Thank you. I wish more of the clergy would talk about this, aka proportionalism, I believe.
The pernicious legacy of Bernardin and his crowd is that the morality abortion has been reduced to the same level as the death penalty or even the same level as day-care for the working poor. Bernardin undoubtedly knew that this provided cover for the Democratic Party whom the great majority of bishops privately supported, a legacy of their once exhaulted place in that party’s circles. He knew that it provided absolution for the consciences of Catholics politicians and the Catholic upper crust who wished to ignore the fact that the United States had the most liberal abortion law in the developed world. Thus those people would now socialize with their “enlightened” neighbors and not be embarrassed by the possibility of having to defend the pro-life position, which was so declasse. Divine judgement fell upon the bishops with the sex scandal, and I suspect that most of them realize that no matter how they try that they will never rise in the estimate of
the right and famous to the level of fifty years ago.