What are the Church’s top priorities?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 05, 2026

Sometimes a conversation takes a permanent spot in one’s memory. About forty years ago, over lunch with a dedicated pro-life activist, I asked whether he thought the leaders of the local Catholic diocese took the problem of abortion seriously.

“Oh, they take it seriously,” he answered. “They issue strong statements against abortion all the time.” However he continued:

But they don’t treat the question with much urgency. Not as much urgency as they’d show if, say, the rectory of a parish burned down. Not even as much as if a house down the street from the parish burned down.

That answer struck home, because we had been discussing the presence of a busy abortion clinic located just around the corner from a parish church. One or two members of that parish sometimes joined the pro-lifers praying on the sidewalk outside the clinic. (This was still legal at the time, in those days before the “bubble zones” protecting clinics from the “threat” of prayerful witness.) But the parish as a whole was not energized to oppose the slaughter of the unborn; the pastor was never seen on that sidewalk.

Obviously my friend was not suggesting that the parishioners should be indifferent if the rectory burned down, or even if a neighbor’s house burned down. As Christians they should be good stewards of church property, and they should help their neighbors in times of need. But shouldn’t they be more concerned about the fact that just around the corner from the place where they worship, dozens of unborn children are being put to death every day?

Granted, it is easy to know how to help a neighbor after a fire, whereas it is difficult to discern how best to curb a practice that, while grotesquely inhumane and immoral, has the protection of civil law. Still the question of urgency looms large.

Most of us have regular routines: daily, weekly, even monthly. We wake up, go to bed, eat, and work at roughly the same times. We walk and drive along the same routes, past the same homes and shops. So if there is an abortion clinic on a busy street, even if we abominate the practice, we might walk past it every day without much thought. When a house burns down, on the other hand, that is something out of the ordinary; we respond by breaking out of our own routines, taking immediate action. That is as it should be, certainly—the special action, I mean. But there is a danger in allowing an evil, or even a less pernicious problem, to become an accepted part of a routine.

In 2026, the Catholic bishops of the US have been preoccupied with the issue of immigration. The question has been with us for years; policy wonks have been holding seminars about “immigration reform” for most of my lifetime. But for various reasons—most of them well known, most of them involving partisan political programs—the issue now commands headlines, and our bishops are giving the matter special attention. Meanwhile the slaughter of the unborn continues, but does not generate headlines. Our bishops dutifully issue statements condemning the practice, but my old friend is right: the sense of urgency is lacking.

The tendency to pay more attention to a hot topic, and neglect an enduring concern, is not limited to political matters. Inside the Church there is a special emphasis on “synodality,” and a sense of urgency about organizing the discussions and listening sessions to promote the “synodal” Church. Meanwhile the proportion of Catholics who attend Mass and marry in the Church and baptize their children continues to decline; young Catholics are still leaving the church in droves. If those long-term trends are not reversed, the “synodal” Church will be holding more and more discussion sessions, involving fewer and fewer people.

What are our top priorities? What should they be? Sometimes the issues that seem most urgent are not most important. Sometimes, in fact, they are distractions: excuses for our failure to address the issues that we know are more important, but can always be put off for another day.