A liberal Catholic blogger who last November inveighed against "extremist" and "Pharasaic" bishops who have said they will deny Communion to pro-choice politicians is cited today by Dallas Morning News religion blogger Bruce Tomaso as an "abortion foe" who, surprise, surprise, has unkind words for the March for Life:
Writing for a blog of America, the Jesuit magazine, Catholic author and "pro-life American" Sean Michael Winters says the annual March for Life -- held last Thursday, on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade -- "has failed utterly to make a difference in this nation's abortion policy."
The mass protest, he says, "probably alienates the very people we should be trying to reach: women facing crisis pregnancies." The marchers' rhetoric tends "to equate abortion with murder which may be objectively true but also lacks the empathy with the desperate circumstance of many women that is the necessary precursor to an effective evangelization of the Gospel of Life."
Tomaso, you may recall, recently lamented that the pro-life CatholicVote.com group "exploited" Barack Obama's life story to make a pro-life point in a short televised ad.
As for his part as an "abortion foe," the liberal Winters certainly has shown a penchant for criticizing more strident foes of the slaughter of the unborn, such as bishops in his own church. From a November 19 blog post at America magazine's Web site (emphasis mine):
To be clear: All bishops are opposed to abortion. That is not the issue. At issue is how the bishops should conduct themselves in the public square. Bishops hate to disagree in public so you are not likely to hear more moderate bishops publicly say what must be said. But, yesterday a Vatican source said it on background and pointed out that I can say it in the light of day: These bishops who want to turn the altar rail into a battlefront in the culture wars, these clergy who wish to drag the Church's teaching into the partisan arena, these prelates who believe that their approach to a complicated legal issue is the only approach, they are extremists and they are a minority within the hierarchy. They stand outside our American traditions of political behavior and outside our Catholic traditions of episcopal governance. They are Pharasaic in their skimpy appraisal of the super-abundance of God's mercy and delusional in their assessment of the political landscape.
