To Be Or To Honestly Be

Puh!
Ptooie!
Ptooey!
Ptooie!
Mary T. Flynn

Since we’re not supposed to “hate,” let’s just say that – even at 102 years old – Mrs. Flynn nurtures an extreme hostility toward Notre Dame football and onetime coach Lou Holtz. Family legend holds that – in her stronger days – she would spit at the very mention of his name and we would have to bind her to “Mrs. Flynn’s chair” when he made a television experience. 

It certainly did not help that she (and my brother and most of my friends) remain convinced he cheated against the Miami Hurricanes in October 1988. 

Happily, she slept through his NRC speech or she’d have mustered the strength to throw something through the flatscreen TV. 

Holtz’s paean “nobody is but [sic] a stronger advocate for the unborn than President Trump” and his profoundly un-Catholic – indeed un-Christian – declaration that “other politicians are Catholics in name only and abandon innocent lives” is the political-moral equivalent of an incomplete Hail Mary pass in the last three seconds of a game in which you’re four point’s behind. It looks good (and may even get the coach rehired for the coming season) but it’s still incomplete. 

It’s politically easy (and perhaps advantageous) to be “a strong advocate for the unborn” – a bravado Hail Mary pass. It is something entirely different to be a strong advocate for the living - pro-the-living. 

Pro-birth is for legislators and politicians who do nothing, despite recognizing that diabetes – the most expensive chronic disease in the United States - cost the nation $327 billion in 2017 and the average list price of diabetes has increased eleven percent per year between 2001 and 2018 – nearing $6,000 per year. Prolife is to guarantee that every American diabetic has and can afford his or her life-essential insulin.

To advocate and fight for guaranteed health care for everyone – from conception to death, without limits on the preconditions of those with spina bifida or congenital malformations, despite handicaps or heath, without regard to race or social/economic status is pro-life. Anything less is pro-birth bluff, bluster and political showmanship.

To build a world in which the parents of Black teenagers need no longer constantly warn them of the dangers inherent in an encounter with the police is prolife.

To be pro-birth for unemployed miners of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Montana to whom four years ago a candidate promised “clean coal” and the return of the coal industry is easy. To be prolife means establishing revolutionary clean energy sources and developing them in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Montana and assuring educations and wages that give dignity to the lives and labor of those who once toiled in the mines. 

It’s easy to be “a strong advocate for the unborn,” when one does not care that rising temperatures creating famines in Africa and around the world and destroying the oceans and rivers on which the unborn will depend for food. 

How does one declare a candidate “a stronger advocate for the unborn” when, in the same week as the Republican convention, two federal prisoners were executed and three others were killed by federal authorities in the preceding month? That’s pro-birth. Not prolife. 

Pro-birth is to remain silent or utter meaningless promises of “thoughts and prayers” without actions in the face of domestic terrorist mass murders in El Paso and Midland and Parkland and at the Pulse but is too afraid to even use the word “terrorism.” Pro-birth is to remain silent or a stooge of the gun industry and the self-aggrandizing “leadership” of the NRA after someone shouts “All Jews must die” as he opens fire, killing eleven people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. That’s simply pro-birth. It’s not prolife.

How does one classify as “prolife” when – even before a trial – he advocated of the execution of five Black and Hispanic New York teens and sixteen years after they were exonerated continued to maintain his position. 

One can call oneself – but is not – prolife when disregarding the environment, destroying the future of Social Security, fighting for the abolition of the Affordable Care Act without – during three-and-a-half years in office - offering anything but platitudes and empty promises about protecting pre-existing conditions. 

Politicians and political leaders who call themselves prolife and yet do nothing to prepare for and better the lives of generations to come are the equivalent of the president of a Christian university who writes rules and disciplines condemning student sex while lying in bed and watching his wife have sex with a “business associate.”

Jesus did not say simply “I have come that they might have life…” To quote him thusly is dishonest and unfaithful. He said, “I have come that they might have life and that they might have life in its fulness.” (John 10:10)

The citizen who refuses to wear a facemask in Walmart or physically assaults workers at a local grocery store when asked to put on a mask while screaming about their “civil rights” and “personal freedoms” to go maskless but would demand every possible life-saving intervention at costs into the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars should they be infected with COVID-19 is – at best – pro-birth; they will never be prolife. The evangelical “minister” who hosts hundreds of maskless men, women and children singing and “praising the Lord” in packed churches may be pro-birth; at best, while they collect their tithes and demand that others finance their lifestyles, they may be pro-birth but have no right to claim the prolife mantle.

Today’s “prolife” politician, political party or lawmaker who is not pro-the-living, who is not pro-future-generations is the equivalent of the university president – a modern day hypocrite. 

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples:
“Do not do what they – the teachers of the law do, for they do 
not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy,
cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, 
But they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to remove them. 
Everything they do is for people to see… they love
to be greeted with respect …
The greatest among you must be your servant. 
For those who exalt themselves will be humbled,
and those who humble themselves will be exalted….
Woe to you hypocrites!
You shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. 
You yourselves do not enter, nor will you
let those enter who are trying…

Woe to you, you hypocrites… You have neglected the more
important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness.
You should have practiced the latter, without rejecting the former.
You blind guides!
You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel…

Woe to you… you hypocrites.! You are like 
whitewashed tombs, which look beautify on the outside
But on the inside are full of the bones of the dead 
and everything unclean. In the same way,
on the outside you appear to people as righteous
but on the inside, you are full of hierocracy and wickedness….

Hidden toward the end of the First Chapter of the Gospel of John is one of history’s greatest compliments. Scripture tells us that, having become a disciple of Jesus, Philip seeks out his friend Nathanael and brings him to Jesus. 

“When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, 
‘He truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit,’
‘How do you know me?’ Nathanael asked.
Jesus answered, ‘I saw you while you were still 
under the fig tree before Philip called you.’”
Matthew 23

Approaching what it is not hyperbole to call “perhaps the most important election in American history,” it is critical to be more than a “one issue voter,” to recognize that the truly “pro-life” candidate and voter must be truly “pro-the-living-in-this-and-coming-generations.”

Perhaps, too, we might take to heart the words of Notre Dame president Father John Jennings, CSC:

“Moreover, we Catholics should remind ourselves that 
while we may judge the objective moral quality of another’s actions, 
we must never question the sincerity of another’s faith, 
which is due to the mysterious working of grace in that person’s heart. 
In this fractious time, let us remember that our highest calling is to love.”