Unless the Catholic Church has changed its teaching since I was in high school (which HAS been a long time, I must admit) it is still a mortal sin to use contraceptives and it is still a mortal sin to divorce and remarry, or to marry a divorced person. Yet U.S. Catholics are doing these things by the millions. They insist, as Catholic politicians do about abortion, capital punishment and war, that the individual’s judgment must be respected. If you claim that all self-identifying U.S. Catholics who practice artificial birth control are not “real” Catholics, church membership has gone down even more than surveys indicate.
Accepting your definition of “real” Catholics, this group might well vote in the same way as they have traditionally—for the pro-life candidate. But the self-identified Catholics who aren’t “real” Catholics, like the author of the article, who I believe are now in the majority in the U.S., will vote on other issues, and they won’t influence an election predictably as they used to. There is no longer a monolithic block of Catholic votes that politicians can try to corral using the abortion issue.
I think that just as we have won permanently on the gun issue, American culture has become permanently dependent on the availability of abortion. Yes, I know that there are still efforts to take away our guns, but how many politicians are running on that issue? Liberals have backed away from it big time because they know they’ve lost. Limitation is all they’re going to achieve, and every inch will be hard won. I think it’s time conservatives acknowledged the same about abortion.
what you lay out is an exercise in moral relativism. as i pointed out above, abortion is intrinsically evil. always has been, always will be, it is THE defining issue. all mankind sins, but not all subscribe to evil. i am a practicing Catholic and i have heard this discussed from various parish pulpits this election season. the Church cannot control how “Catholics” [real or self-described] vote, but it can sure lay out the guiding principles and let them KNOW what they are choosing. Silliness like that put forth by Kmiec and the author of his article, only attempts to muddy the waters by injecting moral relativism into the debate.