The Vatican is not serious about abortion

All was going swimmingly well until, in Hudson’s words at p.194, “prior to the 2004 election, in late August, I stepped down from my position as Catholic advisor to the White House and the RNC [Republican National Committee]. A left-wing Catholic newspaper that supported John Kerry published a lengthy expose about me on its Web site. The article contained documents from a supposedly sealed file at Fordham University [NY], where, as a philosophy professor, I had had a sexual encounter with a female undergraduate in February 1994.”

To save causing Bush further harm, Hudson resigned and became a footnote in American political history. His book reads like a cri-de-coeur for his unrecognised work. He says, with some credibility, that he was at the vanguard of religious and political history.

Hudson argues while the Conference of Bishops was naturally opposed to abortion in principle, when push came to shove, they were not prepared to switch their allegiance from the liberal John Kerry, who supported a woman’s right to choose, and back George Bush.

Moreover, and here is the point, the Vatican turns a blind eye to moderate bishops’ refusal to embrace its supposedly absolutist line on abortion for two main reasons. It doesn’t want to cause a damaging rift in the church and second, the church’s financial position could be at stake were it to undertake a purge of backsliding bishops.

Hudson details at p.141 the Vatican’s pragmatism on abortion historically where he points out that in 1975 US Catholic bishops realised anti-abortion lobbying would cross the line which established them as a charity at law with tax-exempt status. Citing T. Byrnes’ 1991 Catholic Bishops in American Politics, Hudson argues:

“The bishops were well aware of the dangers such a national organising effort [against abortion] would present to their Conference, such as an IRS [Internal Revenue Service] challenge to their tax-exempt status.” The bishops said that pro-life groups were not “an agency of the church, nor operated, controlled or financed by the church”.

Hudson comments: “this qualifying language doomed the [anti-abortion] enterprise to failure, no matter how well intentioned the effort.”

He points out that militant evangelicals were “bold enough” to do what the Catholic bishops were not, even running into challenges from the IRS which they saw off.

He concludes the US Bishops Conference, ever since, has “increasingly used the fear of losing its tax-exempt status to etch a boundary line around its pro-life activity”.

In other words, the Vatican, through its US Conference, considers its tax-exempt status to be more important than its stand on abortion. So, everything has a price, even abortion dogma. As the Pope himself said in 1969 when a leftist Italian government was contemplating revoking the Vatican’s tax-exempt status, “no matter is of greater importance”.

If the Vatican was serious about abortion, it would encourage its priests to openly breach charity law by advocating the election of anti-abortion candidates like Sarah Palin, from all pulpits, inviting tax authorities to abolish its tax-exempt status. But it never has.

(When and how the religious can exercise their free speech in the US without compromising their tax-exempt charitable status is carefully detailed in a September 2007 document entitled “Constitutional Protection for Pastors” (PDF 76KB), published by five US evangelical groups, including Focus on the Family. It is freely available on the internet. The Australian Tax Office artfully avoids discussing this issue on its website.)