Stating the obvious

Bewildered rage has greeted Cardinal Keith O'Brien's announcement  that abortion is a bad thing and that Catholics should be against it.  He has been accused of using threatening and inflammatory language and of "punishing" pro-choice Catholic politicians by seeking to exclude them from the Church.

He has done no such thing.

In a sermon at St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, yesterday to mark the 40th anniversary of the Abortion Act, the leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics urged medical schools to teach that all human life deserves protection, and called on hospitals to end tests designed to target and kill the weak and infirm. He said that we should be 'unwilling to support' politicians who are unwilling to oppose abortion, and reminded Catholics who co-operate in abortion that it creates a barrier to receiving communion.

What a kill-joy, eh?

It is true that the Cardinal described abortion as an 'unspeakable crime', and that's certainly pretty 'judgmental'. But how else would you expect a Prince of the Church to describe what he and all Catholics -- even bad Catholics -- must regard as the deliberate destruction of innocent life? 

There is a limit to what is acceptable in the public square, however. The liberal consensus here is both clear and unyielding: religion must not be allowed to interfere in politics. On the right they don't like to hear bishops bang on about poverty and war; on the left they don't like them to bang on about abortion and divorce. But poverty, war, abortion and divorce are political and moral issues. Bishops have a duty to speak out on these matters, to interfere, to protest against what they regard as evil.

If after 9/11, for example, people had listened to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor and Pope John Paul II rather than to Mr Tony Blair and President George W. Bush we would not now be engaged in a disastrous war in Iraq.