Pope Francis Takes a Leap on Abortion

Did anybody see this coming?

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If there was one issue on which I expected not the tiniest of baby steps from Papa Francesco, it was abortion. That, I believed, was the hill on which the Church was—and is—prepared to die rather than tolerate the smallest splinter of a smidgen of an iota of change in its policies.

Turns out the man is full of surprises.

The pontiff said he will allow priests "discretion to absolve of the sin of abortion those who have procured it and who, with contrite heart, seek forgiveness for it" during the holy year beginning December 8.

OK, all the usual disclaimers apply. It's only for a year. It's based on the idea that a woman who chooses to have an abortion needs absolution in the first place, which is pretty damned patronizing and paternalistic all on its own. It assumes that they need to be "contrite." In sum, it is indeed the smallest splinter of a smidgen of an iota of change. All of that is true. However, and this is a big however, this is anything but a tiny change in the way that HMC does her daily business. Papa Francesco has taken this decision away from the bishops—including those American wingnuts who want politicians who support a woman's right to choose refused communion and/or excommunicatedand placed it in the privacy of the confessional, where it is between a woman and her parish priest. Papa Francesco is not stupid. He knows that it was in the confessional where Paul VI's egregiously wrong and egregiously anti-human encyclical banning artificial birth control, Humanae Vitae, crawled off and expired. It died in hundreds of thousands of whispered conversations between parishioners and priests who were embarrassed by the document. HV is a dead letter among most Catholics because of millions of individual acts of private subversion on the part of clergy and laity. In many ways, this is the pope recognizing that a right to privacy is inherent in the decision. Moreover, the subtext of this latest pronouncement is that Papa Francesco feels he has bigger fish to fry than policing the sexytime of his flock, and that he doesn't fully trust the members of the Clan of the Red Beanie with the job, either. This remains a very interesting auld fella.

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