Catholic Sensibility

I seem to have been sucked into some political tide pool today. Have mercy. I was thinking about the PPC lament, "Why do those anti-Catholic bigots say we don't care about anybody?" We have a problem with perception and PR here, naturally. Let's try to decipher it. 1. An active, vocal, and tenacious subset of American Catholics focuses solely on one issue: saving the unborn. When they have energy to spare, those among them in the public eye do not turn to fight the root causes of women making choices to abort their children. They turn to those who support the right to choose. And when that is deemed unsatisfactory, they attack those who support those who support the right to choose. And so on. 2. The result is that the public face of the pro-life movement has been tricked into looking like ... well, sheep. They take sides in a bitter family feud that was initially about money. They take sides in a personnel issue in a Catholic school in a far away diocese. They get caught up in the side issues that make them look like silly sheep in the light of the substantial life issues of the day: domestic hurricane relief, disaster relief abroad, unjust wars, a legal system that favors the rich and sends the poor to the electric chair. My sincere suggestion to my conservative pro-life Catholic friends is to start acting with some cunning like wolves. I can accept a person for whom abortion is the number one issue. But I'm less ready to condone an ideological firmament that doesn't place the number two or three or four issues on a plane nearly as important. I say this because the ESCR issue is quickly slipping away and if you have no cred with the fence-sitters on this gig, you'd dern well better get out of the way before you screw it up. You don't look like you're compassionate people because your secondary issues aren't comprehensible. Why are you getting your msm time hammering away at a principal who was too slow to fire a teacher? Why are you so fussed about where the presidential candidate went to church and if he received communion? Don't you see how this looks? Your number two could be any number of pressing issues that actually affect whether people live or die: Katrina relief, pre-natal care, poverty, capital punishment, the Iraq War, nuclear disarmament. Failing that, you could just go home after a long day picketing the clinic and hug your kids extra tight. Mainstream USA gives you no cred. And think twice, if you think this is a suitable martyrdom. It's not. Martyrdom isn't whining about anti-Catholic bias in the media. Martyrdom actually hurts and causes physical death and suffering. Like what ordinary, everyday, non-rich people in Iraq, New Orleans, Pakistan, Guatemala, or your nearest drug fiefdom experience. Show some compassion for the unborn, by all means. Make yourselves sly enough to show compassion for their moms, their friends, and a few other people as you go. Mother Teresa was just as anti-abortion as anyone else, but only the dimwitted consider her without compassion or concern. PPC, or not to be: that is the question.