Personnel is policy.

One of the enduring features of the current pontificate is watching the Papal Hyperdulia Club brandish cherry-picked quotes from him on some hot button issue (e.g., abortion) as though they were Roma Locuta Est.

This little thing called context either eludes or is studiously ignored by them in their endless quest to portray skeptics as pseudo-Catholics. Usually with some scary-sounding, adjective-laden invective thrown in.

All the while ignoring the quite-biblical injunction to see if someone is putting their money where their mouth is.

In the meantime, the pontiff's advocates somehow miss the actions of the papal appointees whose behavior undercuts those admittedly fine words.

To wit, the Reverend Vincenzo Paglia, current head of the increasingly-Kafkaesque Pontifical Academy for Life.

Jeffrey Mirus offers insight into the thought of this important appointee, and I will quote the most important part of his piece:

While Paglia does not use the term “seamless garment”, he clearly articulates that ineffective theme. To quote the Crux story:

[Paglia] said Christian churches in the U.S. ought to feel “a universal responsibility” toward life, and called for greater engagement on the life issue “in all its dimensions… That is, a perspective of global bioethics, one that engages all the major topics that touch on life, of the individual and of the human family.”

This is a tall order indeed—an order so tall that, in practical terms, it can accomplish absolutely nothing beyond a pallid approval of whatever the dominant culture is emphasizing as good at the moment. When we are taught that everything demands our attention all of the time, we become inert, taking credit for floating along on the winds of change.

Thus, as recounted with quotations by Crux, Paglia magnanimously warned against:

turning the pro-life cause into an ideological weapon, saying making the protection of life a political football risks doing “great harm”… [and] … “It would do great harm,” he said, “if some topic of bioethics is extracted from its general context and put toward ideological strategies. It would do great harm.”

This can only be interpreted as a dismissal of pro-life political commitment as “ideology”, and it is an enormous misdirection. For what can this warning against “ideological strategies” possibly mean in the context of the need to seek just governance and laws that restrict the scope of evil and promote the common good—which is precisely the purpose of politics?

All lives matter.

Or, to borrow from one of the internet's finest quipsters, what Paglia is doing is trying to cover the issue of abortion...with a pillow, until it stops moving.

The demand that the church cover every major life issue in an apolitical manner is a call to paralysis. 

Now, it is possible that Paglia is not up to speed on the state of things in America. Lord knows that, compared to all of his predecessors back to Benedict XV, the current pontiff is a parochial man whose limited travel and assignments gave him a similarly-circumscribed awareness of the wider world prior to his elevation. And since that time, his inner circle have given him a lurid, bizarre and fact-challenged understanding of the American religious landscape worthy of the New York Times editorial board, to boot. For me, however, it is quite likely that Paglia has read the same fantasy guidebook and shares the same basic mindset.

But in any political context, Paglia's admonitions are an ahistorical call to quietism which stands in stark contrast to how Catholics have actually responded to the social evils which arose in Catholic societies. Try applying them to the actions of Bartolome' de las Casas and see how far you get.

I'm sure the encomenderos would have found Paglia's meditations quite useful.

In any event, Paglia's demand that abortion--and that's obviously what he's talking about--not become an ideological football has been impossible since 1973. And while you will still find a few pro-choice Republicans, let Dan Lipinski tell you what's happened to pro-life Democrats.

The admonition to create an alliance of people of goodwill is invariably going to be heavily-tilted to one side of the political spectrum, thus invariably making it "ideological."

So what then?

Paralysis.

Remember when the Archbishop said “I won’t allow anyone to be more ‘pro-life’ than me”?

He meant it.