Amid the ocean of half-baked, profanity-laced protest signs from this past weekend’s anti-gun march in Washington, D.C., there was this one about Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
This is far from the first direct attack on Rubio over the issue, but it’s the first that I’ve seen from this round of protests that has the audacity to attack Rubio’s faith, and by extension, the faith of other pro-Second Amendment Catholics, because of this particular political stance.
And the bloody forehead cross toes the line between old-school Catholic-bashing and the outright demonic.
This is nothing new. Whether it’s gun control, some barely watered-down form of Marxism, or the latest government-mandated eco-fad, you can’t consider yourself truly Catholic if you don’t line up with the big-government crowd on the latest political litmus test, at least according to the Left.
However, in Catholic moral theology, there are areas of faith and morals (the Trinity, the Ascension, the Assumption, sexual morality, God’s design for marriage, the sanctity of human life, etc.) and there are areas of prudential judgement.
For example, abortion falls into the first category, faith and morals.
That language is pretty clear, no? Of course, voices like those targeting Rubio’s standing with the Vatican will say nothing (that is, if they’re not too busy shouting their abortions) about the mass murder of unborn children every year.
Not anywhere in there does it say anything prohibiting a Catholic in good standing with the Holy See from owning or carrying a firearm where legal. Rather, the Church affirms the right to self-defense, even to the point of killing the aggressor.
Yet there are always those, even within the Church itself, who invert these two, treating the essential as optional and vice versa. These are the types who go to the ends of the Earth for their preferred immigration or environmental policy, but are usually out to lunch when it comes to confronting direct threats to the sanctity of human life like abortion and euthanasia.
But then again, it’s no surprise to find that someone at this march should be so clueless about Catholicism, even as they try to use it as a weapon in policy debates. After all, those clamoring to take others’ guns away in the first place typically have no clue whatsoever how guns work to begin with.
Some will still try to say that you don’t truly value the sanctity of human life if you support the right of people to own something that can be used to murder other people. Where, exactly, does the progression of that type of “logic” end? Drunk driving still kills a lot of people every year, so should the faithful start marching to ban cars or booze? It’s hard to tell where this is going.
Indeed, a great many situations in regular life that call for the use of a firearm fit well within moral parameters. The willful killing of an innocent unborn child, however, never has and never will. It doesn’t take a doctorate in theology to understand this.
The truth of the magisterium is, as the old saying goes, shallow enough for a mouse to wade in and deep enough for an elephant to drown in. However, it will always remain beyond the grasp of those who wish to contort it for the sake of their temporal political agenda.