A majority of German Catholics don’t approve of Pope Francis and the Vatican criticizing abortion, according to a survey commissioned by a Catholic weekly.
Pope Francis has modernized the Catholic Church, but remains a staunch opponent of abortion
By Darko Janjevic
A new survey reveals a large gap between German Catholics and church leaders when it comes to abortion.
The survey, conducted by INSA Consulere pollster on behalf of German Catholic weekly Die Tagespost, asked the responders for their stance on the following sentence: “It is good that the pope and the Church speak out against abortion.”
Only 17% of surveyed Catholics said they agreed with it, compared to 58% who oppose it.
The same survey also showed that only 13% of Protestants were in favor of the anti-abortion statements. Over two-thirds of Protestants disagreed with anti-abortion comments made by Pope Francis and Catholic leaders.
The pollsters questioned a total of 2,099 people in late July and early August.
Church changes, but only to a point
Pope Francis has moved the Catholic Church in a more liberal direction since taking over as pontiff in 2013. He has taken a tough stance on priests involved in child abuse and chastised Western governments for not welcoming migrants, called for more help for the poor and more efforts to preserve the environment. Publicly, he has worked to reduce prejudice against LGBTQ people, reassuring them that God “does not disown any of his children” and endorsing same-sex civil unions.
However, the 85-year-old has also disappointed some of his more liberal supporters by rejecting the blessing of gay marriages. He has also refused to shift from the Church’s traditional stance on celibacy for priests, and most notably, abortion, which the Vatican sees as an act of murder.
Pope’s stance on abortion: ‘Is it right to hire a hit man?’
In an interview with the Reuters news agency last month, Pope Francis restated his controversial view that having an abortion is akin to hiring a hit man.
“The moral question is whether it is right to take a human life to solve a problem. Indeed, is it right to hire a hit man to solve a problem?” the pope said.
The abortion issue is not the only one where the Vatican faces pushback from Germany. Less than three weeks ago, the Catholic Church spoke out against the progressive German Catholic movement known as the “Synodal Path,” warning them they do not have authority to instruct church leaders on matters of morality and doctrine.
The movement has previously called for allowing priests to marry, women to become deacons, and for same-sex couples to receive the Church’s blessing.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday questioned whether a San Francisco archbishop who said he would deny her Communion over abortion rights was using a double standard by allowing politicians who support the death penalty to receive the sacrament.
“I wonder about the death penalty, which I’m opposed to. So is the church, but they take no actions against people who may not share their view,” Pelosi said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
On Friday, the Most Rev. Salvatore J. Cordileone, the Catholic Church’s archbishop in San Francisco, said Pelosi would be denied Communion because of her vocal support for abortion rights, a stunning rebuke of one of the nation’s most senior practicing Catholic politicians, who often evokes her faith when discussing her family and politics.
“After numerous attempts to speak with her to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, and the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that the point has come in which I must make a public declaration that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion unless and until she publicly repudiate her support for abortion ‘rights’ and confess and receive absolution for her cooperation in this evil in the sacrament of Penance,” Cordileone said Friday in a letter to members of his archdiocese.
“I have accordingly sent her a Notification to this effect, which I have now made public,” he added.
Cordileone, one of the country’s most conservative Catholic leaders, last year called for Communion to be withheld from public figures who support abortion rights but did not mention Pelosi by name at the time. In November, U.S. Catholic bishops backed away from a direct confrontation with President Biden, the second Catholic president, over his support for abortion rights and the sacrament of Communion. They approved a document on the Eucharist that did not mention any politicians or the president.
In the MSNBC interview, Pelosi challenged the notion of imposing her personal views on abortion on others and highlighted Cordileone’s pronouncements on other issues, such as gay rights.
“We just have to be prayerful, we have to be respectful. I come from a largely pro-life Italian American Catholic family, so I respect people’s views about that, but I don’t respect us foisting it onto others,” she said. “Now our archbishop has been vehemently against LGBTQ rights. He led the way in some of the issues, an initiative on the ballot in California. So this decision … is very dangerous in the lives of so many of the American people. They’re not consistent with the Gospel of Matthew.”
Democrats and abortion rights advocates have responded with alarm in recent weeks after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the right to abortion established in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
Holy Communion is the central sacrament of Catholicism and the centerpiece of the Catholic Mass — a ritual memorial of Christ’s death on the cross in which bread and wine are said to be transformed into his flesh and blood.
Catholic archbishops have vast power within their diocese, and a reversal of Cordileone’s decision would require the intervention of the Vatican, which is unlikely. The order to deny Communion to Pelosi applies only to Catholic churches within the San Francisco archdiocese under Cordileone’s purview, including the speaker’s home church.
Last September, Pope Francis said the decision about granting Communion to politicians who support abortion rights should be made from a pastoral point of view, not a political one. He told reporters: “I have never refused the Eucharist to anyone,” while adding that he has never knowingly encountered during Communion a politician who backs abortion rights. Francis, however, reiterated that abortion is “murder.”
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released earlier this month, 55 percent of Catholics in the United States want the Supreme Court to uphold Roe. Catholic teaching opposes abortion, however, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last year debated the meaning of Communion and whether it is appropriate to withhold the sacrament from Catholic politicians, such as Pelosi or Biden, who support abortion rights.<
After a firestorm of debate, the bishops clarified that there will be “no national policy on withholding Communion from politicians.” They later released a document on Communion but declined to single out politicians who back abortion rights.
After Cordileone last year condemned a bill codifying the constitutional protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law as an “atrocity” and “nothing short of child sacrifice,” Pelosi acknowledged a “disagreement” with the prelate.
“I believe that God has given us a free will to honor our responsibilities,” she said, before again talking about her own family.
“For us, it was a complete and total blessing, which we enjoy every day of our lives,” Pelosi added. “But it’s none of our business how other people choose the size and timing of their families.”
During her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Amy Coney Barrett tried to reassure Democrats who were leery of her role as a “handmaid” in a Christian group called “People of Praise.”
The group has a male-dominated hierarchy and a rigid view of sexuality reflecting conservative gender norms and rejecting openly gay men and women. Men, the group’s decision makers, “headed” their wives.
Justice Barrett said then that she would not impose her personal beliefs on the country. “Judges can’t just wake up one day and say ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion’ — and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” she said amicably. “It’s not the law of Amy. It’s the law of the American people.”
Yet that’s what seems to be coming. Like a royal queen, she will impose her will on the world. It will be the law of Amy. And Sam. And Clarence. And Neil. And Brett.
It’s outrageous that five or six people in lifelong unaccountable jobs are about to impose their personal views on the rest of the country. While they will certainly provide the legal casuistry for their opinion, let’s not be played for fools: The Supreme Court’s impending repeal of Roe will be owed to more than judicial argumentation. There are prior worldviews at work in this upheaval.
As a Catholic whose father lived through the Irish Catholics “need not apply” era, I’m happy to see Catholics do well in the world. There is an astonishing preponderance of Catholics on the Supreme Court — six out of the nine justices, and a seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised as a Catholic and went to the same Jesuit boys’ high school in a Maryland suburb that Brett Kavanaugh and my nephews did, Georgetown Prep.
My father was furious that Catholic presidential candidates Al Smith and J.F.K. had to defend themselves against scurrilous charges that, if they got to the White House, they would take their orders from the pope.
One must tread carefully here. A Catholic signed on to the Roe v. Wade decision and another was in the court majority that upheld it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Catholic, has expressed support for Roe, and Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative Catholic, may be working for a compromise decision that can uphold Roe.
Still, this Catholic feels an intense disquiet that Catholic doctrine may be shaping (or misshaping) the freedom and the future of millions of women, and men. There is a corona of religious fervor around the court, a churchly ethos that threatens to turn our whole country upside down.
I come from a family that hews to the Catholic dictates on abortion, and I respect the views of my relatives. But it’s hard for me to watch the church trying to control women’s sexuality after a shocking number of its own priests sexually assaulted children and teenagers for decades, and got recycled into other parishes, as the church covered up the whole scandal. It is also hard to see the church couch its anti-abortion position in the context of caring for women when it continues to keep women in subservient roles in the church.
Religiosity is a subject some Catholics on the court have been more open about in recent years.
Last year, at Thomas Aquinas College in California, Justice Samuel Alito fretted that there was growing cultural hostility toward Christianity and Catholicism. “There is a real movement to suppress the expression of anything that opposes the secular orthodoxy,” he said. Precisely which belief or practice of his religion does he feel he has been denied?
President Biden is a Catholic who is uncomfortable with the issue of abortion despite his support for Roe. Still, when Barrett was a law professor at Notre Dame, a group she belonged to unanimously denounced the university’s decision to honor Biden even though he didn’t support the church’s position on abortion.
We have no one in the public arena like Mario Cuomo, who respected the multiplicity of values in an open society and had the guts to wade into the lion’s den at Notre Dame in 1984.
“The Catholic who holds political office in a pluralistic democracy — who is elected to serve Jews and Muslims, atheists and Protestants, as well as Catholics — bears special responsibility,” Cuomo said. “He or she undertakes to help create conditions under which all can live with a maximum of dignity and with a reasonable degree of freedom; where everyone who chooses may hold beliefs different from specifically Catholic ones — sometimes contradictory to them; where the laws protect people’s right to divorce, to use birth control and even to choose abortion.”
The explosive nature of Alito’s draft opinion on Roe has brought to the fore how radical the majority on the court is, willing to make women fit with their zealous worldview — a view most Americans reject. It has also shown how radical Republicans are; although after pushing for this result for decades, because it made a good political weapon, they are now pretending it’s no big deal. We will all have to live with the catastrophic results of their zealotry.
