“At William Brennan’s funeral, Fr. Milton Jordan of the Washington Archdiocese declared of the man who engineered Roe v. Wade, “Bill left the world a better place than he found it.”
Roe v. Wade passed by a 7-2 vote. Even if Brannan had not not voted, it would have still passed. The court was dominated by liberal protestants. The only two dissenting votes were JFK appointed Byron White (Episcopalian) and Nixon appointee William Rehnquist (Lutheran).
So I don’t really know what you mean by saying Brennan, who was a liberal (another wasted republican appointee), was the “engineer” of Roe v. Wade. I think Harry Blackmun, who wrote the opinion, was the architect. He never saw an abortion he didn’t like and wrote the opinion on Roe v. Wade.
The story as I have frequently heard it, and read at the time, is that Blackmun wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade, but that he was kind of a dim bulb who didn’t entirely realize what he was doing. Many accounts have said that it was Brennan who egged him on and told him what to do, from behind the scenes. Or even that Brennan wrote most of it, but told Blackmun to take the credit.
Brennan did not want to be the author of the decision because he was a Catholic, but he was the mastermind behind it. It was, of course, written by Blackmun.
Brennan was pro-abortion. That’s the bottom line. He was a monster—and therefore not a good Catholic.
Fr. Milton Jordan is all-too-typical of American clergy: He loves the Democrat party with all his mind, and all his soul, and all his strength, and the Catholic Church might be made to help the party in some way.