Weighing evils: Abortion versus capital punishment

Progressive Jesuit (sorry, I repeat myself) tried to besmirch those who protest the Catholic Church's willingness to look the other way when it comes to progressive politicians' eagerness to abort children or, there is laicized priest Theodore McKittrick who practiced the "seamless garment" argument to protect pedophile priests; remember, he has been defrocked).

To invoke Pope Francis, who Joe Biden said told Joe that he was a "good Catholic" can only leave other Catholics dumbfounded, and since the pope has not denied it, we can only assume that he intended this judgment -- or at least must have known -- to become a public defense of Biden's support of abortion. The pope provided cover for Biden just as he provided cover for Putin by claiming that the United States was like a 'barking dog,' intent on irritating Putin to the point of an overt reaction. How does a barking dog give credence to a "just war"? One critic noted that the pope is more anti-American in his politics than he is pro-peace, implicitly blaming the West for starting the Ukraine war. Again, the pope has not withdrawn or denied his original assertion, leaving Catholics scratching their heads.

Read Martin's argument, below:

Abortion and the Grumbling Crowd - WSJ.pdf

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Is support or practice of capital punishment the equivalent to the sin of support or practice of abortion? Here is the counterargument in the proverbial nutshell: It is invalid to compare Bill Barr's application of the death penalty law with Joe Biden's strident and unlimited support for abortion from conception to post-birth. The former, as noted in on of the comments below, is the death of a guilty person based upon a legal process; the latter is the destruction of innocent life.

The better argument is that no number or accumulation of positive acts counterbalance the sin of support for abortion, period.

Unsurprisingly, three days later, the best response came from another Catholic priest -- a pastor in New York City and not a Jesuit -- who did a very good job of knocking down the Martin thesis:

The Catholic Church Has a Duty to Correct the Powerful on Abortion - WSJ.pdf

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Two key excerpts:

Many progressives risk diminishing the unique evil of abortion through false equivalences. A favorite, cited by Fr. Martin, is the death penalty. The church has always taught that the state has the inherent right to carry out capital punishment.

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The sad irony is that Fr. Martin’s approach is the true “weaponization” of the Eucharist: Every reception of communion wounds that public official’s soul and deepens its alienation from God. Withholding communion from someone in manifest, public, grave sin is not an act of unkindness, but one of love and mercy. Sometimes medicine has to sting before it can heal. When the church sees souls jeopardizing their salvation through sacrilegious communions, she would be derelict not to intervene.

And here are a few of the succinct counterarguments from the commenters on Martin's post: