Sometimes during Lent, we have a tendency to reduce our vision to one that is exclusively otherworldly focused. We know that the purpose of Lent is to turn back to God and to orient our lives and our priorities to knowing, loving and serving Him. We can lose sight of the fact that we are embodied spirits destined to accomplish those tasks in the material world, in the here and now. We can have a deep suspicion of activities or branches of knowledge that seem to have little or no connection to our communion with God. And sometimes that suspicion comes from the fact that we have lost the connection between the earthly and the transcendent, between Godly ordered creation and the Creator.
This is especially true with respect to politics. We can perceive it as unseemly, admittedly because of the way it has been practiced by some. But the Greeks (Aristotle and Plato) understood that the human person was made for a common life. They understood that the ultimate end of all human activity was the good, or better stated, the supreme good. They understood that the good of the human person must be the end of the science of politics, and that political goodness in common would lead to happiness. This line of thinking flowed into Catholic thought through Augustine and Aquinas and is incorporated into Catholic social doctrine. In recent times, Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est reminds us that “the just ordering of society and the State is a central responsibility of politics, and that justice must be the aim and intrinsic criterion of all politics.” The Church’s role is to help purify reason from special and personal interests and help contribute to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just.
Let’s fast forward to the here and now and to the proposed Ohio constitutional amendment that will likely appear on the November 2023 ballot. The proposed ballot language says, “Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception; fertility treatment; continuing one’s own pregnancy; miscarriage care; and abortion,” and also requires that the State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either an individual’s voluntary exercise of this right or a person who assists in the exercise of that right. There is a nod in the ballot language to the possibility of reasonable legislatively passed abortion prohibitions after fetal viability so long as the life or health of the mother is not threatened. If passed, this Constitutional Amendment will overturn current Ohio restrictions on abortion and prohibit the enactment of new ones that are inconsistent with the new constitutional language.
The Church with her deep understanding of an authentic human anthropology, her expertise in the moral life and her commitment to the sacredness and dignity of every human person from conception to natural death is solidly in opposition to the proposed ballot initiative. However, as an institution, the Church does not have a vote … only her members do! This ballot initiative does not promote our good in common, and will not lead to happiness. This ballot initiative does not create a more just society. This ballot initiative gives protected license to choose death. Please begin now to fast and pray for its defeat. The Ohio bishops urge us on with this prayer: God our loving Father, grant wisdom to those who govern us, compassion and courage to those who work to defend human life, and safety and care to every human being. For you alone who formed us in our mothers' wombs, and who call us home to heaven, are God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Decide also today to choose life and vote for the defeat of this ballot initiative in November. As Pope Benedict XVI said in Deus Caritas Est, “The direct duty to work for a just ordering of society … is proper to the lay faithful.” This is our mission. Let us not think that it is not worthy of our full attention.
