just mentioned, namely the refusal to recognize that abortion and euthanasia are concerns overriding all other issues; and, secondly, the unwillingness to take a stand against Catholic anti-life politicians.

Pro-abortion Catholics

Catholic politicians who are publicly pro-abortion are public sinners who fall directly under the Church's jurisdiction; yet the bishops cannot bring themselves to mention them even after thirty years of provocation and two million aborted babies. This is partly due to a sensitivity about judging individuals; partly to an unwillingness to trust Catholic laity, among whom pro-life activists have made it their business to know where politicians stand; and partly to a 30-year-long history of treating abortion as part of the Church's unpopular sexuality teaching (best left unmentioned, some think) rather than for what it is, the country's most damning justice issue.

Church leaders also seem to think that they must produce a consistent ethic of life every time they speak. We mustn't be "single issue" people, some say. Wrong. Elections are always about few issues, never about a multitude of concerns. To paraphrase American columnist Joe Sobran, far from producing consistency, the seamless garment argument merely allows pro-abortion Catholics to get off the hook (by downplaying abortion and highlighting other issues). For example, not one of the seventeen Ontario pro-abortion Catholic politicians elected to office felt compelled to change his stand. On the other hand, pro-life politicians who are denounced and attacked by the media, the "gays," and the pro-abortionists feel that the church lets them down.

Abortion overrides

To fight the anti-life agenda requires a deep-seated conviction not only that this "culture of death" actually exists but that it is a powerful and immediate threat to both spiritual and societal life; and that, unless it is stopped, the country, as the expression has it, will go to hell in a handbasket. Such a passionate view of the need for a prophetic stand seems restricted only to active members of the pro-life movement, to Pope John Paul II, and to the several canadian bishops in the nineteen-seventies and early-eighties who made it clear that a pro-abortion position disqualifies a politician from office. But most Canadians remain blind to God's wrath and the coming disaster. So bishops at large remain silent or continue to express themselves in polite, reasonable language, unmoving because it lacks focus.