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This Insights eNewsletter was sent to subscribers on November 26, 2024.
eNewsletter Subject: Lost pro-life history
It's a precarious moment for the pro-life movement. The outcome of the recent election carries with it both opportunities and risks. One of those risks is that in the push by non-religious conservatives for a "moderate" position, committed pro-lifers will become even more marginal they already are. It wouldn't be the first time the pro-life movement lost its energy: by the 1980s, the initial outrage against Roe v. Wade had begun to dissipate and legal abortion was beginning to be accepted as a status quo. Abortion was not the hot-button issue we recognize from the 90s and 2000s. It took radical, militant action in the late 80s to catapult abortion back into the limelight, thanks to Operation Rescue. You can hear more of the story in a clip from my interview with OR founder Randall Terry: When the pro-life issue was almost forgotten and how it came back.
Church governance is in a precarious moment, too. It is not clear to anybody what the ultimate effect of the Synod on the diocesan and parish level will be. Will there be an effect at all? Will synodality be invoked to undermine the authority of the clergy and hand decision-making off to those who have no Christ-established mandate to govern the Church? The final document is so indeterminate that it could go in any number of directions. Jeff Mirus comments: What to make of the ongoing preoccupation with Synodality.
Phil Lawler comments on the culture of fear and safetyism here in America, even about a little bad weather: Fear all around me.
And Peter Wolfgang reminds us of an underrated book: Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age never got the Catholic attention it deserved.
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