In October 1979, the Catholic bishops of the United States released a guide to political issues in the 1980 election titled "Political Responsibility: Choices for the 1980s." Four years earlier, the bishops had released a guide to the presidential election of 1976 that gave prime consideration to abortion, but this time, the bishops charted a somewhat different course. Although the 1980 political guide began with the issue of abortion (as the 1976 guide had), it then diverged markedly by offering a detailed discussion of several issues that the bishops had not even mentioned in 1976: arms buildup, the dangers of nuclear war, and the evils of the apartheid system in South Africa, among other matters. With the exception of abortion, nearly all of the political opinions the bishops'' document expressed corresponded to the positions of politicians on the left rather than the right, and all of them were supported with an appeal to the concept of "human dignity" or "human rights," the same principles that the bishops had used as a foundation for their pro-life stance. "Our national economic life must reflect broad values of social justice and human rights," the bishops said. "Above all, the economy must serve the human needs of our people. It is important to call attention to the fact that millions of Americans are still poor, jobless, hungry and inadequately housed and that vast disparities of income and wealth remain within our nation. These conditions are intolerable and must be persistently challenged so that the economy will reflect a fundamental respect for the human dignity and basic needs of all.

" The bishops were not abandoning their fight against abortion, but they were making a concerted effort to avoid linking the pro-life cause to the political right. The key to avoiding a right-wing co-option of the pro-life cause, they thought, was to link the church''s opposition to abortion with the church''s broader social program, or, in a phrase that became a central part of the church''s political vision in the 1980s, a "consistent life ethic." If the church showed as much concern for the prisoners on death row as it did for fetuses in the womb, and if the church gave the same priority to the alleviation of poverty as it did to the campaign for the rights of the unborn, it would avoid the wrong sort of political entanglements that had threatened to tarnish the bishops'' political influence during the Ford versus Carter contest in 1976. In 1980, the bishops were so eager to avoid any hint of an alliance with the political right that some of them were even willing to distance themselves from pro-life organizations if that was what it took to keep the church out of the Republican Party''s orbit and protect the values of human dignity that Vatican II had endorsed for both the born and the unborn. "There are many in the prolife movement who do not share the bishops'' broad application of the respect-life principle," wrote Msgr. George Higgins, who had worked for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) for decades and had established a reputation as a politically progressive priest who strongly supported labor unions, in September 1980. "Instead they apply the principle selectively--to the unborn child, but not to prisoners on death row, nor to the poverty-stricken family in the inner city, nor to the starving child in the Sahel. We cannot wait until a Human Life Amendment is passed to face the problems of massive poverty and starvation, of high unemployment and severely inadequate housing.

While some threats to human life are obviously more serious than others, none can be adequately dealt with in isolation. To suggest otherwise is to promote the kind of moral and political naivete that will ultimately hinder the struggle for human dignity." But the NCCB''s vision of a nonpartisan consistent life ethic that gave as much attention to fighting poverty and capital punishment as it did to the campaign against abortion proved to be short-lived. By 1984, some of the nation''s leading bishops were already moving away from it, because they believed it was inadequate to stop what they considered an abortion holocaust. This debate was directly related to the Republican and Democratic realignment on abortion. For much of the 1970s, abortion had not been a partisan issue, but by the 1980s it was. The NCCB''s internal debate about how to frame their campaign against abortion therefore had national partisan ramifications that would reshape the politics of the Catholic Church in the United States. (excerpted from chapter 5).