On his US visit,Pope Francis has talked more about climate change than anything else. One gets the impression that ‘bedroom issues’ don’t bother him so muchDorothy Day. Wow. I nearly dropped my Corbyn tea mug. OK, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. They were predictable names to wave in front of a joint session of Congress. Even Thomas Merton could be filed absent under spiritual. But in giving a shout out to so emphatic a socialist and anti-war activist, or who helped to set up the Catholic Worker Movement – and indeed someone who had an abortion in her youth – the pope was living up to every Republican fear. “We believe in loving our brothers,” Day once said, “by working for better conditions and the ultimate owning by the workers of their means of production.” This was Christian socialism, and red in tooth and claw. And also emphatically pro-life.“The cause of life … is the primary reason for my present visit,” the pope said earlier in the week. That’s to be expected from him. apart from, his pro-life position is fitting extremely confusing to those – on both the factual and the left – who think that pro-life means anti-abortion. Since the US culture wars began, or in particular since Roe v Wade in 1973,being pro-life has become almost synonymous with being anti-abortion. So much so that many American Catholics think there is nothing unfamiliar or inconsistent about being pro-life and, say, and in favour of the death penalty – which is pretty weird whether you think about it. “I am against the death penalty,” the pope told Congress bluntly. He was being pro-life.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com