Cardinal McElroy’s “Progressive" Stance on Abortion

“Washington’s New Archbishop Is Progressive, Outspoken – and Ready to Stand up,” a Washington Post headline proclaimed last week.

Indeed, the new archbishop of Washington, DC, Cardinal Robert McElroy, has long been considered left-of-center among his fellow American Catholic bishops. As a strong advocate of immigrants’ rights and a close ally of Pope Francis, he is expected to use his position to speak out against some of President Trump’s policies even as he operates in an American church that is tilting increasingly toward conservatism, especially among younger priests.

But while political divisions among American Catholic bishops are real, I think that some outside observers may misunderstand the divisions, especially when it comes to the issue of abortion. McElroy opposed many of his fellow bishops four years ago when he insisted that neither President Biden nor any other pro-choice politicians should be denied communion because of their stances on abortion policy. But I would argue that this should not be misconstrued as a “soft” or “liberal” position on abortion.

Like all other Catholic bishops, McElroy opposes abortion and believes that it is the unjustified taking of a human life. He has called abortion “intrinsically evil” and said that it is “an imperative of conscience for Catholic disciples to seek legal protections for the unborn.”

But there are at least two reasons why McElroy has broken with some of his fellow bishops and has followed Pope Francis in his stance on giving communion to pro-choice politicians – and neither of those reasons have anything to do with a lack of concern about abortion or a liberal position on the issue.

The first is that he recognizes the complexity of translating the church’s moral principles into public policy. As an academic who earned an M.A. in American history and a Ph.D. in political science, he has spent decades reflecting on public policy, and he knows that even when a moral principle might be clear, there can be legitimate disagreement about the best way to translate that moral principle into law. “Like the issues of fighting poverty and addressing climate change, the issue of abortion in law and public policy is a realm where prudential judgment is essential and determinative,” McElroy said.

In other words, while it is imperative to “seek legal protections for the unborn,” the Church needs to give people significant individual leeway in determining how best to exercise their “prudential judgment” in determining which policies and politicians would ultimately provide the best protection for the unborn. Just because the Church can know infallibly that abortion is a moral evil does not mean that it can know infallibly that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision rescinding Roe v. Wade was a good idea that would protect the unborn. Some faithful Catholics might sincerely believe that it was, while others might not. And though a bishop may be thoroughly convinced that a pro-choice Catholic politician is acting with bad intentions, he still needs to give that person the benefit of the doubt and not deny the person communion, given the ambiguity that is always involved in political stances on public policy.

The other reason for McElroy’s difference with some of his fellow bishops on the issue of abortion reflects a conflict in the American church that began in the early 1980s between advocates of a “consistent life ethic” (a position then represented by Archbishop Joseph Bernardin) and a more conservative group (represented by Archbishop John O’Connor) that insisted that abortion was a higher priority than any other political or social issue. Both Bernardin and O’Connor eventually became cardinals, and both were enormously influential in shaping the abortion conversation in the American Catholic Church. Both strongly opposed abortion. But they were at odds with each other about how to translate their opposition to abortion into political strategy, and they never found a way to reconcile their competing positions.

Bernardin and other advocates of the “consistent life ethic” believed that one could not defend the lives of the unborn without advocating for a holistic protection of life in every area – which meant that opposition to abortion had to be coupled with campaigns against nuclear arms buildup, capital punishment, and any other threat to human life.

In taking this stance, Bernardin believed that he was upholding the principles of Vatican II, which had discussed abortion only in the context of a larger vision for human flourishing and the protection of human life in every area. It would be hypocritical of the Church to denounce abortion but turn a blind eye to the buildup of nuclear arms that could destroy the human race, Bernardin thought. Using similar reasoning, a later generation of consistent life ethic advocates in the early 21st century would argue that it would be equally hypocritical to oppose abortion while not trying to stop climate change, since changes in the earth’s climate could have devastating effects on human life.

Many of those who were attracted to the consistent life ethic gravitated toward the Democratic Party and the political left, because while the Democrats generally disagreed with the consistent life ethic’s stance on abortion, their stance on most of the other issues that advocates of the consistent life ethic cared about were closer to Bernardin’s position than the Republican Party’s stances were.

But Cardinal O’Connor disagreed with this reasoning. Abortion was uniquely evil, he argued. It killed far more people each year than were ever killed by any of the other issues that consistent life ethic advocates cared about. And many of the issues that were lumped into the consistent life ethic were morally gray areas; abortion was not. It was therefore appropriate to hold politicians accountable for their stances on abortion in a way that the Church did not hold them accountable for their stances on environmental measures or even on capital punishment.

Those who agreed with O’Connor tended to gravitate toward the Republican Party, which, in the late 20th century, was the only major party that adopted an official antiabortion stance.

It was therefore easy for the news media to interpret the conflict between consistent life ethic advocates and the adherents of O’Connor’s position in partisan terms. As American bishops increasingly shifted from the consistent life ethic toward a position that mirrored O’Connor’s, it was easy for them to characterize this as a partisan shift. And when Pope Francis, a strong advocate of the consistent life ethic, began promoting consistent life ethic advocates (like McElroy) to positions of authority in the American Catholic Church, it was also easy to interpret this in political terms.

But while there is a partisan dimension to all of this, it’s also important to remember that these divisions among Catholic clergy do not translate as neatly into secular political categories as much as we might imagine. Even many of the conservatives who insist that abortion must supersede all other political issues have insisted that the Church must care for immigrants and must be concerned about climate change – just as the pope has said. And all of the progressive advocates of a consistent life ethic insist that abortion is a serious issue – which means that they have been quite willing in some cases to denounce the Democratic Party’s abortion stance.

In fact, one of the critics of the Democratic Party’s position on abortion is McElroy. The Democratic Party had moved to “simply block out the human identity and rights of unborn children,” he lamented in October 2020, a few weeks before the election.

So, is McElroy a progressive? Yes – if by “progressive” we mean an advocate of the Church’s consistent life ethic. We can expect him to give just as much attention to defending the rights of immigrants and fighting climate change as he does to abortion.

But we should not construe this as a deemphasis on abortion or a disregard for that issue’s importance. Instead, it’s a return to the position that the majority of the US bishops held in the early 1980s, when they believed that defending human life before birth could not be separated from caring for human life after birth. McElroy, I think, intends to uphold that message. As he himself has conceded, it’s not a stance that either of the nation’s major political parties necessarily welcomes. But perhaps because it doesn’t neatly fit into a partisan agenda, maybe it will gain a fresh reception among at least a few people who are looking for a countercultural stance from the Church. Some might call that stance “progressive” – but maybe in reality, it’s a revitalization of a position that some in the Church have already been taking for a long time.

Elsewhere on the Internet:

In my forthcoming book Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade, I say a lot more about the differences between Bernardin and O’Connor’s stances on abortion – as well as many other debates in Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church as Christians debated how to respond to the abortion issue. Abortion and America’s Churches will be published by the University of Notre Dame Press in October, but it’s already available for preorder now.

In my final piece for Current (published on Monday), I examine what the arguments for internationalism in the 1940s might mean for us today.

And in a piece published yesterday on the Anxious Bench, I explore the moral complexity of President James Garfield, the “preacher president” who transitioned from being a lay evangelist in the Disciples of Christ to a career as an antislavery politician – but who had a few skeletons in his closet even in the midst of such moral fervor. C. W. Goodyear’s biography President Garfield showed me that Garfield was a more complicated (and compromised) individual than I had once imagined – and in my piece for the Anxious Bench, I explore those complications.