Misunderstanding Day

Catholic blogger Mark Shea points to a remarkably dim article by the best-selling religion scholar Stephen Prothero titled  Catholics will accept a saint who had an abortion . The title reminds me of the punch line of a series of jokes popular when I was in junior high school, the first and third words of which were “No” and “Sherlock.” So does the content. He writes in his conclusion:

Can you be a saint if you have committed the original sin of contemporary Catholicism?

My money says yes.

Partly that is because of the Christian teaching of forgiveness. But mostly it is because of the tendency of Catholics to diverge from the official party line on questions such as homosexuality, birth control and abortion.

. . . . [I]n this case, I believe, they will forgive Day’s sin in part because, in their heart of hearts, many of them don’t consider it all that much of a sin in the first place.

The mind boggles at the religious illiteracy of this. He puts his money on it as if there were any doubt, and there simply isn’t. The Church has canonized all sorts of repentant sinners, starting with St. Mary Magdalene, traditionally thought to have been a prostitute before she met Jesus. St. Paul persecuted Christians to death. St. Augustine enjoyed the sins of the scoundrel and the scholar, the warm sins and the cold sins, and as Dorothy Sayers noted, the second are probably worse. Etc. EtcEtcEtc .  Dorothy Day’s abortion puts her in maybe the third rank of sinners who have become saints.

I have been thinking about all the most conservative Catholics I know, and I can’t think of a single one for whom Prothero’s question is a real one. In fact, most of them would be baffled to be asked it. It’s like asking a baseball fan whether a pitcher can win the Cy Young Award after having had a losing season the year before. “Well, yeah, duh ” is the obvious answer.

Something of his inability to understand Day, or perhaps his desire to misunderstand Day, comes in the middle of the article. Day, he writes,

did make clear her opposition to abortion on pacifist grounds.

For example, in a  1974 interview , she turned a question about genocide into a discussion about birth control and abortion. “We do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, the genocide that took place in the extermination of Jews, but the whole program—I’m speaking now as a Catholic—of birth control and abortion, is another form of genocide.”

You will notice she gave as her being a Catholic, not a pacifist, as her reason for her position. (The comments start at about the 5:20 mark.) The fact that Prothero thinks she’s basing her belief in the sanctity of life on politics rather than religion is telling, especially since her politics itself was based on her religion.