Califano prefers silent bishops

Good grief. From Ramesh Ponnuru:

I thought Joseph Califano's op-ed on the abortion-communion question was extremely poorly reasoned, but going through what I regard as his mistakes one by one would just repeat previous posts I've written on the topic. But I did learn something from the op-ed: Califano, when he worked for LBJ, was responsible for administering the president's policy of "refus[ing] to send grain to India during a famine until Indira Gandhi committed to a family planning program." Califano presents this rather horrifying story as part of the good old days, commending America's Catholic bishops for not being unreasonable in their opposition.

The relevant paragraph from Califano's piece:

Johnson's actions prompted a stinging attack from Catholic bishops, who charged that he was coercing the poor to practice birth control. The president told me to "work something out" with the bishops, who were our needed allies in battling poverty and racial discrimination. At meetings with Father Francis Hurley, the bishops' top Washington staffer, and Detroit Archbishop John Dearden, leader of the American bishops, I assured them that we were offering an option to the poor, not coercing acceptance. We ultimately agreed that if the president phrased his policy in terms of "population control" (which allowed for more food and the church-approved rhythm method of family planning as well as contraception), the bishops would cool their rhetoric. LBJ kept his word, and when he later signed a U.N. declaration supporting population control, the bishops were silent.

May Heaven help the bishops, past, present, and future. Maybe it's not true that the road to hell is paved with their skulls. But that so many are willing to chance it continues to surprise us.

I'm infinitely less able than Ponnuru to parse Califano's reasoning but let me just say that he finishes weakly:

Where we cannot find unanimous answers, there is at least one point on which Catholic bishops and Catholic politicians can find common ground: insistence that those who search for the right answers are doing so with integrity and sincere conviction.

What hollow, sanctimonious nonsense. "Integrity" and "sincere conviction"? Those are the last things I would stipulate. Many "Catholic" politicians, Ted Kennedy included, reversed their opposition to abortion as soon as it became politically expedient to do so. He saw it as a clear and simple issue, but that was before the Democrats became the party of abortion.

Follow-up: Mr. Ponnuru, by popular demand, critiques Califano's op-ed, here.

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