Voting and abortion: Bishop Myers clarified "proportional reasons": there aren't any

Bishop John Myers of Newark was featured Friday in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in which he explained the question of voting for politicians who support abortion. The bishop attempted to clarify terms such as 'proportional reasons' and called abortion, "a tragedy of epic proportions."

Bishop Myers also said that the Holy See document called "On Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion," far from being ambiguous, "dealt primarily with the obligations of bishops to deny communion to Catholic politicians in certain circumstances." The opposite was claimed by Washington's Cardinal McCarrick who declined to present the substance of the letter to the bishops when they met in Denver.

The well-known dissident Catholic priest, Fr. Andrew Greeley of Chicago recently said that a Catholic can in good conscience support a pro-abortion politician using a mental reservation that his reason for doing so is not the politician's support for abortion. He and others have used the same letter from the Catholic Church's second highest authority, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, to defend their position. That letter contained a sentence that said a Catholic may vote for a pro-abortion Catholic politician only "in the presence of proportionate reasons."

Bishop Myers gave two clear situations where a Catholic might be able to support a politician who is not 100% pro-life. He wrote, "either (a) both candidates would have to be in favor of embryo killing on roughly an equal scale or (b) the candidate with the superior position on abortion and embryo-destructive research would have to be a supporter of objective evils of a gravity and magnitude beyond that of 1.3 million yearly abortions plus the killing that would take place if public funds were made available for embryo-destructive research." He wrote that the existence of reasons proportional to the annual killing of so many innocent children would be hard to imagine.

Myers has been a vocal opponent not only of abortion but of the burgeoning biotech industry that considers embryonic and fetal human beings as proper material for medical and scientific experimentation. In what appears to be a reference to the recently recalled USCCB voters' guide, he wrote, "Certainly policies on welfare, national security, the war in Iraq, Social Security or taxes, taken singly or in any combination, do not provide a proportionate reason to vote for a pro-abortion candidate."