Vatican's Approach To Obama On Abortion Rights Contrasts With That Of U.S. Bishops

Main Category: Abortion
Article Date: 13 Jul 2009 - 0:00 PDT

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National Partnership for Women & FamiliesDuring his visit to the Vatican on Friday, President Obama is likely to receive a warmer welcome from Pope Benedict XVI than he has from some U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, experts on the church say, the New York Times reports. The meeting will occur after the conclusion of the Group of Eight industrialized nations summit in Italy and three days after the pope released an encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate," updating the church's social teaching on the global economy.

Early in Obama's administration, U.S. Catholic bishops "set an adversarial tone" over Obama's views on abortion rights, contraception and embryonic stem cell research, the Times reports. Although the pope also disagrees with Obama on those issues, he and Obama both recognize an opportunity to come together on international issues like climate change, poverty, nuclear nonproliferation and immigration reform, according to the Times. In a session with reporters from Catholic publications last week, Obama said the church has "always been a powerful moral compass" on questions of social justice. He also said that U.S. bishops "have a profound influence" and that he would take his critics' opinions seriously.

The Vatican has often taken a much softer approach than the U.S. bishops in its reactions to Obama's abortion-rights policies, according to the Times. The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a letter issued after the election that "aggressive pro-abortion policies" would "be seen by many as an attack on the free exercise of their religion." In contrast, the Vatican sent Obama a telegram of congratulations immediately after his election, which experts say is "a highly unusual gesture" because the Vatican usually waits until inauguration, the Times reports.

More recently, several U.S. bishops denounced the University of Notre Dame for inviting Obama to give the spring commencement address and receive an honorary degree. The Vatican's newspaper ran a "markedly positive" article about Obama's speech in reaction to the controversy, according to the Times. Some Vatican officials have also expressed support for Obama's "common ground" approach to reducing the need for abortion, whereas some U.S. bishops and antiabortion-rights leaders have reacted with "suspicion and disdain," the Times reports (Goodstein, New York Times, 7/10).

According to John Allen, a Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, cultural differences between U.S. and European Catholic views on abortion rights help explain their contrasting approaches to the issue. Allen said that abortion is usually "the defining social and political issue" in the U.S., and that "everything else, in a way, takes second place." In Europe "that has never been the case," and "even the most conservative Catholics in Europe ... don't evaluate political leaders exclusively through the basis of their positions on abortion and other so-called life issues," Allen said (Poggioli, "Morning Edition," NPR, 7/10).

The Vatican and the U.S. bishops also have different approaches to working with governments, according to the Rev. Drew Christensen, editor-in-chief of the national Jesuit weekly magazine America. Christensen, who formerly worked for the church in international relations, said that some Obama critics "think you have to be at war, and the pope is saying, there's a different way to proceed here and it's very essential to the church's approach, in that what you want is consensus." Christensen added that the pope is "trying to engage America's capacity for good in the world at a time when it's really critical" (New York Times, 7/10).

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