Now, certainly, we should not be forced to mold Catholic morality to conform to disagreement by non-Catholics, however sincere they are, however severe their disagreement. Our bishops should be teachers, not pollsters. They should not change what we Catholics believe in order to ease our consciences or please our friends or protect the Church from criticism. But if the breadth and intensity and sincerity of opposition to Church teaching shouldn't be allowed to shape our Catholic morality, it can't help but determine our ability -- our realistic, political ability -- to translate our Catholic morality into civil law, a law not for the believers who don't need it but for the disbelievers who reject it.
And it's here, in our attempt to find a political answer to abortion -- an answer beyond our private observance of Catholic morality -- that we encounter controversy within and without the Church over how and in what degree to press the case that our morality should be everybody else's morality. I repeat, there is no Church teaching that mandates the best political course for making our belief everyone's rule, for spreading this part of our Catholicism. There is neither an encyclical nor a catechism that spells out a political strategy for achieving legislative goals. And so the Catholic trying to make moral and prudent judgments in the political realm must discern which, if any, of the actions one could take would be best.
This latitude of judgment is not something new in our Catholic Church. It's not a development that has arisen only with the abortion issue. Take, for example, a very popular illustration -- and I heard about again tonight two or three times, and I'm told about often: the question of slavery. It has been argued that the failure to endorse a legal ban on abortions is equivalent to refusing to support the cause of abolition before the Civil War. This analogy has been advanced by bishops of my own state.
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