On Being ‘Single Issue’

Joseph Sobran will go down as one of the great American thinkers of our time. Now, Mr. Sobran is considered controversial in some circles, due largely to his not-so-amicable break with William F. Buckley. But I don’t think Sobran set out to be controversial; I suspect he was too preoccupied with more transcendent and enduring things than that.

I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Sobran — indeed, of hosting him — in 2001, when he spoke at our conference. We had met once before at a conference in New Jersey. Our mutual friend, Jack McManus, memorialized Joe shortly after his death on September 30, 2010 (the Feast of Saint Jerome, more than a coincidence, I’m sure). More recently, Gary Potter wrote well of him on our web site.

One of Sobran’s books, Single Issues, is a collection of essays he wrote for the Human Life Review. The ironic name is Joe’s poke at the liberal (or “fiscal conservative”) accusation that committed pro-life conservatives are “single-issue” in their politics. Sobran’s deft handling of the accusation is good to read. His impish charm and wit gave him a disarming quality, but Sobran could level his opponent with facts, logic, and elegant prose. He had a great nose for the hypocrisy of pro-abort rhetoric, and could humorously turn it back at the foe, as he does here, for instance:

Whoever is forbidden an abortion is a victim of “compulsory pregnancy,” to use a phrase coined by the National Abortion Rights Action League. (By the same token, a man who is forbidden to do away with his wife’s obnoxious mother is doomed, I suppose, to compulsory son- in-law hood.)

And here:

It is vital to keep things straight. Opposing abortion is “single-issue politics.” Favoring abortion isn’t. NARAL people, who keep sending out form letters accusing their opponents of firebombing clinics, are manifestly well-rounded human beings — fully human, as they might say.

Many of Joe’s observations on the single issue of abortion find a parallel in the “single issue” that we at Saint Benedict Center are known for. (It is not, of course, the only issue we care about, but it is, to borrow Joe’s words, a “crucial issue.”) To make my point, let me quote five passages from the book’s forward and first chapter, which I encourage the reader to savor with me:

  1. What people mean when they call anti-abortion people “single-issue voters” is that you may disagree with them about the wrongness of abortion, but you must not disagree with them about its importance. You must not give it priority over other issues. You must not regard it as one of those issues that are crucial in determining what sort of society we are.
  2. [Sobran mentioned Mike Wallace’s Sixty-Minutes hack job on Henry Hyde, whom he tried to trip up on the abortion issue by confronting him only with the “hard cases” that pro-aborts always bring up. “Thanks to the miracle of film editing, Hyde came across less as pro-life than pro-deformity.”] As the Mike Wallace example illustrates we are obsessed with exceptions and hard cases and anomalies. In every area, from free speech to economics, we have formed the habit of sacrificing normal to abnormal, rule to exception, central to eccentric. But I repeat: at some point welfare subverts the work ethic, at some point abortion subverts the family (intrinsic morality apart). If only to protect its own good order (which is itself an aspect of social justice), society must at some point draw the line.
  3. The pro-abortion side can bear plenty of disagreement-but only as long as it contains its opposition by suppressing the radical implications of legal abortion, carefully focusing attention on “hard cases.” In keeping with its general deviousness, the pro-abortion side fears recognition that abortion is a crucial issue, one of those issues that define the very nature of a society. And it condemns that recognition as obsessive — “single-issue politics” — to prevent the general public from realizing the stakes. For this reason, the proper rejoinder from the anti-abortion side is to insist that its own cause is a matter of “crucial-issue politics.”
  4. I have found that the abortion issue has so many ramifications that it can’t possibly remain isolated. Time and again when I thought everything there was to say had been said, new and vital considerations came to the fore, The Court’s disruption of life rippled outward to disrupt the family: it ruled that women were entitled to get abortions without informing their husbands, and teenage girls without informing their parents. The Court’s very willingness to assert these things implied something deeply ominous: that the state could redefine family relations, as well as life itself, at its whim.
  5. The anti-abortion movement refuses to accept that definition of America [“as an atheistic people, a people for whom no moral considerations may obstruct the claims of convenience and hedonism assisted by advanced techniques of killing”]. This is the heart of the issue. Those of us who oppose abortion, morally and legally, are trying to keep alive the very idea of piety — man’s subordination to creation and the Creator — at a time when we are being seduced with false promises of power over creation, society, each other. We are arguing that human embryos have souls; we are even arguing that abortionists have souls.

Without pretending that Sobran would approve of my doing so, I will attempt to apply some of these same arguments our our crucial issue.

“The heart of the issue” is that when we affirm no salvation outside the Church, we are affirming — as Father Feeney himself said — that there is salvation inside the Church. That is the good news. Now, if all the news is good news, then nothing stands out in relief as particularly good. The good news of Immaculate Conception stands out against the bad news of Original Sin. The good news of Redemption stands out against the bad news of the Fall. The good news of the sacrament of Penance stands out against the bad news of actual sin. These contrasts can be multiplied, but what is the point? The Catholic Faith is the Gospel — the Good News. What that Good News presumes is a lot of darkness, and whatever contradicts the Catholic Good News is bad indeed.

In the socio-political realm, the abortion issue is crucial, as Sobran so well observed. So much goes wrong when this issue is got wrong. To support and expand the alleged “right” of a woman to dispense with her child’s life, the courts created a host of other false rights out of thin air. When we deny essences and purposes — both of which abortion advocates deny — we make ourselves drunk on the wine of delusion. In the case of abortion, motherhood is denied, fatherhood is denied, (therefore) the family is denied. What we are left with is an abstract notion of human autonomy that severs itself from the most primaeval of human relationships.

When, on the other hand, the Church’s necessity is denied, man is declared autonomous in his religious thought — in his relation to God. Authority in religious matters, the sources of divine revelation, the Divine Law itself, are all what the individual thinks them to be. If — as the vast majority of Catholics in the pew seem to believe — one may be saved in any religion or no religion, then faith and morals are of no consequence. The spiritual maternity of the Church is unimportant, as is the spiritual Paternity of the Holy Father, the bishops, and the lower clergy. If there is salvation outside the Church, then what the clergy have to say may be ignored, for we do not need them, not a bit. While this might be good news to some people, it ultimately reduces the Church’s Magisterium to a rather useless and inefficient think tank. But, as St. Cyprian famously and forcefully said, “No one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother” (St. Cyprian, De unit. 6: PL 4, 519, as cited in the CCC).

If I am free to choose my own personal path to salvation, then God’s Fatherhood does not matter, either. He cannot really command me to hear His beloved Son (Matt. 17:5, Luke 9:35, Mark 9:6, 2 Pet. 1:17) just as the Son cannot command me to hear His Church (Luke 10:16, Mark 16:16, Matt. 18:17). My soul, my choice!

And if there is salvation outside the Church, then heresy, schism, apostasy, and unbelief are compatible with salvation. And if they are compatible with salvation, then they are compatible with sanctity. At this point it becomes very difficult to distinguish sanctity from its polar opposite, unless we say that being naturally virtuous or naturally good is sufficient for salvation, which is, to be sure, Pelagian.

These are but a few of the “radical implications” of denying this “crucial” dogma, a doctrine that is “one of those issues which defines the very nature of [the] society” of the Church. How so? Because the Church’s uniqueness as the ark of salvation corresponds with Christ’s uniqueness as Savior. She is His Spouse and Mystical Body and He wills all His elect to united to Him through Her.

Which leads to another thought. So much of the abortion issue is about chastity. A woman may abort her baby, it is thought, because she is free to enjoy unbridled sensuality with whomever she wants, in whatever context she chooses, and without any responsibility on her part. My body, my choice! The issue of salvation is also about chastity. To be perfectly Biblical about it, we are not free to go fornicating after strange gods” (Deut. 31:16). Jesus Christ is chaste. So is His Spouse, the Catholic Church. Neither goes after any another lover. As the Bridegroom says in the holy Canticle (6:8), “One is my dove, my perfect one is but one, she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her.” If the reader thinks that this crazy brother is abusing Solomon’s inspired love song to make a point, then he might reread the first paragraph of Unam Sanctam to see how Pope Boniface VIII connects this very verse with no salvation outside the Church.

Sobran noted the obsession that the pro-abortion crowd follows the pandemic modern obsession with “exceptions and hard cases and anomalies.” Is that not what we are constantly met with when we affirm that the Church is necessary for salvation? Natives in deserts; denizens of deepest, darkest Africa; catechumens getting run over by busses on the way to the Baptismal font. Decades before Sobran penned his wise words, Father Feeney observed that the Liberal Catholic and the modern thinker in general have this same obsession. As soon as a man is challenged with the truth concerning his eternal salvation, he asks about a native on a desert island. Speaking of epistemology, Brother Francis illustrates the same point this way: “One of the marks of the age in which we live (an age which is, philosophically, a sick age) is preoccupation with abnormality. Before they study the marvel of sight, the modern sophists like to get distracted by the accident — the defect — of color blindness.” Compare this to Sobran, in number two, above: “In every area, from free speech to economics, we have formed the habit of sacrificing normal to abnormal, rule to exception, central to eccentric.” Let us simply and chastely affirm what God has revealed through His Church and let Him handle the hard cases. We have enough to do with remedying our own hard-heartedness.

Those of us who uphold extra ecclesiam nulla salus, are trying to keep alive the very idea of piety — of man’s subordination to his Creator, and his need of a Savior — at a time when the faithful are being powerfully seduced by “spirits of error, and doctrines of devils” (I Tim. 4:1). We are arguing that all men have souls in need of Christ’s salvation; we are even arguing that non-Catholics have souls to save. What’s more, we want to help save them.