Say ‘Morality’ and the Cheering Stops : Abortion: America’s Catholic bishops were the media’s darlings when they criticized : the political Establishment. Now they’re bashed for fighting our culture’s moral laxity.

Remember those Catholic bishops who just a short time ago were being celebrated on the covers of the newsmagazines for their “progressive” views on economics and the nuclear freeze? Those same bishops are now being castigated as too “conservative.”

The media’s current bishop-bashing began at a special moment: when the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States showed the guts to confront the real Establishment in America--the cultural Establishment. When bishops criticize Presidents, the media cheer. And when bishops criticize businessmen--the rich, “the system”--the media cheer. But when bishops criticize abortion, when they say that it is morally wrong, and offer persuasive reasons for their view, the cheering turns to jeering.

To see how far things have gone, just look at the terms in which the media describe the national debate on abortion. One side is described in a positive light: “pro-choice.” The other group is described in a negative light: “anti-abortion.” (And when they say “abortion rights,” the media do not mean the right of the infant to life.) It’s clear whose side the media are on. Even so, decency would suggest at least a show of evenhandedness.

As Prof. Kristin Luker pointed out in “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood,” most of the pro-choice activists are members of the highly educated and affluent professional class, articulate and well-spoken. But most of the pro-life activists are of working-class or poor backgrounds, less highly educated, less articulate. To speak for the poor is precisely the role of Catholic bishops--to give voice to the inarticulate, to express in reasoned and civil discourse the instinctive revulsion that many good people feel when encountering abortion “up close and personal.”

Just at this moment, journalists warn that bishops will become “unpopular” if they continue to criticize the habit of abortion, stitched so deeply into our culture since 1973. There are now huge vested interests at stake, and lots of emotional commitments. After 25 million abortions (involving 11 million women) the passions of many are now involved.

But if bishops did not have the courage to speak up for moral principle, what good would bishops be? No one is consecrated as a bishop simply to bless the prejudices of his culture. His very reason for being is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ against his culture--against the whole world, if necessary. The rite of consecration warns him that he will be hated for this.

Thus, millions of us in the pews are very glad to see our bishops living up to their vocation; we admire their guts. Besides, our nation as a whole needs more such moral challenge, not less; and from every quarter, not just from highly secularized (and unduly proud) cultural elites. A nation getting its moral education from Phil Donahue is not in good shape.

Just the other day, one journalist wrote that the bishops are losing “credibility” on sexual issues, another that they are “losing the people in the pews.” (This is self-delusion; Catholic churches--and parking lots--are packed for Mass after Mass every Sunday.) Their plaintive advice to bishops was: conform.

But do these journalists really want the Catholic bishops to preach the same sexual ethic that rock videos, movies and magazines do? Do they really want bishops to exhort our children to premarital intercourse at will, infidelity as desired, abortion on demand, and sexual preferences ad libitum ? Look around at our culture now. Are people who hold such values happy?

Other media writers denounce the bishops for allotting $5 million to a new public-relations campaign that will get their argument against abortion out to the public. “In cities where poor people eat from dumpsters,” one journalist wrote, she can think of better uses for $5 million. Yet when infants in human form are torn from the womb and thrown into dumpsters, 25 million of them, perhaps that doesn’t seem like such a waste of money, after all.

Make no mistake about the heart of the bishops’ argument: “pro-choice” is not enough. Morally, choice is rendered good or bad by its content. Slave owners were also “pro-choice”; they wanted freedom of choice to dispose of other human beings, whom they regarded as property. It took a lot of preaching by a lot of abolitionists (including women)--as well as Lincoln’s brilliant attack on the “pro-choice” argument of Stephen Douglas--to build a public consensus against slavery.

So now the Catholic bishops of the United States--humble men, really, with no true power except the power of persuasion (and the grace of God)--are also willing to stand up against the powerful panjandrums of their time. This may be their finest moment ever.

This is exactly “the Catholic moment” that the Lutheran scholar Richard John Neuhaus predicted--that moment when the largest body of America’s Christians (three times larger than the next-largest denomination) stands up forthrightly and makes a public argument for its moral views; and the rest of the country, startled at first, begins to argue back in a rational and civil manner. On that happy day, Pastor Neuhaus predicted, America’s “public square” will no longer echo emptily but will be alive with serious moral argument, as a free country ought to be.