HERE is another expose on the fallacy of the "pro-life" drumpf / trump-pence administration and the hypocrisy of Catholic Christians from Sojourners. I would love to hear these Protestant and Catholic practitioners of the gospel of greed, these followers of the alt-jesus, justify their personal and / or business acceptance of money from the federal government during this pandemic when they oppose adequate funding of social safety net programs for the poor, the least among us.
THERE'S NOTHING PRO-LIFE ABOUT TRUMP
Trump's weaponization of whiteness and all-out assault on America’s working poor stand in stark contradiction to the “culture of life” that Catholics embrace.
WHITE CHRISTIAN VOTERS —evangelicals, but also Catholics—pushed Trump over the finish line in the 2016 election. Trump regularly holds court in the media with evangelicals but has been less overt with Catholics. That is until January, when he favored some with a personal appearance at the annual March for Life on the national Mall, held in protest of the 1973 Supreme Court decision that overturned state bans on abortion.
“Catholics were of secondary importance to the Trump campaign in 2016, behind evangelicals. That hasn’t changed, but there is at least an effort to reach this community now,” former Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) told Politico in January.
As a Catholic, I’m deeply troubled by this president. Trump stands against everything I’ve been taught to believe.
Pope Francis has prioritized the climate crisis for Catholics; Trump withdrew from the Paris accords and dismantled the modest advances made under Obama.
Pope Francis says welcoming migrants builds a strong social ethic; Trump implements policies that tear apart families and imprison migrant children.
Catholics believe in promoting a consistent moral stance that allows life to flourish. Under the Trump administration average life expectancy in the U.S. has been on the decline for three consecutive years (representing the longest consecutive decline in the American lifespan since World War I).
Pope Francis teaches that the death penalty is no longer permissible under any circumstance; Trump’s attorney general reinstated the federal death penalty, executing prisoners for the first time in nearly two decades.
Though Obama left a shameful legacy of drone strikes involving civilian deaths, under Trump drone strikes have risen and so have civilian deaths. During the 2015 campaign, Trump told Fox & Friends, “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” When Trump took office, he dismantled the few drone-strike reforms Obama had put into place. In 2018, while Trump was reviewing video of a drone strike in Syria, he asked a CIA official why they didn’t just kill the terrorist’s whole family.
Nuclear weapons are one of the gravest threats to human life. In 2019, Pope Francis began teaching that it is immoral for nations to possess nuclear weapons; he urged Catholics to withdraw support from nuclear national security systems. Not only is the Trump administration expanding the nuclear weapons arsenal, it confirmed in February that for the first time “low-yield” nuclear warheads have been deployed on U.S. submarines, perpetuating the grievous fallacy that it’s possible to “win” a nuclear war.
Let’s be clear: There is nothing “pro-life” about President Trump. His weaponization of whiteness, “pussy-grabbing” tendencies, vicious racism, and all-out assault on America’s working poor stand in stark contradiction to the “culture of life” that Catholics embrace.
But isn’t abortion the apex issue for Catholics? The 650,000 medically induced abortions in the U.S. each year certainly make this a key issue for all Christians. But no—abortion is not the paramount social issue for Catholics. It must be held alongside realities such as the fact that the U.S. has the highest “first-day death rate” for newborns in the industrialized world. The whole point of a “consistent ethic of life,” a “seamless garment,” as Cardinal Joseph Bernardin framed it in 1983, is that we must see, judge, and act with prudence on a complex array of social issues.
The danger of single-issue supremacy, says Cardinal Blasé Cupich, is that it may “fragment our Catholic social teaching, pretending to offer so-called non-negotiables, which end up reducing our moral tradition to a single set of issues.” Inevitably, “single issues” get hijacked by forces with vastly different goals. Christians who seek to form their conscience in social ethics today must resist partisan distortion and advance a generative, trustworthy, and respectful culture of life—for all.
Rose Marie Berger is senior associate editor of Sojourners magazine, a contributor to the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative (a project of Pax Christi International), and author of Bending the Arch: Poems (2019).
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