Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress

6. The ‘‘Miracle’’ Election

6 The ‘‘Miracle’’ Election In a February 16 letter to his would-be constituents on Boston College Law School stationery, Dean Drinan invited voters to the February 21 caucus in Concord and reminded them that his new book, Vietnam and Armageddon, would appear on May 6 as an ‘‘outline of a new challenging foreign policy for the United States in the 1970s.’’ And, he asserted, his visit to Israel in 1964 made him highly qualified on Middle Eastern affairs. In a subsequent letter he pointed to his article in the current Theological Studies on abortion for those who had questions on that subject, which was not a big campaign issue but was roiling offstage. But as the campaign progressed, on a talk show, during a debate, and in interviews, both publications would give him some close calls. One would imperil his progress, and both would challenge and raise questions about his skill as a campaigner and spokesperson. To those who recall the religious issues during the presidential campaigns of 2004 and 2008, when some American bishops sought to deny the Eucharist to candidates who favored keeping abortion legal, it may be surprising to remember that in 1970 abortion was not an overriding issue. Senator Edward M. Kennedy was roundly booed at a Cambridge voters’ meeting for opposing looser abortion laws. But Drinan was spared such treatment. Of course, all this preceded the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which, on the basis of a newly developed constitutional right to privacy that had been employed to support the legality of contraception, struck down state laws that made abortion illegal. Since that time, Church strategy has concentrated on effecting Roe’s reversal, including the hope that conservative presidents would appoint justices who would reverse the landmark decision. the ‘‘miracle’’ election | 127 In 1970, however, in the Quayle survey only 2 percent of those interviewed saw abortion as a campaign issue, and the Quayle report did not even include it among voters’ twenty leading concerns. Nevertheless, in the years leading up to his candidacy in 1970, Drinan ’s legal philosophy on abortion had been evolving: from one in which religious faith was seen as the principal source of public morality , the strongest source of all our moral convictions, to one that removed the government from influence on what was later considered one of the great moral issues of our time. One adviser who worked with him for more than ten years referred to this ‘‘evolution’’ in his thinking as his ‘‘ten positions on abortion.’’ During an interview with a Boston Globe reporter in 1967, Drinan showed the writer a recent America (February 4, 1967) article, ‘‘Strategy on Abortion,’’ in which he suggested that Catholics opposed to the legalization of abortion should not get cornered into discussing the emotion-laden, extremely rare cases but rather meet the opposition with a positive stand concerning abortion following rape or incest and concerning deformed infants, so as to isolate these cases, rather than let these rare cases become propaganda for general legalization. For example, in Drinan’s view abortion opponents should present a carefully drafted bill that would allow immediate medical assistance to a rape victim to prevent pregnancy; a state fund to support a defective child; and a ‘‘therapeutic’’ abortion, certified by three medical specialists , when the mother’s life is in danger. Then he wondered aloud to the reporter whether the state should have any role in abortion at all. Meanwhile, all his articles held to the moral principle that the happiness of one human being can never take precedence over another human’s right to exist. But by the time his ‘‘Jurisprudential Options on Abortion,’’ a development of his earlier presentation to the American Catholic Theological Association, was published in Theological Studies (March 1970), his position had become broader and much more complex. Nevertheless, while presenting the pros and cons of different theories, he was careful to return to and conclude on the same strong stand, that abortion is immoral. Perhaps anticipating Roe v. Wade, he predicted that in the 1970s ‘‘those opposing abortion on moral grounds will confront several 128 | the ‘‘miracle’’ election legal–moral dilemmas which are now just beginning.’’ The new struggle was no longer about modified abortion law, he said, but about ‘‘abortion on request to any person who desires it for any medical or social reason.’’ Now, he suggested, Catholics should...