Recently, the BGSU pro-life organization held a “vigil” for miscarried fetuses on campus. This has gone beyond the level of parody at this point. The founder of this organization is demanding that the deceased “be given a proper burial”. It does not matter to this group that the parents of the deceased children made the difficult decision to donate their loved ones’ bodies to the university for science . What matters is that a theocracy be instilled on campus. From all appearances and given that all the important figures in this group are Catholic, it is fair to call it essentially (if not entirely) a Catholic organization.
The Catholic Church was not always a “defender of innocent human life”. On October 16, 1943, over a thousand of Rome’s Jews were rounded up, forced to sleep in a military college that had been converted into a holding center, practically across from Pope Pius XII’s own bedroom, with no access to food, water, or latrines and then sent to Auschwitz. Only a handful survived. No official protest was ever released and the Pope made zero effort to clarify matters in the years after the war. This vitiates any possible defense that he was merely working behind the scenes and did not want to draw attention to himself for his supposed work in saving the Jews. This was not the only time the Church and its pontiff ignored pleas to save human life. Pope Paul IV installed a Jewish ghetto in Rome where Jews were forced to live for three hundred years and which later inspired the Italian racial laws. Pope Innocent III during the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that Jews were to wear distinct clothing to prevent Christians from marrying or employing them and Pope Pius IX kidnapped Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy who had been baptized by a Christian servant girl, despite pleas from the boy’s family and virtually the entire Western world. To grandstand and hold a vigil for beings who by the Catholic Church’s official teachings have entered some sort of afterlife (the Catholic Church officially downplays the importance of any bodily resurrection so what point there would be in burying the deceased is not clear) is nothing short of meme worthy. We have no idea what the faith commitments or lack thereof of the parents were and so it is potentially offensive to hold a specifically Catholic vigil for them much like post-mortem baptisms of Hindus by Mormons are in bad taste.
In the old days there was a place called “limbo” where the souls of infants went but even in the pro-life movement this state of existence is never really mentioned suggesting that even the most diehard Catholics no longer believe in it but accept the “popular” view that the souls in question go straight to heaven. The idea of a bodily resurrection is incoherent IF our eternal fates are already decided at death (purgatory being a probationary period before one enters heaven, so strictly speaking this is compatible with the “eternal reward” thesis) and so it is pointless to advocate that the deceased fetuses used for scientific research should be buried in accordance with a faith that the families in question may not adhere to along with the fact that such burial is theologically moot given that the souls of the deceased have already moved on to the next life. Some might object and say that this group doesn’t want to give the deceased a Catholic funeral but let us not be deceived. The group is run by those with “traditionalist” Catholic (Vatican I) leanings and so the thought that they would find a secular burial acceptable is hard to believe.
Meanwhile there are many children in NW Ohio who have zero access to medical, dental, vision, or hearing coverage. There are single mothers who are trying to protect their loved ones from abuse boyfriends or ex-husbands and what does this organization do? Vote for politicians who opposed the Violence Against Women Act, cut foot stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, etc. The Pharisees during Jesus’ day never had political power, it was the wealthy Sadducees who demanded that he be put on the cross. Some might ask whether I would find it objectionable if, say, a pro-life group made up entirely of Methodists were to do this? No, because no Methodist would do something like this while supporting Plutocratic politicians who gut access to healthcare and education. I spent two years at a Methodist institution. I didn’t meet anybody who even used the label “pro-life” despite many of them opening up community gardens in urban areas, delivering food to the poor, adopting children, etc.
In countries where half of all pregnant women have iron deficiencies, the Catholic Church chooses to lecture them on how condoms are both “environmentally problematic” and, according to a recently deceased pope, actually increase the risk of AIDS. We can do better.
Bill Kennedy,
Bowling Green
Further reading: Kertzer, David I. The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Antisemitism. Knopf: 2001.
For evidence that the event in question actually happened, see: https://www.facebook.com/respectlifetoledo/
For the science: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30284-w
The comments by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/17/pope-africa-condoms-aids
