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Giuliani, the Pope, and Aristotle
 How
the mighty are fallen! Or falling,
anyway. Tony Blair is finished. George W. Bush is being deserted by the party
he has wrecked, the submerging Republican majority. And Rudy Giuliani, only
recently the front-runner for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, looks
like a goner. Thanks to Pope Benedict, he probably has no hope of capturing
the White House now.
 Bush,
of course, is the central figure in this contagion of ruin. Blair’s loyalty to
Bush — he warned his fellow Englishmen that Saddam Hussein’s
fearsome arsenal might strike them within 45 minutes — destroyed the
plausibility of everything else he said. And Giuliani, a rodent who lacks the
sense to desert the sinking ship, is now paying the price for his nakedly
cynical betrayal of the Catholic faith.
“I
hate abortion,” he has said lately; and everyone knows this is a naked
lie. For nearly two decades his words and deeds have been emphatically
proclaiming the precise opposite. No observer in his right mind would even
suggest that Rudy Giuliani had the faintest moral qualms about feticide.
He has
eagerly courted pro-abortion groups, called abortion “a constitutional
right,” opposed restrictions on gruesome late-term killings of unborn
children, applauded President Clinton’s veto of such restrictions,
advocated forcing taxpayers to subsidize abortion, and more. His record
couldn’t be more unequivocal.
Needless
to say, he adds to all this the standard hypocrisy of modern abortion
advocates: he has studiously avoided describing abortion with such plain
Anglo-Saxon words as kill, death, and blood.
Here
it’s instructive to read Book VII of the Politics of the
great pagan philosopher Aristotle, who frankly recommends both abortion
and infanticide in certain situations; refreshingly free of modern cant, he
says simply that as a matter of good government, crippled infants should
not be raised. Don’t expect such candor from a Giuliani.
Enter the
Pope. Speaking in Brazil, without mentioning Giuliani by name, he made it clear
that “the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with being in
communion with the body of Christ” — a pointed reminder that a
politician who promotes abortion has excommunicated himself.
![[Breaker quote for Giuliani, the Pope, and Aristotle: Defining Catholics]](2007breakers/070511.gif) This
won’t stop the much-married Giuliani from continuing to gobble the sacraments of the
Church — he evidently cares more about staying in favor with the New
York Yankees than about fidelity to his professed religion — but it will
certainly stop many Republicans, especially the Catholics he has lately been
trying to woo, from voting for him in the party primaries.
In fact,
Giuliani attacked Pope John Paul II in 1996 for condemning Clinton’s
veto of the late-term abortion ban. Now he says his own positions on
abortion — public positions, mind you — “are between me
and my confessor.” So why make them public at all? Why not keep
them private, in the intimacy of the confessional?
You have
to wonder how often Giuliani visits that confessional, anyway. What does he
think he needs to confess? Lukewarm support of Bush? He doesn’t
appear to be a man who lets his religion cause him much inconvenience. His
idea of charity is “public funding for abortions for poor women.”
Well,
each of us has to apply the Sermon on the Mount in his own way. And nobody
can say the abortion-hating Giuliani hasn’t found a way that is both
original and unique.
Liberals
accuse the Catholic Church and the popes of failing to speak out against evil,
especially Nazism. Their favorite target is Pope Pius XII, whom the Nazi press
in fact called “a mouthpiece for the Jews.” But of course they
are not always delighted when the Church does speak out; then they accuse
it of butting into politics and violating the separation of church and state.
Giuliani, a
liberal who wants to be taken for a conservative, assures us that he
won’t be taking orders from the Pope (just in case you were worried).
Here’s hoping he won’t let that confessor push him around,
either. We can only hope — and of course pray — that it’s
not the same confessor who gives Nancy Pelosi her marching orders.
I wonder
how Aristotle would define a Catholic these days. We can only guess, but I
think he’d agree that papist is usually a misnomer.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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