Furthermore, Weigel asserts, Pope Benedict was directing his words to other pro-abortion Catholics in the United States: Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Barbara Mikulski, Rose DeLauro, Kathleen Sebelius, and others clarifying to them that the Catholic stance against abortion “is not some weird Catholic hocus-pocus; it’s a first principle of justice than can be known by reason.”
“It is a ‘requirement of the natural moral law’,” says Weigel, “that is, the moral truths we can know by thinking about what is right and what is wrong — to defend the inviolability of innocent human life. You don’t have to believe in papal primacy to know that; you don’t have do believe in seven sacraments, or the episcopal structure of the Church, or the divinity of Christ, to know that. You don’t even have to believe in God to know that. You only have to be a morally serious human being, willing to work through a moral argument — which, of course, means being the kind of person who understands that moral truth cannot be reduced to questions of feminist political correctness or partisan political advantage.”
Though it is apparent that Pelosi is “deeply confused about what her church teaches on the morality of abortion,” Weigel continues, she “has now been informed, and by a world-class intellectual who happens to be the universal pastor of the Catholic Church, that she is, in fact, confused, and that both her spiritual life and her public service are in jeopardy because of that.”