Over at The Christian Post, you’ll find a story that at first might depress you. On second thought, it ought to cheer you up. And then on deeper reflection, it should sober you profoundly, and remind you of the life-or-death, heaven-or-hell war in the trenches that all Christians are engaged in.
From that story:
Less than 1% of American Catholics agree with all three of the Catholic Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life issues, showing the widespread existence of what some call “cafeteria Catholics” in the United States, according to an analysis.
Researcher Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University who publishes articles on a Substack called “Graphs About Religion,” shared data Thursday about the beliefs of Catholics in the U.S., focusing on their views on abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia. …
When investigating the phenomenon of “cafeteria Catholics,” Burge discovered that “it’s not just many Catholics who disagree with the teachings of the church.”
“[I]n fact, if you look at the data, it’s nearly all of them,” he wrote.
Using data from the General Social Survey dating back to 1988, he measured the percentage of U.S. Catholics who said they did not support abortion for any reason and also opposed the death penalty and euthanasia at 0.9% in 2022.
Reading that story, my first reaction is not, “This is horrible. We need to get that percentage up to 100%.” Instead it’s, “This is great. We need to drive that fraction down to 0%.”
The Seamless Bodybag for Unborn Babies
Since I’m a lifelong, fervent Catholic, that might surprise you. But it shouldn’t –because the Vatican under Pope Francis has abandoned orthodox doctrines on a growing list of issues, and renounced both biblical teachings and Natural Law principles in favor of a toxic Utopian ideology, labeled by its creators the “Seamless Garment.”
That Garment pretends to be a “consistent life ethic” responding to all threats against human dignity. But in fact it is a cobbled-together, incoherent, logically self-contradictory mishmash of traditional Christian teachings and post-modern leftist posturing. It’s literally gibberish, to which no intelligent person can honestly assent.
And not a single such person honestly does. Not one. In the world.
A Poison Pill for Pro-Lifers
No one was ever meant to. As real human rights advocate Jason Jones wrote here, the Seamless Garment was woven together by liberal Catholics as a bulletproof vest for pro-abortion Democrat politicians with Irish or Italian last names like “Kennedy” and “Cuomo,” and also as a shroud with which to smother the pro-life movement. As I wrote here at The Stream eight years ago:
When Catholic liberal Democrats embraced the “Seamless Garment” spun by the leftist Cardinal Joseph Bernadin in 1982, and when they pushed it on passionately pro-life Catholics, they surely knew what they were doing. That theological project lumped together the intentional killing of more than a million unborn babies a year with every other phenomenon that might conceivably shorten some humans’ lives, from poor child nutrition to smog, from NATO missiles to Reagan’s aid to the anti-Communist contras. In essence, they said, if you aren’t a pacifist who favors absolutely unlimited welfare programs, open borders, and police using only rubber bullets, you cannot oppose abortion.
Those who take this stance can pretend that they really oppose abortion, but are too intellectually rigorous to become “single issue” voters. In fact what they are doing is saddling the pro-life movement with a deadly poison pill: Either embrace our outrageous, implausible, and likely suicidal utopianism, or let us go on murdering a million children per year.
And in a sense the strategy worked. Almost no sincere pro-lifers were willing to adopt all the crackpot items on this Christmas wishlist, but its very existence gives crucial political cover to the likes of Joe Biden, Tim Kaine and Nancy Pelosi. The so-called “consistent” pro-life position, they suggest, is such a rigorous and demanding, unworldly agenda, that you can’t blame them for falling short on one or two items of the full glory of God. As Democrats, they can’t surrender abortion, but hey, look how much better they are than Republicans at federal grants for transgender illegal aliens!
Pope Francis’s appointee to Bernardin’s old throne in Chicago, Cardinal Blaise Cupich, has taken up this banner. He responded to the news that Planned Parenthood traffics in baby parts for profit by writing the following in The Chicago Tribune:
While commerce in the remains of defenseless children is particularly repulsive, we should be no less appalled by the indifference toward the thousands of people who die daily for lack of decent medical care; who are denied rights by a broken immigration system and by racism; who suffer in hunger, joblessness and want; who pay the price of violence in gun-saturated neighborhoods; or who are executed by the state in the name of justice.
Have you got that? If you don’t agree with Cardinal Cupich about Medicaid funding, open borders, “systemic racism,” welfare programs, gun control, and capital punishment, you are just as appalling as baby-parts profiteers.
Nobody who actually opposes abortion believes this, except for .9% of Catholics. The fact that such people even exist is the genuine scandal.
The Vatican B.S. Generator
The Vatican has made my job here easier by actually codifying the Rainbow Seamless Garment in recent documents, such as Fiducia Supplicans — which allows for blessings in church of same-sex couples, while pretending that in doing so the Church doesn’t bless their actual … coupling. Pope Francis will bless the union of two people gathered together with flowers and wedding photographers to celebrate their mutual commitment to “acts of grave depravity” (according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church). But he won’t bless what they do together in bed. Have you got that? Does that make sense to you? It didn’t to bishops all around the world, who told the Vatican to pound sand.
Even more helpful to my cause is the recent document Dignitas Infinita, which claims that deporting anyone out of any country for any reason at all is intrinsically evil … like aborting a baby in the womb. Or like hanging the Nazi war criminals after Nuremburg, which Pope Pius XII supported. Or like punishing murderers with execution, as God Himself demanded in the Covenant of Noah, and the Catholic Church has supported in the teachings of pope after pope after pope. Or like fighting defensive wars, which the same document seems to condemn — inching toward an absolute pacifism which the Church always rejected because it’s insane.
Like open borders — which we now see in practice entails letting illegal aliens squat in our homes and vote in our elections — pacifism would turn Christianity into a suicide cult that deserves to be scoffed at, if not actively persecuted by any sane human government committed to the Natural Law which God wrote on the human heart.
We’re Winning at Checkers, But Losing at Chess
I’m happy that only 0.9% of my fellow Catholics believe in square circles, and torture their minds out of blind Stalinist obedience, tribalism, or learned helplessness into accepting the self-canceling nonsense which Pope Francis and his compliant bishops are touting.
I’m tempted to do a little end-zone dance about that. But that would be celebrating having beaten some IQ- 95ers at checkers, while Satan is winning at chess. The enemy has gravely discredited the teaching authority of the Catholic Church — and the integrity of every Protestant church which dabbles in similar woke, Seamless Garment jibjab. He has infiltrated, corrupted, and tainted crucial institutions meant to pass along the Gospel, and that’s nothing to celebrate. Instead it’s a wake-up call to pray more, fight harder, and trust that God Himself will reach down and sweep the enemy’s pieces off the chessboard.
Because we cannot win on our own.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.