Why let a scandal like this rage?
Novak said that the paper ignored the fact that the US bishops had issued a public declaration that no politicians who oppose "fundamental moral principles" were to be honoured by any Catholic institution in the US. It has also failed to distinguish between the 40 percent of practising US Catholics who support the Church's teaching on abortion, and the US Church's barely practising members who support legal abortion. This failure to distinguish, Novak said, put L'Osservatore Romano into the same ranks as the mainstream liberal secular press.
The L'Osservatore Romano coverage also failed to note, he said, that Barack Obama has gone "farther than any president in American history in supporting abortion." This includes supporting legal infanticide, "euphemistically called 'partial-birth abortion,'" and opposing legislation that would protect children born alive after an attempted abortion. In this latter case, Novak pointed out, Obama is "virtually alone in U.S. politics" in his attempt to please the abortion lobby, since many other "pro-choice" politicians voted in favor of the measure.
The paper, he wrote, has also failed to grasp the subtleties of the euphemistic language, the "code" of "doublespeak," that has grown up in politics around the abortion issue in the US. While L'Osservatore Romano claimed that Obama promised at Notre Dame to put in place legal protections for doctors, Novak points to the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), for which Obama has promised his support. FOCA proposes to repeal all previous legislation that put any restrictions whatever on abortion. This would effectively force all medical practitioners in the US to participate in abortion.
FOCA, Novak wrote, would change the law so that "anyone who would stand in the way of abortion could be recognized as a criminal."
Novak concludes by asking, "Why on earth, then, does L'Osservatore Romano side with the abortionists, and against the besieged, struggling minority of churchgoing Catholics who find abortion abhorrent, and an intrinsic and unrationalizable evil?"
He laments, "We ask Rome for bread, and L'Osservatore Romano gives us stones."
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