COMMENTARY: Becoming the ethical conscience of the church as well as society

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Suzanne Holland is Assistant Professor of Religious and Social Ethics at The University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.) UNDATED _ With the summer’s end approaching, I have hurriedly been preparing for the courses I will teach in a few weeks. One of those courses is Liberation Theology and Ethics, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Suzanne Holland is Assistant Professor of Religious and Social Ethics at The University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.)

UNDATED _ With the summer’s end approaching, I have hurriedly been preparing for the courses I will teach in a few weeks.


One of those courses is Liberation Theology and Ethics, so I have been thinking a lot about the central tenet of all Christian theologies of liberation: the”preferential option for the poor.”Simply put, but often hard to swallow, this means we must choose to put the poor and oppressed first.

So, when I picked up the newspaper this week, two news stories in particular caught my attention: legislation is being formulated in Chile to stiffen prison sentences for those having and performing in abortion, and the United Methodist Church elevated a guideline against same-sex unions into church law.

(This follows on the heels of the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion in which Anglican bishops passed a resolution declaring homosexual activity to be”incompatible with Scripture”and advising Anglican churches worldwide against ordaining homosexuals to the priesthood.)

At a glance, these news items appear to be entirely unrelated, both to each other and to the notion of putting the poor first. What do church strictures against homosexuals have to do with the Chilean government’s legislation against women seeking abortions?

On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear how the measures against Chilean women _ and their health care providers _ seeking abortions in Chile are connected to the similar measures being imposed against Christian homosexuals and their spiritual providers.

The linchpin is the church.

Chile is an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country _ 80 percent of its 15 million people are Catholic. But, despite the prevalence of Catholicism, and despite its having the most restrictive abortion laws in Latin America, Chile has one of the highest abortion rates in the region. An estimated 160,000 clandestine abortions take place each year _ about one-third of pregnancies end in abortion. The majority of those clandestine abortions are likely to have been performed on poor women since, as Lidia Casas Becerra, a Chilean abortion rights advocate points out, any woman with sufficient means can obtain a medically safe abortion in a clinic or hospital for $1,000 to $2,500.

In contrast, poor women in Chile, as in other places where abortion is illegal, must turn to”back alley”abortion providers who lack sufficient medical training and who may charge $200 or more for a procedure which often involves the use of wires or primitive rubber probes.


Local health experts estimate upwards of 100 women die annually from botched abortions, while another 50 Chileans, most of them poor women, are prosecuted each year for having or performing abortions.

Meanwhile the Catholic church, while affirming the”preferential option for the poor,”remains firmly opposed to procreative choice and implicitly supports the Chilean government’s attempts to tighten punishments for women having abortions. In this way, the church collaborates in the further deprivation of these same poor (women) it professes to prefer. This tragic scenario raises the question of the church’s moral grounding with regard to women.

Shift to the question of homosexuals and the church. Most liberation theologians today recognize the struggles of homosexuals in society as an issue that must be embraced by the Christian churches that align themselves with the preferential option for the poor.

In the United States, feminist theologians have been instrumental in broadening the term”the poor”to include those persons in any society who are despised, socially marginalized and who suffer from discrimination and oppression _ homosexuals, in this case.

And here’s the moral rub: How can the churches embrace the principle of liberation from oppression as a central tenet of Christianity, while refusing to extend the same principle to disenfranchised gays and lesbians, and to those who would minister on their behalf? How can Christians who wish to affirm the”preferential option for the poor”in their own contexts continue to embrace the church when its ethical mandate is at war with itself?

As feminist ethicist Beverly Harrison has written:”To ask `what does all this mean?’ is a very good question, but in feminist moral theology, good questions are answered by something we must do.” Whether in Chile or the United States, whether on the question of abortion or homosexuality, what we must do is become the ethical conscience of the church when we perceive, sadly, that it lacks one of its own.


DEA END HOLLAND

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