With friends like these....

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 09, 2024

Not a day passed—not even a news cycle—between the announcement that Vice President Kamala Harris had chosen Gov. Tim Walz as her running-mate and the statement from the Minnesota Catholic Conference offering hearty congratulations to the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“We are proud to have worked together with him” on tax credits and immigration, boasted the official public-policy arm of the Minnesota bishops. Yes, the statement did go on to note “areas of strong disagreement,” on abortion and gender ideology and parental rights. But even before finishing that paragraph the Conference pulled its punch, giving Walz credit for working through some disagreements: “In some areas, such as religious liberty, we have appreciated his willingness to hear our concerns and change course.”

Take a closer look at that conciliatory sentence. During the Covid lockdown of 2020, Gov. Walz unilaterally decreed that no more than ten people could attend church services—whereas stores could operate at 50% of their full capacity. After protesting the order, which effectively preventing the public celebration of Mass, the Minnesota bishops announced that they would defy the governor’s order and resume celebrating Mass. Walz quickly caved and eased the restrictions. He did “change course,” but only under duress.

And Walz has certainly not changed course on abortion. On the contrary he has boasted that his stand on that issue is more extreme than that of Nancy Pelosi. He fully supports legal access to abortion in all circumstances, and has not even flinched when approaching infanticide, signing into law a bill that removed the existing requirement in Minnesota requiring abortionists to “preserve the life and health of the born-alive infant.”

Do we Catholics really believe that abortion is not merely a grave sin but a moral abomination? Do we believe that the deliberate destruction of human life is a blatant and grotesque violation of natural law? If we do, we cannot maintain cordial relations with politicians who promote the practice. We may be forced by circumstances to do business with them, and to treat them with civil respect. But we cannot be their friends.

We would not, I hope, schedule a convivial gathering with politicians who espouse the cause of slavery or of genocide. These are not ordinary political issues; they are gross violations of human rights. We can and should maintain friendly relations with people who disagree with use on some political issue, such as the appropriate levels of taxation or welfare payments or immigration. But when we argue that no reasonable moral actor can accept abortion, we are perforce saying that the governor who supports unrestricted legal abortion is unreasonable or immoral or both: he should be shunned, not congratulated.

The evidently friendly relationship between Gov. Walz and the Minnesota Catholic Conference is far from unique. In Boston, when Cardinal Sean O’Malley announced that Pope Francis had accepted his resignation, I could not find a news story that failed to mention the cardinal’s cordial cooperation with Gov. Maura Healey, a partnered lesbian who has pledged to make Massachusetts a “sanctuary state” for abortion, used public funds to stock up on abortifacient pills, and launched a crusade to shut down pregnancy-help centers.

Unlike Walz, who has forsworn the faith of his parents, Healey still identifies herself as a Catholic. Yet if Cardinal O’Malley ever warned her that her public stands have jeopardized her soul, that warning escaped public notice, and so the scandal continued. With the cardinal’s backing, Healey was invited to participate in a Vatican conference on climate change (along with Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu, whose political views are similar). She was invited to speak at the Spring Gala fundraiser for Catholic Charities in June of this year. There, ironically, the governor praised the cardinal for his compassion toward “the most vulnerable among us.”

If the innocent unborn are “the most vulnerable among us” (and in Massachusetts, statistically, they are), the Catholic Church cannot honor a politician who champions their destruction. The official public-policy arm of the Catholic Church in Minnesota cannot congratulate a pro-abortion extremist on his political success. Church leaders cannot treat our political adversaries as old pals, and still expect the ordinary faithful to take their commitment seriously.