Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

They say you shouldn’t talk about religion or politics in polite company. In a jarring opinion piece on CNN’s website earlier this summer, a religion professor, seeming to talk about both, served up a poisonous cocktail of confusion, one that might deny souls the balm of God’s mercy.

“Can Catholics abide a saint who had an abortion?,”  Stephen Prothero of Boston University asked, wondering if Dorothy Day should be considered an acceptable candidate for canonization. He later restated the question as: “Can you be a saint if you have committed the original sin of contemporary Catholicism?”

Given that original sin hasn’t changed since the fall, Prothero’s rewrite was as misguided as his original misfire.

This religion scholar was reacting, in part, to a recent news of a conversation Day reportedly had in the 70’s with Daniel Marshall, a member of her Catholic Worker movement:

Then Dorothy said, “You know, I had an abortion. The doctor was fat, dirty and furtive. He left hastily after it was accomplished, leaving me bleeding. The daughter of the landlords assisted me and never said a word of it. He was Emma Gold-man’s lover; that’s why I have never had any use for Emma.”

No doubt Prothero’s question was influenced by the scandalous mess of Catholic witness in recent decades. Indeed, Catholics are frequently seen using their professed faith to defend abortion rights, often out of a perverse, albeit sometimes well-intentioned sense of “social justice.”

It’s probably fair to say that Day is more readily embraced by those who are active in liberal, rather than conservative politics. But when looked at through a political lens, she presents challenges to all—and especially to those who don’t want to acknowledge that this woman who could be considered a hero of left-leaning Catholics also came to believe that abortion was a grave evil. 

the rest is here: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column.php?n=1784