Where are the bishops?

We have just returned from our annual midwinter sojourn to D.C. for the March for Life.  Every year on (or about) the 22nd of January, pro-life Americans converge on the capitol to observe the anniversary of the lamentable decision by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.

The Archlady and I - and each of the five archscions as they've arrived on the scene - have been making he trip for nearly fifteen years.  The March itself has been going on for thirty-eight years now.  We assemble, rally, march, tie-up traffic, mill-around outside the Capitol and the Supreme Court, visit our Senators and Representatives, and then quietly return home to begin making plans for next year.  The MSM barely deigns to acknowledge the March, much less provide any in-depth coverage or editorial examination of the serious issue at hand.  They know they can get away with it because with each passing year, even as polls indicate Americans are growing more and more pro-life, abortion-on-demand becomes a more entrenched element of the status quo.

You see, nothing has changed.  The immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade was a time of raw emotion and righteous indignation that the Greatest Nation on Earth could grant legal protection to such a barbaric and immoral act.  The Eighties were a time of hope and promise, with the election of President Reagan and the effort to pass the "Human Life Amendment".  Alas, it failed, most of the activity since then has been in the direction of further broadening or at least codifying various abortion-related "rights".

Joseph Stalin famously said that "a single death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic".  This seems to be the attitude of the media, who are able to work themselves into a well-lathered state of agitation about a single death, as long as it's the death of a "suspect" who initiated a gunfight with the police and lost, the long-delayed execution of a convicted criminal whose guilt is beyond questions, or a cute animal.  Meanwhile the million-plus babies aborted each year are only a footnote, and afterthought, and certainly not someting that merits a mention in the nightly newscast or the morning paper.

Since 1973 the Catholic Bishops have leading the fight against abortion - sort of.  It is of course the unambiguous teaching of the Church, to which all of the bishops are to give assent, that direct abortion for any reason is gravely sinful and can never be permitted.  Many individual bishops have been staunch and visible leaders, the late Edward Cardinal O'Connor of New York comes to mind, but others seem to display a curious detachment from this issue.  I find it particularly scandalous that each and every bishop is not on hand for the annual observances in Washington, D.C. each and every year.  Sure, there will be a few who can't come for authentic reasons, but I really wonder whether the presence of the entire U.S. episcopate, in person or represented by a senior member of their local curia, would help us to extinguish this enduring holocaust even a little bit sooner. 

Why cannot the bishops resolve to do this?  It is not as though they don't know where Washington is, and none of them seems to have embraced poverty to such an extent that they are unwilling to fly - if only in coach!  They certainly find their way to the Nation's Capitol when one of their pet political issues is being legislated, and of course the U.S.C.C.B. has its headquarters there.  Speaking of this "sorry bench of bishops", as His Excellency Bishop Fabian Bruskewicz of Lincoln, Nebraska called them a few years ago, one wonders why they haven't done this.  Here we are, in an era when far too many bishops abdicate their God-given rights and responsibilities to govern, teach, and sacntify their own flock in favor of some lowest-common-denominator "policy" of the U.S.C.C.B., whom they seems to regard as the supreme authority in the Church.  How about having one of their annual meetings in D.C. during the week of the March?  Would the MSM dare ignore the entire episcopate - cardinals in scarlet and bishops in purple - marching at the head of +200k citizens down one of the main throughfares of the Capitol?  Perhaps they ask themselves, right now at least, "if this isn't important enough for ALL of the Catholic bishops to be there, why should we take any notice of it?"

Let me close by thanking all of those bishops who *do* come to the March every year, I didn't mean to imply that there were not many of them; my lament is that that even their witness is diminshed and diluted when so many of their brothers in the episcopate stay away.