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Schiavo case bares political sea change

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It all began, strangely enough, on Palm Sunday, the first day of the Holy Week during which Christians annually commemorate Christ’s Passion, death and burial.

That peculiar symmetry alone was enough to confer a special kind of drama on the tragic story of Theresa Maria Schiavo. But the week since the U.S. House of Representatives met in an extraordinary nighttime session to grant her parents standing to press for Schiavo’s continued medical care in federal court has tested to their limits all three branches of government and -- no less -- the nation’s news media.

Christians believe their founder’s Passion was a redemptive act, the stillness of the tomb an interlude between death and resurrection. All the fever and fervor reported out of Florida this week notwithstanding, the question of what -- if anything -- has been vindicated by this wrenching affair will remain a source of recrimination and reassessment.

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We’ll leave the former to those so inclined. That latter might begin with something that’s been unsatisfactorily explored in the torrent of print and electronic news coverage this story has received -- a sense of these extraordinary events’ political context. Just as the war in Iraq signaled the tectonic shift that George W. Bush’s presidency has wrought in U.S. foreign policy, the drama played out in Florida and Washington this week signaled the domestic sea change that many believe was signaled by the president’s reelection.

To understand why, it’s helpful to go back to 1994. That year, the American Enterprise Institute published a symposium on the future of conservatism after Bill Clinton’s electoral victory. The most prophetic contribution came from Vice President Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff, William Kristol, who now edits the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and is a frequent commentator on Fox News. Basically, Kristol wrote that the conservative -- read Republican -- future would require a program that combined “a politics of liberty” and “a sociology of virtue.”

That’s pretty much what Karl Rove served up in the president’s reelection campaign -- liberty for the neo-conservative internationalists, who believe that U.S. security requires preemptive war and the extension of democracy on the barrel of a gun; virtue for the traditional-values voters who flocked to the incumbent’s cause.

Because our media commentators remain locked in old left-right, liberal-conservative dichotomies, the novelty of all this goes all but unremarked upon. Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) may call himself a conservative, but what the House did last Sunday night was something entirely new under the Republican sun.

Kristol is a skilled polemicist, but he also is too intellectually honest not to have laid out where the program he was proposing would inevitably lead. “Our politics should and will be overwhelmingly a politics of liberty,” he wrote, “the pursuit of virtue will be primarily a ‘sociological’ matter; but at the intersection of politics and society -- at the family -- some judgments must be made.... The politics of liberty and sociology of virtue can be pursued for quite a while before we reach this point, but at some point neither our politics nor our sociology can ultimately be neutral as to the content of the ‘laws of Nature and Nature’s God.’ ”

That’s neatly put, and it sounds precisely like the result the House majority, the president and the president’s brother, the governor of Florida, tried to bring about this week. The problem is that one of the reasons America is the most religious nation in the developed world is that our government never has sought to impose a single “established” notion of virtue. We are agreed, for example, that murder for hire is a crime, but even people of good will and similar backgrounds tend to differ over fairly fundamental questions, such as when life begins or ends.

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Consider, for instance, these two conservative Republicans, both of Irish Catholic heritage, reacting to the Schiavo case: Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter and an enthusiast of the Bush revolution, writes, “I don’t ‘know’ that any degree of progress or healing is possible for Terri Schiavo; I only hope they are. We can’t know, but we can ‘err on the side of life.’ How do the pro-death forces ‘know’ there is no possibility of progress, healing, miracles?”

By contrast, William F. Buckley, a founding father of the modern conservative movement, writes, “There was never a more industrious inquiry, than in the Schiavo case, into the matter of rights formal and inchoate. It is simply wrong, whatever is felt about the eventual abandonment of her by her husband, to use the killing language. She was kept alive for 15 years, underwent a hundred medical ministrations, all of them in service of an abstraction, which was that she wanted to stay alive. There are laws against force-feeding, and no one will know whether, if she had had the means to convey her will in the matter, she too would have said, ‘Enough.’ ”

Small wonder, then, that the polls taken so far appear to show an overwhelming public discomfort with the attempt by the Bush administration and the House majority to determine a result that would define virtue for Theresa Maria Schiavo, her husband and her family.

Schiavo was baptized a Roman Catholic and, though she reportedly did not practice her faith at the time of her collapse, her parents and others have pressed legal appeals asserting that removal of her feeding tube constituted a violation of her religious liberty. But even within the church in which Schiavo was raised, the notions of what constitutes virtuous conduct under these circumstances are in flux.

In paragraph 2,278 of “The Catechism of the Catholic Church,” for example, it states: “Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of ‘over-zealous’ treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient.”

Until recently, the provision of water and nutrients by feeding tube has been deemed an “extraordinary measure” by Catholic theologians and medical ethicists. A year ago this month, however, Pope John Paul II, addressing a conference on the ethical implications of treating patients in a persistent vegetative state, made the first papal statement on the matter and said that withdrawal of feeding tubes constituted “euthanasia by omission.”

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Thus, this week, the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, attacked U.S. District Judge James Whittemore’s refusal to order Schiavo’s feeding tube reinserted and compared her situation to that of an innocent person sentenced to capital punishment.

That same day, the website maintained by Florida’s Catholic bishops posted a list of “themes” to be employed in weighing the Schiavo case. Among them was this: “The Catholic community begins discussion regarding the withdrawal and withholding of artificial nutrition and hydration with a presumption in favor of their provision. However, when the burdens exceed the benefits of providing them, they may be withdrawn or withheld. We note that what is too burdensome for one person may not be too burdensome for another.”

So what’s a Catholic to think, let alone those of other persuasions who might be curious about the matter?

We asked Father Richard McBrien, the Crowley-O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, to help sort it out, and he said: “The traditional teaching of the Catholic Church, as expressed by Pope Pius XII, by various bishops over the course of many years, and by numerous Catholic moral theologians, is that no one is ever required to use extraordinary means to preserve life. If a feeding tube is the only way that a person in a vegetative state can be kept alive, that is clearly an example of extraordinary means. In this case, the editorial in L’Osservatore Romano deviates from traditional Catholic teaching, while the statement of the Florida bishops is exactly in line with it. For the editorial writer to compare the withdrawal of feeding tubes from Terri Schiavo -- or from any other person in similar circumstances -- to capital punishment ‘of the innocent’ is theologically erroneous -- and irresponsibly so, given the highly public nature of this controversy.”

In other words, like the congressional intervention in the Schiavo case, the Vatican’s appraisal -- whatever its objective merits -- is novel and not traditional, which is to say, innovative rather than conservative.

Tricky business this virtue stuff, particularly when you’re trying to determine it for someone else. At the very least, we might all have been better served this week if more people had kept in mind another of the “themes” recommended by the Florida bishops:

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“We urge people to refrain from excessive rhetoric and misguided zeal.... There are many unanswered questions in this case, and it is necessary to presume upon the best intentions of all involved until shown otherwise.”

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