Antics show need for new voices to come forth at Alaska Right to Life
The leadership of Alaska Right to Life overstepped the bounds of propriety last month when it attempted to transform a prayer service organized by the Knights of Columbus and led by Archbishop Roger Schwietz into a public admonition of the archbishop.
Fortunately the Knights blocked the antics, mostly. But it offended them enough that the state’s top Knight has suspended ties with their old ally.
What was the Alaska Right to Life board thinking?
The fact is, Archbishop Schwietz has been diligent and extremely thorough in his attempts to ensure that Catholic principles are being followed at Providence Alaska Medical Center. Likewise, Providence has been open to suggestions and has said from the start that it would abide by the archbishop’s decisions on the practice of early induction.
To ensure, as he says, that "nothing akin to abortion" was done at Providence, the archbishop asked some of the finest and most respected Catholic ethicists in the country to work with Providence’s top people to revise the existing protocol on early induction.
After the National Catholic Bioethics Center completed its consultation last summer and the revised guidelines were in place at Providence, the archbishop took two additional precautionary steps. He directed that the protocol be reviewed periodically to ensure it keeps pace with the rapidly changing medical world, and he sent the revised guidelines to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The congregation is still studying early induction as it is practiced at Providence and other Catholic health care institutions around the world.
If the doctrinal congregation asks for a change to the policy, Archbishop Schwietz will immediately comply. His goal is to uphold Catholic doctrine, after all.
Alaska Right to Life has a different goal, and a different, much more simplistic approach to the complex, tragic cases that occasionally confront pregnant women, medical experts and ethicists at Providence. The anti-abortion group’s leadership is utterly convinced that Providence allows abortions, and it wouldn’t matter if the pope himself were to disagree.
Alaska Right to Life is certainly free to picket the hospital and speak out against the archbishop. It’s a free society.
However, when the group’s 13-member board (which includes seven Catholics) stoops to the level of attempting to disrupt a pro-life prayer service the archbishop is leading, it is time for more level-headed folks within the organization to make their voices heard.
Editor’s Note: Ed Wassell, who when this editorial was written was president of Alaska Right to Life, initially told the Anchor in a tape-recorded interview that his 13-member board had voted unanimously to speak out against the archbishop and Providence at the Jan. 22 memorial service. However, in a subsequent interview, he said that at least one member voted against the resolution or abstained, and that others were not present to vote. He wasn’t sure how many had voted in favor of the resolution.