Thread by @stevenpmillies

1/ Ok. Serious question. Now that #abortion has been returned firmly to the status quo ante #RoeVsWade, to its status before the grave, urgent situation that mobilized #Catholics into a #ProLife mvmt, why was this article written?

ncregister.com/news/downplayi…

2/ And, I lied. That's not a serious question. I already know the answer. (I suspect @Pontifex does too.) I wrote it here 3yrs ago-americamagazine.org/politics-socie…

The answer is plain. "[D]ecades of binary cultural and political argument means that reversing Roe is no longer enough"

3/ We have been doing this so long, we simply don't know how to stop.

Don't believe me? Ask some serious people what the goal of the #ProLife mvmt is now. Their reply? I kid you not--

"A firm commitment to end #abortion"

Seriously.

4/ And it is for this reason that I tell you I have thought for a long time that there is a gnostic whiff on the #ProLife mvmt.

A "firm commitment to end #abortion" bears no resemblance to any way the world has ever been or will ever be on this side of the Eschaton.

5/ What we have now in the #ProLife mvmt is a **disordered** expectation whose origins have more to do with ideological conflict than with the political vision of, say, St. Augustine.

This world is a place where evil things happen. No Christian should be comfortable with that.

6/ But no one should trust a #Catholic who thinks they can change it. Once they have that hope, 'a firm commitment to end evil in the world,' they have immanentized something that doesn't belong in the world, and **they** know the way toward Paradise.

That's gnostic ideology.

7/ This is the danger that the #ProLife mvmt generally, #Catholics specifically, have courted for decades. Nothing reveals it better than their response to having gotten the best thing we should have wanted.

Now we have it. It's not enough.

8/ And you know how dangerous this ideological vision is because you can see the human suffering it wants to overlook in service to its gnostic expectation: "racism...gun violence, the death penalty & other social ills." Those all have to wait.

So we can have a consistent ethic.

9/ This is madness.

We need to do better. All this was foreseeable. I foresaw it--"Roe will be reversed, and nothing else has changed."

And I'll close here the way I closed 3yrs ago:

"Imagine, instead, if we had set about to 'restore respect for human life'...

10/ "...by educating, appealing to and converting our fellow citizens while focusing on the whole range of threats to human life, as Cardinal Bernardin suggested.

We might, by now, be able to focus on one or two other issues, too."

Can we imagine that #consistentethic? /END/