Do they think this is a debate they’re actually going to win? Do
they imagine the Catholic theologians of America–from Avery Cardinal
Dulles all the way to Sister Sara Butler–are suddenly going to whack
their heads and say, “My God, we never thought of that”? What impulse
makes Catholic politicians try to argue theology with their own church?

There it was, at the end of August, when Nancy Pelosi, the Catholic speaker of the House, went on Meet the Press to explain that abortion is not theologically wrong:

“What I know is,
over the centuries, the doctors of the Church have not been able to
make that definition. And St. Augustine said at three months. .  .  . I
don’t think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins.
As I say, the Catholic Church for centuries has been discussing this.”

And then, two weeks later, Joe Biden, the Catholic vice-presidential candidate, went back on Meet the Press to add:

“There is a debate in our church. .  .  . Back in Summa Theologia, when Thomas Aquinas wrote Summa Theologia,
he said there was no–it didn’t occur until quickening, 40 days after
conception. How am I going out and tell you, if you or anyone else that
you must insist upon my view that is based on a matter of faith?”

With their typical patience, the theologians replied that theology
has always taken its facts from the biological sciences when talking
about biological issues–and science these days makes clearer how
gestation works than it did in the fourth century. For that matter,
Augustine explicitly condemned abortion at any stage, as did Thomas
Aquinas, and besides, quickening (the fetal motion that usually occurs
between 90 and 120 days in a pregnancy) is completely different from
the Thomistic account of the development of the intellective soul
around the 40th day, and Speaker Pelosi seems to have confused .  .  .
while Senator Biden may not have fully grasped .  .  .

On and on it went, as stylized as a Kabuki performance–until, with his typical impatience, Denver’s archbishop, Charles Chaput, summed up:

“Meet the Press has become a national window on the flawed moral reasoning of some
Catholic public servants.”

Fourteen bishops have now issued public
statements on the Pelosi and Biden gaffes.

In part, what these politicians are doing is dredging up the
half-remembered talking points of elections past–the sort of block of
eroded verbiage that the Catholic John Kerry sometimes used during the
2004 presidential campaign, as when, for example, he said his position
on abortion was in line with the liberalism of the (non-existent) Pope
Pius XXIII and the changes wrought by “the Vatican II.”

Along the way, however, Kerry established what seems to have become
a new default position for Democratic Catholics–one of those spots to
which the minds of politicians, like overstretched rubber-bands, always
snap back. The default position used to be the one established by Mario
Cuomo, in a famous talk he gave at Notre Dame in 1984, which claimed
that Catholic officials may resist Church teaching by being personally opposed to abortion even though they publicly support it.

Now, however, the position seems to have become the notion that Catholic officials must resist Catholic teaching, since opposition to abortion is inherently
religious –a matter solely of narrow sectarian definition, like not
eating meat on Fridays. The fact that the Catholic Church holds a view
has become the reason that Catholic politicians are required to oppose
it. As Biden told Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press,

“I voted
against telling everyone else in the country that they have to accept
my religiously based view.”

Perhaps one shouldn’t read too much into those particular comments, for
the babbling brook that is Joe Biden  often overflows its banks.
Campaigning in Missouri, for example, he noted the praise that has come
to Sarah Palin  for her care for her Down syndrome baby, and he demanded
that Republicans be asked,

“If you care about it, why don’t you support
stem cell research?”

Leave aside the fact that, even back in the 2004 glory days of
overinflated claims for stem cells, no one seriously claimed they would
soon cure Down syndrome. Leave aside, as well, the fact that the use of
embryonic stem cells is what the pro-life community rejects.
Leave aside, for that matter, the fact that the recent scientific
breakthroughs with reprogrammed cells taken from adults have pushed
much of the issue off the political table. Consider just the fact that
Biden was declaring his own Catholic position on embryonic stem cells
to be uncaring. As the philosopher Francis Beckwith observed of the
incident, this is a man who won’t even force his beliefs on himself.

But Joe Biden–like Nancy Pelosi and other Catholic supporters of the
Obama campaign–are caught in a bind that is, in many ways, even
tighter this year than the one that squeezed John Kerry and his
Catholic followers four years ago. Back in 2002, the Vatican office
headed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger issued a note about the
participation of Catholics in political life. Declaring that
politicians have “a duty to be morally coherent” –an explicit rejection
of the Cuomoesque attempt to distinguish private from public
positions– the note insisted that

“a well-formed Christian conscience
does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual
law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals.”

Some American bishops took this to mean that Catholic officials who
support the legality of abortion should not present themselves for
communion or identify themselves as Catholics. Most of the nation’s
bishops, however, followed the lead of Washington’s cardinal, Theodore
McCarrick, who put together what was widely reported as a compromise in
the summer of 2004. McCarrick’s task force rejected

“the denial of
communion from Catholic politicians or Catholic voters,”

while
recommending that bishops give private instruction on the life issues
to the politicians in their dioceses. This is the model apparently
followed by Biden’s bishop at the time, Michael Saltarelli, and still
followed by San Francisco’s archbishop, George Niederauer, who has
asked Pelosi to meet with him to discuss her comments on Meet the Press.

But things in Catholic circles have changed since 2004.
To begin
with, Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, which makes his instructions
a little harder to ignore. Then, in 2005, McCarrick turned 75, the age
at which bishops are required to offer their resignations–an offer the
Vatican promptly accepted. All along the line, the identification of
Catholicism with the rejection of abortion has hardened into something
that Catholic church-goers and the general American public all
recognize.

American politics, too, has undergone a ch
ange over the past four years. Here’s a curious fact: Not once was the word abortion mentioned from the dais of the Democratic convention in 2004. That
convention seemed, at times, about nothing except embryonic stem cell
research, as speaker after speaker denounced the Luddite Republican
opposition to all things scientific. But the Democrats at the time
clearly did not see the defense of Roe v. Wade as a winning issue.

Then came the Democratic victories in the 2006 midterm elections and
the collapse of public approval ratings for President Bush–followed by
polls early in 2008 that suggested anyone from a blind monkey to Che
Guevara, if he ran as a Democrat, would win the 2008 presidential
election. Conservative positions were so unpopular, the left decided,
that concessions (like the one that forced them to support the
self-declared pro-life Democrat Bob Casey Jr. in the 2008 Pennsylvania
Senate race) no longer needed to be made.

And so the platform adopted at their convention in Denver this year
begins its mention of abortion with the flat sentence:

“The Democratic
Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of
ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or
undermine that right.”

For that matter, Senator Barack Obama proclaimed
his party’s support for legalized abortion in the extravaganza of his
acceptance speech at the Democratic convention–even though he had been
widely mocked for appearing astonishingly unreflective about the issue,
declaring at the Saddleback Church interviews in August that the
question of when life begins is “above my pay grade.”

Not helping him at all was South Carolina’s Democratic chairwoman,
Carol Fowler, who swiped at Sarah Palin by saying the Republicans had
nominated a vice-presidential candidate

“whose primary qualification
seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

Nonetheless, early this
month, the Obama campaign began running radio ads about the evil that
would follow if the Republicans are elected and “Roe v. Wade is overturned.” All along the line, liberal columnists and party
activists have been far more vocal about abortion than they were in
2004.

So what’s Joe Biden to do? What, for that matter, is any Catholic
supporter of Obama to do? The ledge on which they are trying to stand
is crumbling beneath their feet. Douglas Kmiec, a former legal counsel
in the Reagan administration, has gotten the most publicity for his
Catholic praise of the Democratic ticket. Indeed, he’s made a new
career for himself out of being a Catholic Republican who supports
Obama: pouring out op-eds, delivering speeches, and penning a
just-released book, Can a Catholic Support Him?–Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama.

The title is a tease, as you might expect. “What’s wrong,” he
writes, “is for Republican partisans to claim” that support for
abortion is Obama’s position.

“It’s not. Rather, Obama believes there
are alternative ways to promote the ‘culture of life,’ even given the
law’s sanction of abortion.”

The trouble, of course, is that Obama has
given little indication he believes anything of the sort, and, in the
months Kmiec spent writing the book, the Democrats have systematically
undermined its premise by explicitly endorsing Roe v. Wade and refusing any concessions that abortion might be even a necessary evil.

In response to it all, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden were reduced to
the idiocy of trying to argue theology on the Sunday morning shows, and
Kmiec’s claims have dwindled down to a kind of old-fashioned
double-effect argument: The Republicans are so wrong about other
issues, especially the Iraq war and the economy, that Catholics should
vote for the Democratic party and accept the Democrats’ support for
legalized abortion as an unintended consequence.

Who’s likely to be convinced by such a position? Republicans have
occasionally tacked away from pro-life voters. There’s a solid argument
to be made that the fact of Sarah Palin’s nomination, together with the
visual presentation of her family at the Republican convention, made as
strong a pro-life argument as it’s possible to make. Still, in the
convention’s acceptance speeches–an hour and a half of speechmaking
from McCain and Palin–the issue was explicitly mentioned only once,
with the brief phrase “a culture of life” coming in a laundry list late
in McCain’s speech. And pro–lifers have been made nervous by McCain’s
recent answer to a science group’s questionnaire, in which he affirmed
his support for

“federal funding for embryonic stem cell research,”

though he insists on unspecified limits. His campaign has announced
that it is airing radio ads about stem cells. Embryonic? Adult?
Reprogrammed pluripotent cells? The ad doesn’t say, but the fact of the
ad is not reassuring.

Still, here is where the doctrine of double effect might actually
have some purchase. Abortion is so grave an evil that some errors from
McCain might be acceptable. Polls over the last few elections
consistently show much weaker Catholic opposition to embryonic stem
cell research than to abortion.

As it happens, those same polls consistently show little that can be
identified as a uniquely Catholic vote, once the presidential election
has narrowed down the choice to the two parties’ candidates. The
Democratic primaries did seem to reveal a Catholic identity among some
voters: Hillary Clinton won 70 percent of Catholics in Pennsylvania,
and she beat Obama by 10 percentage points or more among Catholics in
two-thirds of the states where exit polls asked for religious
identification. But those numbers precisely matched her victories among
white voters with lower-middle-class incomes and blue-collar jobs in
the old Rust Belt. For that matter, they mostly came at the end of the
primary cycle, when a backlash against Obama was setting in. Once
Catholic Republicans are added, in the broader setting of a national
campaign, the likelihood is that Catholics will vote much the way the
rest of the nation votes.

And yet, there remains that question of abortion. Things have
tightened over the last few years, the Catholic position is firmer in
the public’s mind–firmer in the Catholic mind, for that matter. McCain
was a long way from the pro-lifers’ first choice for a Republican
nominee, but the Democrats this election cycle are determined to force
the issue. They’ve pushed, and they’ve pushed, and they’ve pushed,
until Catholics are falling off the cliff. Poor Doug Kmiec and his sad
question, “Can a Catholic Support Him?” As a matter of good conscience,
the answer looks increasingly like no, a Catholic can’t support Obama.
And as a matter of political fact–well, that’s starting to look like
no, as well, isn’t it?

Joseph Bottum, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is editor of First Things.