Written by Jenny Hanniver   

The article on Patrick Kennedy's exclusion from communion because of his support for abortion rights contains a serious error. It states that the church has always opposed abortion, which is only a half-truth. The church always deplored abortion as do we all, but considering it a form of "murder" is recent. I'm a Protestant but my education is as a Medievalist. I know that during most of Church's long history a fetus was not considered alive before the "quickening", that is, before the end of the third trimester, when the fetus begins to move about noticeably. Abortion could occur, and village healers and doctors had medications--not very safe to the mother or always effective, but not treated as a cardinal sin.

Oddly, the change came about because Church leaders feared competition from dogmatically puritanical Protestant churches, which as recently as a century ago held abortion to be a damnable sin. "Any sin you can blame I can blame better!" frightened Catholicism and it changed, even as it changed the sexual morals of the Renaissance, so as not to be accused of laxity. The Newtonian physics of Protestantism, finally adopted by Catholics, reinforced the rigidity. In the 18th and 19th centuries "life" ceased to be a process with shades of meaning, and for the first time became an on-off electric switch. My own faith considers this either-or viewpoint materialistic--something to avoid.

Gradually Protestants, although not the fundamentalists, modified their views on abortion, as something tragic but often unavoidable. The positions flip-flopped, and now neither Catholicism (nor fundamentalism) can understand the need for it, or even for birth control. The results have been a steady attrition of Catholic adherents to other relgions. I have two friends, former Catholics with extremely Irish names, who've become Jewish. As many Protestant denominations can attest, a heavy-handed abortion and birth control policy, keeping women as second-class citizens, plus clerical celibacy, have discouraged Catholics and attracted many to other religions, or simply driven them to agnosticism or atheism. That's sad, since my Catholic friends are troubled by the new clampdowns. All of them are activists, many inspired by John XXIII, who have been using the Church's vast resources for social justice. Even the cause of social justice seems to be dwindling under the new pope, as the traditional Evangelical passion for reform died in fundamentalist, along with a rise in "infallible" fundamenliat "popes".

Finally, most persons, including Catholics and even many fundamentalists, are well aware that the world is no longer underpopulated as it was in the days of Abraham and ancient Rome, nor in America do three our of five infants die in their first year. Instead our polluted planet is overpopulated and medical science can save a 6-month preemie. Children and grandchildren are wonderful--mine are--but a religion that encourages indiscriminate breeding gives one the uneasy feeling that it's damaging the planet. And perhaps such faiths are caught in the web of committing the sin of Pride, the deadliest of all sins.