Assessing my political beliefs is a simple enough task. I am a liberal and a Democrat. I believe in healthcare for the needy, in the critical need for compassionate government and true to my rust belt roots, I believe in the importance of unions. I also believe in gay rights, in the decriminalization of marijuana, the importance of sex education and making birth control available. I am a feminist, and will accept all the bra-burning connotations that come along with that.
Of equal, though less pectoral, pertinence, I am a Catholic. As a kid, I said the Hail Mary before every Catholic Youth Organization basketball game I played, wore a white dress on my first communion and fought with my sisters over who got to read “The Lives of the Saints” during mass. As an adult, I’m a Catholic at a Jesuit university. I still go to mass and my interest piques at the mention of the Church in a news article or in an advertisement for a speaker, but my life as an adult Catholic woman—and a liberal one at that—is more and more often consumed by a combination of doubt in and defensiveness of the social tenets of my faith.
This week is Choice Week at Georgetown, sponsored by a club whose primary mission—to make contraception easily available on campus—is one I heartily I believe in. Next week, Benedict XVI will visit Washington to give a series of speeches that will no doubt offend many of my political sensibilities. And yet, though there are a great many issues upon which the Pope and I disagree, he remains, for all his personal shortcomings, an important symbol of the Church—an institution at once frustratingly patriarchal and stubborn, yet compassionate and giving to no end.
The incongruity of my religious and political beliefs is certainly nothing new to me, but something that grows more unsettling the more I examine them. My support for H*yas for Choice, my self-professed feminism and perhaps even my position as a columnist for this liberal campus publication leads most people to assume that all of my political positions will be of the knee-jerk persuasion. My reflexes, however, remain self-propelled and often slow on politically and morally volatile issues, most notably abortion.
At the risk of being called vacillating, I am unsure of my stance on abortion. I fall somewhere into that purgatorial medium, between political pragmatism and individual conscience. I hold “pro-life” and “pro-choice” views dually, though in fairness, how can a brief, hyphenated phrase even begin to express the complexities that lie on either side of the issue? Though I can never imagine aborting a child, I know there always have been and always will be women desperate enough to terminate their pregnancies. There is something to be said for moral absolutism on matters of life and death, but I shudder to think of back-alley procedures, not to mention the fact that most Americans believe in legal abortion. This notion of majority concensus is nothing to be scoffed at in a democratic nation.
My “pro-choice” ideas are met with business-as-usual attitudes on this largely liberal campus, but upon the sharing of my “pro-life” proclivities, I become a traitor to my sex and to my otherwise “progressive” sensibilities. Because I choose to ponder moral and religious questions attached to a political stance, I am suddenly a hater of my body and my freedoms.
I do not purport to be the first liberal, Catholic woman to write about this conundrum, nor will I be the last. But I raise this issue at this time and on this campus as a reminder that the voice of the middle ground must not be lost. To be sure, organizations like H*yas for Choice and GU Right to Life provide necessary voices, but the forums provided by these groups leave little room for soul-searching; there is an undercurrent of if-you’re-not-with-us-then-you’re-against-us at work in each.
What about those of us whose beliefs are not black and white? Why haven’t we, in our privileged position as America’s renegade Catholic institution, more openly examined this quandary that faces not just me, not just Catholic women, but those of every sex and religion? Where are the lectures, the Lecture Fund speakers, the provocative professors to raise the issues frustrating and confusing American Catholicism? The Vatican may condemn such a “radical” educational outreach, but seeing as we’re already in for a verbal lashing, why not go the extra mile?
Surely our intellects can handle more than debates over breasts and burgers. We owe it to ourselves to try. Anything less would be a grave sin of omission.
