It’s the Vatican’s jalopy. Ship it back.

by David Benjamin 

“Catholic teaching was that no homicide was involved if abortion took place before the foetus was infused with a soul, known as ‘ensoulment’. This was believed to occur at ‘quickening’, when the mother detected the child move for the first time in her womb. It indicated a separate consciousness.

“In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV determined it took place at 166 days of pregnancy, almost 24 weeks…”

— Patsy McGarry, The Irish Times

 

MADISON, Wis.— As I watched the eight dwarfs of the GOP mumble, bumble and deflect over the ectopic politics of abortion on Wednesday night, I was carried back to High Mass one Sunday at St. Mary’s Church, when I was about ten years old. We had a guest speaker, an exalted monsignor from La Crosse. 

Now, by that stage in my education, I’d uttered a few hundred thousand repetitions of the “Hail Mary,” including the lines, “Bless art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus…” Despite—or perhaps because of—those countless rote recitations, it had never occurred to me to raise a hand in mid-rosary and ask the most potentially revealing question of my life.

“Sister, what’s a womb?”

Of course, not all kids caught the word accurately. By my estimate, there were thousands—millions?—of Catholic school kids who heard the phrase as “fruit of the loom,” and construed this passage as reference to Jesus’ underwear.

A curious pupil would have asked: Why are we praying over the Son of God’s shorts? But we were Catholic kids, conditioned to leave the myriad mysteries of our faith unchallenged. No kid even asked if these three syllables constituted two words, “womb, Jesus,” or—in our customary enunciation—just one, “woomjesus”.

So, that day at Mass, sealed snugly in devout ignorance, I was both puzzled and vaguely frightened when the celebrity cleric began to rave cryptically about a tiny, sweet, divinely conceived organism floating in a warm lake of love, innocently sucking an incipient thumb when—YIKES! The little fella feels, thrust through its pea-pod heart, a deathly stiletto. And, suddenly, with no purchase for  his weak and helpless little fins, he’s ripped from his pool of life-giving protoplasm by giant scorpion-like pincers, his mangled remains then callously wiped onto the smock of his murderer like a delinquent booger. 

Without warning, Mass had turned into a midnight creature feature. Was this the attack of giant ants, nuclear spiders, the gila monster from Hell. I had no idea. The monsignor was unhelpful. Raging against the unnamed perpetrators of this horror, he seemed to be using some sort of ecclesiastic code. Peering at grownups for signs of comprehension, all I saw were faces frozen in impotent guilt.

Part of my confusion, and it took a few years to get wise, was that talk of abortion in those days was widely taboo. More significantly, as a moral and political issue, it was Catholic Church property. Protestants in that era had misgivings, I guess, about abortion. Who doesn’t? But their bishops were content with a delineation, offered by St. Augustine in the 4th century and affirmed by Thomas Aquinas 900 years later, that a fetus isn’t human ’til six months into a pregnancy, when it “quickens.” Moreover, abortion was illegal almost everywhere, while thriving in a black market that had been around since before Aristotle. 

Then, years later, along came the Roe v. Wade bombshell, loudly establishing a constitutional right to abortion. The Vatican, of course, went raised hell. The surprise, though, was a Protestant faction, referred to as “evangelical,” that found common cause with the dread Papists, turning abortion suddenly into one of the prickliest political causes of the last fifty years. 

These upstart evangelicals, egged on by the rightmost GOP fringe, added ferocity to Vatican dogma. It wasn’t enough to write sermons, carry signs and surround Planned Parenthood clinics. These zealots enhanced abortion into pretext for mayhem. They bombed their first clinic in 1984. The first doctor murdered was David Gunn in 1993. From then ’til the Trump Court upended Roe, the abortion-clinic body count is over a dozen doctors, nurses, aides and patients.

Curiously enough, the Catholic Church—which has blood on its hands in so many other conflicts since the Crucifixion—played no role in this terrorism. The Vatican stood by and let the Protestants and GOP wage war on women’s health in general, and abortion care in particular. 

Today, as exposed by the GOP debate chaos, anti-abortion Republicans are, as the cliché goes, the dog who caught the car. They don’t know what next. They have sunk their canines into a cause supported by barely a third of Americans. 

They’d look really silly if they just up and gave the car back. But banning abortion—it’s been proven repeatedly—is political poison. Sticking with it as a state-by-state choice, is untenable and, as the tragedies mount, ugly. Expanding abortion to a national ban is not only impossible. The idea is sheer lunacy. And if they tried it anyway, what would Clarence, Sam, Neil, Brett and Judge Amy do? 

So, what next?

Let’s scroll back to 1869. That’s when Pope Pius IX reversed the 1500-year Augustinian doctrine on quickening and declared that the life of the human soul begins at birth. By reducing pre-ensoulment from 166 days to zero, Pius IX—who also invented “papal infallibility” and the Immaculate Conception—established abortion as both the theological and political province of the Vatican. Outside of Rome, abortion went undiscussed. In every other culture on earth, it persisted either as a dirty secret, or a lamentable necessity. 

In 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 to enshrine abortion as a right, it implicitly reaffirmed the theology of Augustine, estimating fetal viability at the quickening stage—24-26 weeks. But from there, the surprising alliance between the reactionary papacy of Pius IX with the U.S. religious right, a century later, thrust abortion into the center of politics, in America and around the world. 

Ironically, the Dobbs case in 2022 poses a golden opportunity to pull off a switcheroo as spectacular as Pius IX’s Apostolicae Sedis in 1869. Clearly, the leaders of today’s GOP—including their Messiah—are flummoxed about how to somehow dispose of the car they caught. They know that the vast majority of women want the right to choose. Most men are inclined to go along with the girl and they’re even willing to help pay for the operation (just to get off the hook). Most everybody else would be content to just overlook the whole icky mess. 

Beneath all this dissension and indecision lies the GOP’s escape hatch into the refuge of bourgeois evasion. Recall that Pontius Pilate, with jurisdiction over both public and religious affairs in Jerusalem, demurred on both. “Well, no,” he said. “Not this time. Let the Jews handle this Jesus kerfuffle.”

 This is the opportunity that Republicans have created but failed yet to seize. By engineering the installation of a Supreme Court that ostentatiously washed its hands of abortion, the GOP has ironically given itself an opening to relinquish ownership entirely. To invoke the prevailing metaphor, why keep the car? 

Crate it up. Send it back to the original dealer, the Catholic Church. Point to an empty garage and say, “Car? What car?” And if you’re pressed by the press, get testy: ““Hey, do I look like a priest? All this talk about quickening, ensoulment, fetal personhood—gee whiz! That’s way over my head, gang. Tell you what. Go ask the Pope.”

One more piece of advice: Don’t pay the postage. The Church is richer than God. Send it back C.O.D.