Thread by @stevenpmillies

1/ It came to me very clearly while writing about the #consistentethic and #Catholics this morning.

The consistent ethic, on one view, sought to join what we might call 'sexual morality' to 'social morality,' our concern abt #abortion to other issues.

2/ Bernardin hoped a call for consistency would bring together these strands of what the #CatholicChurch teaches us.

The divisions that would thwart him already existed in 1983 when he proposed the consistent ethic. But there would be other problems.

3/ Following the cues offered by JP2's curia (to a lesser degree JP2 himself), US #Catholic bishops went a different way emphasizing sexual morality & #abortion as a preeminent priority while claiming the consistent ethic unpersuasively & keeping social morality in the backseat.

4/ We know the story. The question is why, because objectively Bernardin was right. #Catholicism is more than opposition to #abortion (as much harder as that's gotten to remember 40yrs later).

It's how clearly the answer I already knew came to me that I'm writing about now.

5/ Sexual morality & #abortion offered a better, clearer way to achieve the real goal, far better than helping the poor or nuclear disarmament.

The goal always is to reassert the place the #CatholicChurch held in the medieval world.

6/ The goal is not so much to enforce #Catholic faith by law (though to some degree it is that). Rather the goal is to re-establish a Christian society with the #CatholicChurch at the center of social life. This has been the thing really at work for decades.

7/ The integralists merely are saying the quiet part out loud. They know, they've gotten the message clearer than all of us, and they're telling us that.

This is why concern abt #abortion so often is joined to the argument abt liturgy, opposition to #VaticanII and @Pontifex.

8/ It's not that the poor don't matter for these #Catholics. It's just that they're no help achieving their real objective.

Like abortion as a pre-eminent priority I'm sure they sincerely intend to get to the poor later, once a Christian society has been re-established.

9/ That's the real priority for too many #Catholics in 2023: defeating modernism, resisting the modern world, returning to the ordered society of the high middle ages with the #CatholicChurch at its heart. #Abortion is great for that, it pulls a lot of necessary pieces together.

10/ Regulating gender & the family can reorient social life from the bottom up--reach into law, economics, everywhere.

Notice something else: this isn't abt the unborn. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure concern for the unborn is sincere. But really this instrumentalizes the unborn.

11/ There is another objective that matters even more than #abortion. And if we step back and see that throwing off the modern world entirely is the objective, the whole distortion of #Catholicism's public witness for decades makes a terrible kind of sense.

12/ There still is an answer. There is a good alternative:

a consistent ethic of life rooted in the Gospel call to care the vulnerable and protect the gift of life in every case, responding effectively to where life is challenged right in front of us.

13/ An ethic, that is, marked not by achieving any outcome whether feeding a hungry person or saving a life. Those aren't quite the point.

Rather the consistent ethic is marked by *consistency*, being effective & active Christians in all situations.

14/ In other words, "Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel." Let the world organize itself. Stop acting like neo-Pelagians.

Abandon the temptations of Christendom, they're not Christianity.

It's not impossible. It starts with seeing clearly what we're doing. /END/