Father Zuhlsdorf on "Toning Down the Rhetoric," Part I

Longtime readers of this weblog know that I have great admiration for Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, whose What Does the Prayer Really Say? weblog is a must-read for all faithful Catholics. The weblog is an outgrowth of Father Zuhlsdorf's column by the same name in the Wanderer, the longest-running Catholic weekly newspaper in the United States, for which I too write almost every week.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that I agree almost entirely with a post on Father Zuhlsdorf's weblog yesterday entitled "The Problem With Toning Down the Rhetoric—And Why We Probably Won’t Do It." In a nutshell, Father Zuhlsdorf offers a typically well-reasoned response to those who say that criticism of President Obama or Notre Dame or even of abortion is "negative" and "counter-productive."

Along the way, he makes some of the same points that I have made in discussing the Notre Dame scandal—for instance, how calls for "dialogue" are often just attempts to silence pro-lifers and how President Obama's call for "common ground" is really just an attempt to get us to acquiesce to the idea that (as Father Zuhldorf characterizes it) "it’s all right that we agree to disagree about this issue."

Still, despite my near-total agreement with both Father Zuhlsdorf's intent in writing this post and his execution, there are two salient points that I think he does not fully address. I'll discuss one in this post, and another later this week.

The first is the example that he gives of a pro-life tactic that is often criticized as "negative"—namely, "showing pictures of aborted fetuses." Father Zuhlsdorf glosses over it, but the tactic is controversial, and with good reason. It's not only those "'progressive' Catholics" or "'consistent life ethics' Catholics" whom Father Zuhlsdorf (correctly) accuses of playing down the importance of abortion who oppose this tactic.

There are people like myself and my wife, the parents of seven, who fully embrace the Church's teaching on life (not just Her opposition to abortion, but Her teaching on contraception as well). We understand that abortion is destructive not only of the individual human lives that are being taken in the womb, and of the lives of the women who procure the abortions, and the lives of the families affected by the murder of an innocent family member; it is destructive of social order at large.

We want our children to be protected against the violence of abortion, and its ubiquity. But confronting them on Life Chain Sundays with pictures of aborted children does not protect them against the violence; it confronts them with it, attacks their senses, places horrifying images in their minds that they do not need to see.

And to what end? The justification usually given is that such graphic images "bring home the reality of what takes place in an abortion." But the same people who make this argument will claim, in the next breath, that any rational human being knows that abortion isn't "the termination of a pregnancy" but the destruction of a child.

They're right on the latter point, and my children understand that and have always understood it, from the first day that they became aware of abortion. Why? Because this is a reality of life that is built into human nature. We have to fall for propaganda, repeated endlessly, even to begin to convince ourselves that it's "not a baby, but a choice," or "not a baby, but a lump of tissue."

In other words, from our youngest days, we know "the reality of what takes place in an abortion." We may not have seen graphic pictures of unborn children, bloodied and ripped limb from limb, but those add nothing to our knowledge—at least, nothing morally edifying.

My wife and I protect our children from TV shows and films that portray simulated graphic violence. We know that such images, even though they aren't "real," are not something our children need to see. So why should we, in the name of building up a Culture of Life, embrace graphic images of the real thing?

When I was in high school, I suffered through a similar experience—one which haunts me to this day, 25 or more years later. A prominent evangelical Christian foundation came to our small-town public school to offer a presentation on the evils of pornography. They operated under a similar idea: Show these adolescents that there is a natural progression from pin-up pictures to the most hardcore pornography, and you'll convince them to keep their thoughts chaste and their eyes pure.

The presentation consisted of a series of images, each presented only for a few seconds; as they became progressively more explicit, black bars or blurs were added to lessen the blow. I won't go into the details, except to mention this: The final image was of an act of bestiality. Yes, there were black bars, but there was no mistaking what was going on.

I had never seen anything like it in my life, and I hope never to see anything like it again. Yes, indeed, it "brought home the reality of pornography." But it was not an image that I or anyone else in that room needed to see, and it did nothing to advance our moral formation. To this day, I am convinced that this presentation was an objectively evil act—though done with the best of intentions.

This is an important point that gets lost in the debate over the use of pictures of aborted babies. Because the loudest voices protesting the use of such images are explicitly pro-abortion or practically so, the natural reaction among pro-lifers is to say, "Aha! See? They're having an effect! We need more! We need to be in their face!"

And yet, as in everything else, we cannot do evil that good may come of it. Deliberately confronting our children with graphically violent images is—I do not hesitate to affirm—an objectively evil act. And the fruits of evil acts, even when (especially when?) done with "good intentions," are quite often the opposite of what we expect them to be.