No one separated from love of God

With his visit to the United States not far off, a less courageous man than Pope Francis would have kept quiet concerning abortion – one of the issues that has dominated Church-state relations there for a generation. He has issued a statement about the need for the Catholic Church to show compassion and mercy to women who have had a pregnancy terminated. He has suspended the rule that such women cannot receive absolution in the confessional without the permission of the diocesan bishop. And he has lifted the automatic excommunication prescribed according to the letter of Canon Law.

From this autumn, when the Jubilee Year of Mercy starts, all priests will have that permission, given them by Francis personally. Bishops already have authority to grant that, and those in England and Wales took the step some years ago. But in many parts of the world priests still have to refer abortion cases to their bishops or to a senior priest with special authorisation.

Francis said he was “well aware of the pressure” that led women to this decision which was “agonising and painful” and often “an existential and moral ordeal...” Yet abortion itself remains a “profoundly unjust” act. Francis explains this over-riding of Canon Law as being a requirement of God’s mercy, the principle by which he wants the Jubilee Year to be characterised. Although the permission he has granted to all priests technically expires after 12 months, it hardly needs stating that God will not stop being merciful after that time: it is difficult to imagine the situation ever going back exactly to what it was before. The real significance of what he said was the tone with which he said it.

It reshapes the moral landscape.

In the United States, priests who said what Francis said in explanation of why women seek abortions could in some dioceses expect a reprimand from their bishops. They would be accused of weakening the Church’s witness in favour of the right to life. Indeed, as elsewhere in the West, the Catholic Church has watched while termination has gone from being regarded as an emergency procedure in dire circumstances, to a woman’s right that she may freely choose as a back-up to contraception. This has made it easy to deny the humanity of the foetus, and Francis will undoubtedly be accused of moving the Church a step in that direction. Conservative Catholics in the United States and elsewhere are already dismayed by what they see as an over-liberal papal line on many vexed moral questions.

Francis puts all this in the context of evangelisation. He is concerned not just with spreading the Gospel to those who have never heard it. His priority during the Jubilee Year is with bringing back the lost sheep who have been alienated by the way the Church’s moral teaching has been presented to them, finding it harsh and unforgiving. As American bishops will doubtless point out to him, such relaxation comes at a price.

But he is right that many women contemplating an abortion may feel they have no realistic alternative.

He wants them to know that God still loves them, which to him is the more important message.