St. John Fisher, the Bishops, and Abortion

St. John Fisher

St. John Fisher gave up his life on this date in 1535. He died because he would not subordinate the moral authority of the Church to the demands of the secular state.

I’ll have more to say about today’s saint in a moment. First, let’s take a moment to discuss the demands of the state.

You May Not be Interested . . .

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

The quote above is often attributed to communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. There is no record of his actually having said it, but it’s widely repeated because it pithily sums up a terrifying truth about the relentlessness of war. In an age when a large and influential segment of the population wages political warfare on all who seem to stand in the way of their urgent drive to replace reality as it is with a vaguely envisioned utopia, we can amend that to, “You may not be interested in political warfare, but political warfare is interested in you.”

For a long time now the Catholic bishops in the United States have dabbled in politics, mostly in a manner that we would call “virtue signaling.” There was a statement about nuclear war in the 1980s, expressions of concern about capital punishment in the 1990s, some handwringing about immigration in more recent years.  All issues with legitimate moral dimensions, it’s true, but all likewise issues on which serious Catholics can have legitimate differences of opinion. In none of them were the bishops confronting Catholics or others who were clearly advocating anything directly contrary to the moral law, or promoting an intrinsic evil.  And for what it’s worth, none of them are areas in which Catholic bishops have particular competence.

A “Devout” Catholic

Over the same stretch of time there has been another issue looming, one which is indeed a matter of intrinsic evil. With this issue is no room for prudential judgment, and it is very much within the competence of the episcopacy. I’m speaking, of course, about abortion.  Abortion has been unambiguously condemned as a moral evil from the very first days of the Church. In the 1st century AD, the Didache declared “thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide” (Didache, II.2). Now, to be fair, the bishops have been virtually unanimous that abortion is wrong. At the same time, they have been unable or unwilling to fully deploy their authority to teach, govern, and sanctify. This is particularly true in the case of prominent public figures who claim to be Catholic but, at the same time, promote abortion and other evils.

It has become increasingly difficult for them to dodge the issue. Just a few years ago a man who claimed to be “a devout Catholic” was President of the United States. This same man promised to use the power of the U.S. government to make abortion more accessible at home and around the world. And that at the expense of American taxpayers regardless of their religious or moral convictions.  He did the same with regard to other moral evils such as same sex marriage.  The Catholic president even waged a legal battle against the Little Sisters of the Poor to force them to pay for contraceptives for employees. He only faced any sort of practical push-back from the institutional Church once. In October 2019 a parish priest denied him communion. That’s it. From his bishop, from any bishop, nothing.

Standing up to the King

As it happens, we are honoring two great saints today who know what is to stand for the Truth in the face of an invasive government, St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More. St. Thomas More is more familiar to us than his contemporary St. John Fisher. In part this is because his magnetic personality still resonates almost five centuries later. Robert Bolt’s play and film A Man for All Seasons have also done a lot to keep St.Thomas More current. 

St. John Fisher’s story is no less compelling, however. In fact, the Church gives it greater prominence. We commemorate both Saints on the anniversary of the martyred bishop’s death. St. Thomas More actually died on July 6th. In any case, as a bishop John Fisher faced some particularly difficult choices which make him particularly relevant today.

     Who was St. John Fisher?  At the time of his death he was bishop of the English See of Rochester. He died defending the authority of the Church, its vicar the Pope, and the sanctity of marriage. His adversary was a monarch who was willing to destroy all of those things in order to get his way: King Henry VIII.  In my previous post (here) on Blessed Margaret Pole I wrote of Henry VIII that

he could serve as a sort of patron “anti-saint” for our times.  He was a man possessed of great gifts . . .  Henry never mastered himself, however, and so his prodigious talents were put at the service, not of his people, but of his equally prodigious cravings for women, wealth, and power.  In the end he tried to swallow even the Church.  In his later years his grossly obese body became a living image of his insatiable appetites.

     

Resisting the King’s Encroachments

John Fisher was no stranger to Henry’s household. Before his episcopal ordination, Fisher had been the confessor of Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s grandmother. He reportedly tutored the future Monarch himself. As it happens, the bishop gained no more protection from his long familiarity with the king and his family than layman Thomas More did from his personal friendship with Henry. Fisher had championed the marriage of Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife, and he had resisted the king’s encroachments on the Church. At last, when he refused to take an oath recognizing the offspring of Henry’s new wife Ann Boleyn as the legitimate successors to the throne, he was put to death. He alone of the English bishops resisted to the bitter end King Henry’s usurpation of the authority of the Church and mockery of the sanctity of marriage.

Henry VIII’s bloated specter casts a longer shadow over the world today than at any time since his death almost five hundred years ago. Now a voracious state is again devouring more and more of our freedoms and casting an especially greedy eye on the free exercise of religion. While the current U.S. administrative is more Church-friendly, the threat is still there. A future president can easily resume the aggressive policies of the Biden administration. And the attacks continue on the local level. The Washington State law that requires priests to violate the Seal of the Confessional is just one example.

The Bishops’ Document

It’s in this context that in 2021 the American bishops issued a document called The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church. The first section, “The Gift,” is a beautiful exposition of the Church’s theology of the Eucharist. It examines three aspects of the Eucharist, “The Sacrifice of Christ,” “The Real Presence of Christ,” “Communion with Christ and the Church.”

The second half of the document, “Our Response,” flows naturally from these. “Having been sanctified by the gift of the Eucharist and filled with faith, hope, and charity, the faithful are called to respond to this gift” (par. 30). Again, the discussion of our need for thanksgiving, transformation, and conversion is all good and true. Much of it is even beautifully moving.

The problem is that the document doesn’t quite do what many Catholics would hope it would do. It does cite the following section from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

If a Catholic in his or her personal or professional life were knowingly and obstinately to reject the defined doctrines of the Church, or knowingly and obstinately to repudiate her definitive teaching on moral issues, however, he or she would seriously diminish his or her communion with the Church. Reception of Holy Communion in such a situation would not accord with the nature of the Eucharistic celebration, so that he or she should refrain. (par. 48)

The document helpfully notes that “Reception of Holy Communion in such a situation is also likely to cause scandal for others, weakening their resolve to be faithful to the demands of the Gospel” (par. 48).

The Empire Strikes First

And that is precisely the problem with prominent politicians pushing abortion, homosexual marriage, transgenderism, and so on. Actually, no, it goes beyond that. They are not simply obstinately and publicly holding opinions directly contrary to unambiguous doctrinal teachings. They are actively promoting them and even using their public office to try to force them on the rest of us. When bishops fail to use their authority to teach, sanctify, and govern in these cases, it implicates them in the scandal. They give tacit assent when they allow public figures who are manifestly working against the Church to present themselves as “devout” Catholics and receive communion. It sends the message that the actions of the politicians are no big deal. More than that, it severely undermines the Church’s teaching on the Body of Christ.

Back in 2021 when the USCCB was preparing this document, many Catholics hoped that the bishops would address this issue more forthrightly than they had in the past. Others feared that they would. A large number of pro-abortion self-identified Catholics in the U.S. Congress issued a preemptive strike in the form of a so-called “statement of principles“.  There really aren’t much in the way of actual principles in the letter.  The pro-abortion legislators mostly point out all the areas where they agree with the prudential policy preferences of a large number of bishops. The implication is that all of those political stances somehow outweigh the moral depravity of abortion.  

Tired Cliches

The statement concludes with, well, with the usual tired, unconvincing cliches:

We believe the separation of church and state allows for our faith to inform our public duties and best serve our constituents. The Sacrament of Holy Communion is central to the life of practicing Catholics, and the weaponization of the Eucharist to Democratic lawmakers for their support of a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion is contradictory.

I examine the incoherence of the “weaponization” argument in my post “Who’s Really ‘politicizing’ the Body of Christ?” I’ll simply point out here that this description implies that the real significance of the Eucharist is its influence on political behavior, and that abortion itself is just another political issue. There is no recognition that the value the Church places on the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with politics, and the dismissive reduction of the horror of abortion to the trite evasion of “a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion” is simply insulting.

On the whole, this letter and the public comments of some of the individual signers are saturated with the same self-idolatry that we find at the center of the gender wars: I am not bound by any truth or reality outside of my desires – if I decide that I’m a Catholic, nobody can tell me differently.

The Responsibility of the Bishop

Sadly, The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church doesn’t do much to address the situation. To be fair, it does suggest that bishops should do something:

It is the special responsibility of the diocesan bishop to work to remedy situations that involve public actions at variance with the visible communion of the Church and the moral law. Indeed, he must guard the integrity of the sacrament, the visible communion of the Church, and the salvation of souls. (par. 49)

Indeed he must. But how? This is the same vague language they’ve been throwing around for decades. To my knowledge it has not led a single politician to recant or reform. There have long been calls for the bishops to excommunicate pro-abortion politicians. But if more of them simply did what that lone parish priest did when Joe Biden presented himself for communion it would go a long way.

St. John Fisher and Us

Clearly, we should not get our hopes up.  All the same, we should keep encouraging our bishops to do the right thing and keep praying for them: The Holy Spirit may yet give them the strength. After all, if reality is really reducible to our individual desires, then here’s no need for bishops . . . or a Church . . . or even a Savior.

This is an important moment for the American bishops. They stand to lose whatever moral authority they have left if they allow themselves to be bullied by this crowd of political grifters.  The spirit of Henry VIII might be alive, but his modern-day emulators at least don’t have his power to remove the heads of their adversaries.  At least not yet. May our bishops look to the example of St. John Fisher, pray for his intercession, and trust in the Lord to sustain them as they leave aside the temptations of mere politics and take up once again the true authority handed on to them from Christ through his Apostles.

St. John Fisher, pray for all Catholic bishops and priests, and be an inspiration to them, that they may follow your lead in bravely defending Christ’s Church and his Holy Sacraments. Amen.

Featured image top of page: Execution of Bishop John Fisher (A) and lord chancellor Thomas More (B). Unsigned engraving from Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum, Antwerp, 1592