Once more, for good measure: The press’s three greatest blind spots are firearms, faith, and abortion.
This weekend, the New York Times published an opinion article that botches basic facts regarding two of the three.
The error-riddled article, authored by historian Garry Wills, criticizes the Catholic bishops who say President Joe Biden’s support for abortion puts him at odds with his professed faith, which teaches abortion is a grave moral evil.
Wills, by the way, is the same person who wrote Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition, which argues quite seriously the Catholic Church ought to abolish the office of priesthood. So, take from this what you will.
“The Bishops Are Wrong About Biden — and Abortion,” reads the headline to Wills’s New York Times op-ed.
Let’s skip past the part where he claims falsely the bishops are upset Biden is not doing more to end abortion — their complaint with the president is that he supports abortion. Let’s also skip past the part where Wills sloppily and dishonestly paraphrases Catholic Church fathers. We can also skip past his weak appeal to authority when he argues the bishops are wrong about church teaching because polling shows abortion is relatively popular among certain voting demographics.
Let’s get right to the part where Wills asserts falsely the Catholic Church treats stillbirths, miscarriages, and infants who die shortly after birth differently than it treats children who are born healthy because it doesn’t consider the former “full” human beings.
Wills writes:
…
This new cult of the fetus was not observed in the long history of the bishops’ own church. When my wife and I were in England in the 1960s, her doctor there said she was at severe risk of a miscarriage and consigned her to immobility in bed. I did not know what my Catholic Church prescribed about treatment of a miscarried baby, if that should occur. I went to John Henry Newman’s Oratory fathers, where I had been attending Mass, and asked what I should do in that event. They looked puzzled and said the hospital should handle that.
I found, in later questions, that the church did not prescribe or recommend baptizing a miscarriage as if it were a full human being, nor giving it last rites, nor burying it in consecrated ground. My Catholic grandmother, Rose Collins, had three or four miscarriages, but told me she did not worry about how the discharges were disposed of — she had four living children to care for.
Wills alleges the Catholic Church does not recommend baptism or any other end-of-life arrangements for infants who die prematurely because the church doesn’t consider them to be “full” human beings. This simply is not the case.
It’s true the church does not prescribe baptism for children who die either in the womb or shortly after birth. However, this is because sacraments, including baptism, are for the living, not because the church doesn’t recognize the child as a full human being.
This brings us to Wills’s other claims, including that the church doesn’t recommend last rites or burials on consecrated grounds for infants who die prematurely. None of this is true.
“I was recently discussing with someone about burying the baby she miscarried in a Catholic cemetery,” the Rev. Matthew P. Schneider said. “The [New York Times] editors could just Google ‘miscarriage burial Catholic’ & several diocesan pages come up on page 1 talking about the process, but they printed false info instead.”
Moreover, the Catholic Church actually encourages funeral rites for unbaptized infants and stillborn babies. The Code of Canon Law, which is the collected ecclesiastical laws of the church, states specifically the “local ordinary can permit children whom the parents intended to baptize but who died before baptism” may be allowed church funeral rites by the local ordinary.
Now, as to what the church teaches about baptism for children who die prematurely, the Catechism says, “The Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: ‘Let them come to me, do not hinder them’ allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without baptism.’”
In the Catholic Church’s Order of Christian Funerals, the “Funeral Rites for Children” section is careful to include alternative prayers for children who died before receiving baptism. Clergy also instructed to use as a resource the Blessing of Parents after a Miscarriage in situations involving stillborn or miscarried infants.
All of this is to say: The church believes very much children who die prematurely are full human beings, Wills’s ignorant suggestions to the contrary notwithstanding.
Speaking of which, Wills is free to be as ill-informed as he pleases — though ignorance seems an implausible defense, given his many years writing on the church. But what’s the New York Times’s excuse for publishing his nonsense? For that matter, how did Wills’s many falsehoods even make it past the paper’s editors?
This isn’t even the first time the New York Times has bungled basic facts about the Catholic Church. In June, it claimed [emphasis added], “American Catholics are facing an internal war over one of the church’s most sacred rituals, the Eucharist, which represents the body and blood of Christ.” Note the word “represents.” Of all times to get this wrong, the paper did it in the context of reporting on the Christian denomination that believes exclusively the Eucharist is literally, rather than just symbolically, Christ’s body and blood. Earlier, in 2019, the paper’s editors also thought the term “body of Christ” referred to a literal statue of Christ and not consecrated hosts. Back in 2005, the paper referred incorrectly to the late St. John Paul II’s hooked shepherd’s staff as a “crow’s ear.” It’s called a “crosier.” (OK, this one is obscure, but come on! No one at the New York Times thought to ask, “Are you sure it’s ‘crow’s ear?’”)
It’s a religion with 1.34 billion adherents, yet the editors at one of the most powerful newspapers in the world apparently don’t know anything about it.
