Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome XIII. In which the Year of Mercy confounds New York Times columnist Jill Filipovic.

ou can­not con­ceive, nor can I,” Gra­ham Greene writes in Brighton Rock, “of the appalling strange­ness of the mer­cy of God.” Now, if I can’t con­ceive it, and you can’t con­ceive it, and Gra­ham Greene can’t con­ceive it, imag­ine how much trou­ble they must be hav­ing at the New York Times.

And so they are. Jill Fil­ipovic, the author of this lat­est excur­sion into Pope Fran­cis Derange­ment Syn­drome, goes as far as to call for­give­ness “unfor­giv­ing.” It must have been pret­zel day at Coney Island when she turned in that copy.

She begins thus:

Pope Fran­cis announced this month that for a year, begin­ning in Decem­ber, women who had ter­mi­nat­ed preg­nan­cies could be grant­ed for­give­ness from Roman Catholic priests, instead of fac­ing poten­tial excom­mu­ni­ca­tion for their sins.

Stop. (We will have to stop often, for the errors in this piece exceed a plen­i­tude of pret­zels.)

• The Church is not offer­ing for­give­ness “for a year.”

News flash: Women who have had abor­tions have always been able to go to a priest and be absolved. They will still be able to after the Year of Mer­cy. And that is all the more true of women who have not been excom­mu­ni­cat­ed; what the pope said changes noth­ing for them.

• Excom­mu­ni­ca­tion is not a “poten­tial” result of procur­ing an abor­tion.

It is, with some excep­tions, auto­mat­ic. In canon law these are called latae sen­ten­ti­ae, or “already passed,” excom­mu­ni­ca­tions. The need not be imposed by an offi­cial act of the bish­op.

Now, there are excep­tions to this, and they do mat­ter. (See this dis­cus­sion as well as The Code of Canon Law §1321–1330.) Among them are these.

• If the indi­vid­ual was under 17.
• If the indi­vid­ual did not know that an auto­mat­ic excom­mu­ni­ca­tion applied.
• If the indi­vid­ual was act­ing under com­pul­sion, or grave threat or fear.
• If the indi­vid­ual had imper­fect use of rea­son, as in men­tal retar­da­tion or psy­cho­log­i­cal impair­ment.

So what does Pope Fran­cis’s deci­sion change? In fact, not much. It changes no more than a point of pro­ce­dure for those who do not fall under any of these excep­tions and who have been excom­mu­ni­cat­ed. Under the 1973 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1355), a priest may only absolve such per­sons once the bish­op has lift­ed the excom­mu­ni­ca­tion. That can take time. So what the pope has done is no more than to remove this delay for the Year of Mer­cy; he has put the entire process in the hands of the priest in the con­fes­sion­al. It is his way of encour­ag­ing women to seek for­give­ness: With­out the usu­al delay and seem­ing red tape, more may do so. That would be a good. That would be cause for joy.

But it is impor­tant to note here how very few women actu­al­ly do meet the require­ments for a latae sen­ten­ti­ae excom­mu­ni­ca­tion. For one thing, the woman needs to have known at the time of the abor­tion that this penal­ty applies. Very few have that much knowl­edge of canon law. (Not even Ms. Fil­ipovic does, and she writes for the New York Times!) And on top of that, it is very rare for a woman not to have been moti­vat­ed, even in part, by fear.

For such as these, the pope’s change changes noth­ing. They could go to any priest before, they can go to any priest after.

But Ms. Filopovic, knot­ting anoth­er loop in her pret­zel, goes on: “It sounds like a step in the right direc­tion: Mer­cy for women who have had abor­tions cer­tain­ly seems prefer­able to con­dem­na­tion.”

Stop. That is not right. In the first place, as I said, it is not as though the Church offers mer­cy now where it offered none before. Any­one who thinks that does not know what they’re talk­ing about. But Ms. Fil­ipovic gets more wrong than just that. Excom­mu­ni­ca­tion is not, no mat­ter what they say oth­er­wise, the same as con­dem­na­tion. It is med­i­c­i­nal. It is an attempt to shock a per­son into know­ing the grav­i­ty of their sin, such that he will want to be rec­on­ciled. Far from the oppo­site of mer­cy, it is an effort to spur a per­son to seek out mer­cy.

“But,” Ms. Filopovic insists, “mer­cy may actu­al­ly be worse.” She will tell us why:

While the pope’s announce­ment has been hailed as evi­dence of the Church’s new, soft­er approach, it’s actu­al­ly the lat­est exam­ple of the mod­ern anti-abor­tion strat­e­gy: Por­tray women as vic­tims who need to be pro­tect­ed from them­selves with laws that restrict abor­tion rights.

In fact, the pope’s deci­sion has noth­ing to do with any­thing “new” or “soft”; it just speeds up a process that already exist­ed in the Church. Ms. Fil­ipovic, though, will not be pleased until the Church is pro-abor­tion; which is to say, she will remain unpleased regard­less.

But I am con­fused here, since the pope’s deci­sion says noth­ing about civ­il abor­tion law. It speeds up a pro­ce­dur­al point of canon law, and stops there. Please try to stay on point, Ms. Filopovic.

Despite the con­cern for what the pope calls an “ago­niz­ing and painful deci­sion,” research shows a vast major­i­ty of women who ter­mi­nate preg­nan­cies in the Unit­ed States don’t actu­al­ly feel bad about it.

Well, if they don’t feel bad about it, that would make it worse, in my view. But I am not sure I trust this “research.” Is the truth real­ly that the women don’t feel bad, or is it that they say they don’t? Do these stud­ies take account of psy­cho­log­i­cal defense mech­a­nisms, or do they take women at their word on this point?

But even if these fig­ures were to be trust­ed, the real point is that abor­tion is an objec­tive moral evil that can­not be weighed on the scale of peo­ple’s sub­jec­tive feel­ings about it. So I am not sure what Ms. Filopovic is try­ing to prove by these stud­ies. If women do not feel bad, isn’t the pope’s call to repen­tance that much more urgent?

Ms. Fil­ipovic goes on: “Instead of treat­ing women as adults who make their own deci­sions—”

Stop. No. Remem­ber: The whole premise of an excom­mu­ni­ca­tion, in this case, is that the woman is a moral­ly respon­si­ble adult who has made her own deci­sion. She must be at least 17, and she must not be act­ing under com­pul­sion. If these fac­tors are not present, then not only is there no excom­mu­ni­ca­tion, but in many cas­es it mit­i­gates her cul­pa­bil­i­ty for the sin. (See Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church 1857–1860.)

Of course, what Ms. Filopovic seems to mean by an adult who makes her own deci­sions is some­one who has done no wrong and there­fore needs no mer­cy. For some­one who thinks that way, a return to first prin­ci­ples is often in order. If we say we have no sin, we deceive our­selves and the truth is not in us (1 John 1:8.)

“The threat of excom­mu­ni­ca­tion, at the very least,” Ms. Fil­ipovic con­tin­ues,

makes the Church’s views on wom­en’s rights clear. Offer­ing for­give­ness [which the Church has always done] is a safer ver­sion of the same judg­ment: that the mil­lions of women around the world who have abor­tions every year are sin­ners.

[Yes. They are.]

Invit­ing women to feel shame and guilt for their abor­tions isn’t a mer­cy; it’s cru­el­ty.

Stop. Ms. Fil­ipovic is twist­ing her pret­zels at a furi­ous rate here. Where shall I start?

Well, first let me point out that the Church’s oppo­si­tion to abor­tion has not a thing to do with “wom­en’s rights.” We need to get that clear before we take up any­thing else in this para­graph. It has to do with the right of the inno­cent and defense­less child, male or female, to live. It is about the right to breathe. With­out the right to breathe first, you may talk of no oth­er right. Indeed, you will not be able to talk at all.

Nor is there a right to sin. There is no right to kill. By fram­ing the dis­cus­sion in the lan­guage of “wom­en’s rights,” Ms. Filopovic is sim­ply beg­ging the ques­tion. As abor­tion sur­vivor Gian­na Jessen has said time and again, “If abor­tion is sim­ply a mat­ter of wom­en’s rights, then where were mine?”

Ms. Fil­ipovic sim­ply is unwill­ing to con­cede the real point in all this, which is that abor­tion is sin. Noth­ing would sat­is­fy her unless the pope said, “Abor­tion is okay now.” (Which the pope will not say, and which no pope can say.) But if abor­tion is okay, what else is okay? Are there no sins for which peo­ple should feel shame and guilt? Are not shame and guilt the very thing that sin­ners ought to feel?

On that point, we should note (for Ms. Fil­ipovic seems not to under­stand this) that shame and guilt are not where mer­cy ends, but where it begins. The priest does not say, “The Lord has freed you from your sins, go and keep feel­ing shame and guilt.” No. He says, “Go in peace.” Shame and guilt impel a per­son to seek mer­cy, but when mer­cy has done its work, shame and guilt turn to peace and free­dom from sin. That is what the pope real­ly wants.

“The move toward this ver­sion of mer­cy,” Ms. Fil­ipovic says—but, no, it’s not a “ver­sion” of mer­cy, it’s what mer­cy has always meant—“seems to be less about sup­port­ing women and more about savvy pol­i­tics.”

Stop. Now, the gist of what Ms. Filopovic says here is that all this Year of Mer­cy stuff is just a PR move along the lines of pro-life marchers no longer shout­ing “baby killer” and instead offer­ing coun­sel­ing and sup­port. That is what she means by “savvy pol­i­tics.”

She con­tin­ues:

“The anti-abor­tion move­men­t’s refash­ion­ing of women seek­ing abor­tions from self­ish tramps to weak-willed vic­tims has been an effec­tive move—”

Stop. Now, I know full well that some­one who, like Ms. Filopovic, sees every­thing through a polit­i­cal scrim is going to think that the rest of the world does too. It seems not to occur to her for an instant that the Church’s oppo­si­tion to abor­tion has noth­ing at all to do with pol­i­tics. But she real­ly ought to try hard­er, since it makes what she says here not just wrong but com­i­cal­ly wrong.

To take but one exam­ple, what­ev­er may or may not be true about the very broad “anti-abor­tion move­ment” in the Unit­ed States, the Catholic Church has nev­er por­trayed women as “self­ish tramps.” A full twen­ty years ago, in 1995, Pope St. John Paul II had this to say in his encycli­cal Evan­geli­um Vitae:

I would now like to say a spe­cial word to women who have had an abor­tion. The Church is aware of the many fac­tors which may have influ­enced your deci­sion, and she does not doubt that in many cas­es it was a painful and even shat­ter­ing deci­sion. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Cer­tain­ly what hap­pened was and remains ter­ri­bly wrong. But do not give in to dis­cour­age­ment and do not lose hope. Try rather to under­stand what hap­pened and face it hon­est­ly. If you have not already done so, give your­selves over with humil­i­ty and trust to repen­tance. The Father of mer­cies is ready to give you his for­give­ness and his peace in the Sacra­ment of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. To the same Father and his mer­cy you can with sure hope entrust your child. (EV 99)

So twen­ty years ago, John Paul II was say­ing the very same thing as Fran­cis. Twen­ty years ago, John Paul II was point­ing out that the Church offers for­give­ness and mer­cy to women who have had abor­tions. And yet Ms. Filopovic, twist­ing her pret­zels, insists that there’s some new and devi­ous polit­i­cal strat­e­gy in all this:

And the Church’s lob­by­ing against abor­tion rights,” she says (though it is not “lob­by­ing,” for once more she wants to drape a polit­i­cal pall over all this), “does have hor­rif­ic out­comes, and not just for the esti­mat­ed tens of thou­sands of women who die every year from unsafe abor­tion pro­ce­dures and the near­ly sev­en mil­lion women who are injured.

This is the old saw: If you do not per­mit legal and safe abor­tion, women will get ille­gal, unsafe abor­tions from quacks in back alleys. And so forth.

It is log­i­cal­ly false. You can put the same argu­ment in a broad way. If you out­law any action x, peo­ple will just do x ille­gal­ly at great risk. There­fore, there should be no law.

It is moral­ly false. You do not per­mit an evil in order to avoid some so-called greater evil.

It is fac­tu­al­ly false. (See here and here.)

• Ille­gal abor­tion was actu­al­ly safer. In 1950, before Roe, there were 263 abor­tion-relat­ed mater­nal deaths. By 1970, still before Roe, that num­ber had dropped to 119.
• Even the Guttmach­er Insti­tute showed that these mater­nal deaths had dropped from 200 in 1965 to 110 in 1967.
• CDF sta­tis­tics show that, begin­ning in 1940, the death rate from ille­gal abor­tion fell faster than the over­all mater­nal death rate.
• Pri­or to Roe, as many as 89% of ille­gal abor­tions were per­formed by licensed physi­cians.
• The real rea­son for the decrease in mater­nal deaths after the 1950s was not legal abor­tion but antibi­otics.
• In Chile, where abor­tion is out­lawed alto­geth­er, mater­nal death rates have dras­ti­cal­ly decreased.

Ms. Fil­ipovic con­cludes her piece by recall­ing the much-mis­un­der­stood case of an excom­mu­ni­ca­tion in Brazil in 2009: “A hand­ful of women and girls can get legal abor­tions in Brazil if they’re rape vic­tims or if their lives are threat­ened by preg­nan­cy. But the Catholic Church some­times inter­venes, as it did in 2009 when a 9‑year-old girl, who said she’d been raped by her step­fa­ther and was preg­nant with twins, sought a legal abor­tion. The local arch­bish­op excom­mu­ni­cat­ed the girl’s moth­er and the doc­tors who per­formed the abortion—but not the step­fa­ther. The child could­n’t be excom­mu­ni­cat­ed because she was a minor.

Today that girl is a teenag­er. The lead­ers of that same Church that tried to force her as a child to bear her rapist’s chil­dren now offer her mer­cy if she cops to her sin.

Per­haps they should be the ones beg­ging her for­give­ness.

With that, Ms. Filopovic gra­cious­ly stops twist­ing pret­zels, but not with­out get­ting a few final facts wrong.

• The excom­mu­ni­ca­tion was dis­avowed by the Nation­al Con­fer­ence of Bish­ops of Brazil.
• The child would nev­er have been cul­pa­ble in the first place, since she was under 17 and act­ing under com­pul­sion.
• Pope Fran­cis’s deci­sion has no appli­ca­tion to this case, since it only effects excom­mu­ni­cat­ed per­sons, as I stat­ed above.

The pope’s deci­sion for the Year of Mer­cy only speeds up a process that already exists in the Church. While Ms. Filopovic does not do the required home­work to find this out—who in the sec­u­lar media does any­more? they spread their dis­tor­tions and mis­un­der­stand­ings with a blithe lack of curiosity—she also lacks a basic under­stand­ing of what mer­cy is and how it works in the Church. Mer­cy does not mean: You have not sinned. For if you have not sinned, you hard­ly stand in need of mer­cy.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive our­selves and the truth is not in us. Sin wounds. But mer­cy is the balm that heals the wound. It does not mean: Feel shame! It means: Because you feel shame, be for­giv­en and have no more need for shame. That is how rad­i­cal mer­cy is. And the Church always offers it to us—always has, always will. If the pope speeds it up this com­ing year, and invites us to it, it is because he desires our peace and our free­dom from sin.

Cling­ing to our sin, deny­ing that it is sin, and demand­ing that the Church no longer call sin, sin, is not mer­cy. That is the real cru­el­ty, for it leaves us bound, and unfree, and even resent­ful of mer­cy. If you resent mer­cy, it is safe to say you are with­out under­stand­ing.