Wouldn’t this curdle your blood, if it were true: "I do further promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth. And that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poniard, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity or authority of the persons ... at any time I may be directed to do so by the agents of the Pope. . . ."
That supposedly was from the oath of the Knights of Columbus. Neither it nor anything vaguely similar was ever used by the K of C, but it was believed by many to be the real thing. I remember being exposed to it at least three times, always by Protestant Evangelicals. Sadly, tragically, we’ve learned over the last few decades of sexual abuse in some monasteries and nunneries and other Catholic institutions, including local parishes, but a few decades ago many Bible-thumping preachers denounced everything Catholic constantly. Every priest was a sex fiend, and every Catholic Church’s foundation walls hid the bones of human sacrifice. According to some, young nuns were routinely raped by priests, impregnated, and their babies baptized then murdered. Of course, the Pope’s secret armies were ready to declare holy wars around the world at a moment’s notice.
Around that same time, while the Catholic Church may have been ignoring and even covering up some corruption in its ranks, it wasn’t waging the same level of War of Words against Protestantism. Admittedly, the Ku Klux Klan targeted Catholics along with blacks and Jews, but the Church didn’t accuse all of "them," i.e., Protestants, with planning the violent destruction of Catholicism. The more-or-less official attitude toward Protestantism was that it simply was invalid. It was better, a well-informed Catholic told me, not to let "them" think that they could possibly have any religious view or opinion of any value. God spoke through His Church, not through anyone else. If any subset of Protestants had any truth whatever, it was what they had accidentally retained from Catholicism.
Enter the abortion issue. With the new doctrine that the Virgin Mary was conceived without sin, the Catholic Church had redefined life as starting at conception. A fertilized egg is a human being, period. So abortion, at any stage of pregnancy, is murder, period. Evangelical Christians, many of whom formerly viewed anything Catholic as a creation of Satan, heartily embraced that definition, sometimes with kukluxian fervor and lawlessness. Meanwhile Catholics, who had often been a hated minority in our nation and so had chosen not to make waves unnecessarily, adopted evangelical revivalist militancy against what it had now defined as mass murder.
Strange bedfellows indeed. Ironic, and sad, because in our troubled times, religion has been a source of comfort and hope for so many of us. We don’t need to divert its power into fake holy wars, bloody or bloodless.
As I’ve admitted previously, I’m no theologian, but it seems obvious to me that the "Old Testament," which both Catholics and Protestants embrace, in Exodus 21:22-25, spells out that causing the death of a fetus is a property crime, not murder. Also, if murder is the taking of a human being’s life, and a human being is a living organism, then abortion cannot be murder because the fetus is not an independent organism. It is POTENTIAL human life because it has the POTENTIAL to become an independent organism.
I do not believe it rational to propose that abortion should be taken lightly. It’s a very serious decision, whether to bring a new person into the world or not. However, I also do not think it is rational to leave that decision to any level of government. It is the decision of the human being most affected, the mother, in consultation with her physician, and hopefully with her family and the male who contributed the sperm.
Certainly it should NEVER be left up to crackpots with guns and bombs.
This still leaves the question of parental notification unanswered. I’ve heard only two answers to the question, and in my opinion, both of them fall short. Very soon, I’ll give you what I believe is a sensible alternative.