The Catholic Church Started the Culture Wars — Now Can They End Them? | Patricia Miller.
This week, the U.S. Catholic bishops are gathering in Baltimore for their semi-annual meeting. It’s the first gathering of the U.S. prelates since the Catholic Church’s rocky Extraordinary Synod on the Family and a chance for the bishops to demonstrate that they have heard Pope Francis’ calls for a more inclusive church that’s more concerned with the pastoral than with the rulebook.The Catholic Church Started the Culture Wars — Now Can They End Them? | Patricia Miller.
Francis has acknowledged that the church’s leaders became “obsessed” with imposing strict rules “related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods” on the faithful to the detriment of the church. But the impact of the hierarchy’s obsessions go beyond the church and affect us all. In fact, while the culture wars are usually attributed to the Christian right, the U.S. Catholic bishops are in many ways responsible for starting the culture wars that have polarized society and paralyzed our political process.
It was, after all, the Catholic bishops who created the “right-to-life” movement in the first place, back when most American weren’t even paying attention to the abortion issue, as I detail in my book Good Catholics: The Battle over Abortion in the Catholic Church. In the mid-1960s, abortion wasn’t a major political issue. It was regulated by the states, most of which banned it except to save a woman’s life. But public health officials, doctors and some legislators began pushing to make abortion more widely available because some 1 million illegal procedures were being performed every year. The gynecological wards of many city’s hospitals were filled with women suffering from botched procedures — some 10,000 in New York City alone in 1967 — and only women who were rich or well-connected could get legal abortions, even in cases of rape or fetal deformity. …..
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