What does it mean to be pro-life?
I’ve been told by online pro-lifers that as a Catholic I should never vote for a pro-abortion candidate, even if that candidate’s policies could reasonably be expected to help the unborn. And that I still shouldn’t vote for them even if the pro-life person’s policies would hurt the unborn.
I’ve heard bishops say that one is jeopardizing their eternal soul if they vote for a Democrat simply because the Democratic Party has a platform position for abortion and the Republicans don’t. There are also priests and even bishops who falsely state that Catholics cannot be Democrats or vote for a Democrat.
This is the Pharisee’s way of being pro-life. The Pharisee is concerned with rightness as such, whether it’s the rightness of the laws, of a party platform, or individual beliefs. The rightness is everything. But rightness is not a higher value than the life of a person. The real lives of human beings ought not to be sacrificed for the abstract correctness of beliefs, laws, positions platforms, or whatever. What good is being right if it leads to wrongful death? What good is it to care about the law if one doesn’t also care about the person?
Jesus rejects this perverted hierarchy of values in the parable of the good Samaritan. The Jewish religious leaders that passed the victim on the road could make a good religious argument for ignoring him. They had to remain pure for the Temple services after all, they couldn’t go involving themselves in the needs of a guy just beat up by robbers. The hero of Jesus’ parable was a Samaritan; an apostate, a heretic, a guy with the wrong beliefs. But Jesus doesn’t care about that. The religious leaders and scribes were always missing the point of the laws, they were blind to the connection between the right worship of God and right way of relating to their neighbor. And modern day Pharisees are still missing that point.
The relevance of this parable is that the temptation to prioritize some kind of “purity” over human life, especially of the lives of the “others”, is always with us. Today it is not Jewish ritual purity that is the temptation, but other forms of “purity”. It may be political purity or intellectual purity or legal purity. A purity that makes helping actual human lives secondary to having the right beliefs about abortion, or or the right laws about abortion or the right political platform about abortion. Every time we do this we are being the priest and the Levite in this parable and failing the test to love our neighbor.
An authentic Catholic pro-life mentality would cooperate with the Samaritan in helping concrete human life, but a pro-life movement that is willing to walk on the other side of the road for the sake of ‘rightness’ is a whitewashed tomb. Today, the “Samaritan” could very well be a pro-choice Democrat who is wrong about abortion rights but nevertheless could aid both mothers and children
The pro-life movement today is sick because it has become a pro-life movement of the priest and the Levite. What we need is a pro-life movement of the Samaritan. One that fulfills the commandment to love God and our neighbor by prioritizing human life over the various forms of modern “ritual purity”.
