Proud Catholic, Public Defiance: Maura Healey answers critics
Maura Healey has answered criticism of Massachusetts’s radical new abortion law by invoking her identity as a “proud Catholic”. Her bishops had already called the measure “gravely immoral”; her archbishop had described its signing as a “grave offense”. The governor has not retreated. She has defended what she did in the language of compassion — and has thereby made the meaning of Catholic identity itself part of the controversy.
In our earlier editorial, Nuntiatoria asked what becomes of the word grave when ecclesiastical authority attaches it to an action but no publicly visible ecclesiastical consequence follows. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey had signed legislation removing the specific statutory conditions which previously restricted abortion after twenty-four weeks. The bishops of Massachusetts had warned beforehand that eliminating those restraints would be “gravely immoral”. Archbishop Richard Henning of Boston subsequently described the passage and signing of the legislation as “a grave offense against the sanctity and dignity of every person”. Yet, so far as anything publicly announced indicated, the Catholic governor who deliberately placed her signature beneath the measure remained ecclesiastically untouched.¹
The story has now developed in a way which makes that question considerably more serious. According to a statement from Healey’s office reported by LifeNews on 17 August, and subsequently reproduced and criticised by CatholicVote, the governor has answered her critics by expressly invoking her religion: “As a proud Catholic, she believes everyone is deserving of kindness and empathy, especially in their time of need.”² Her office went on to defend the availability of abortion in Massachusetts for women and families who would otherwise have travelled to other states, and invoked Healey’s duty to govern citizens of every faith. Because Nuntiatoria has not located the original statement independently on an official Massachusetts government page, that attribution should be stated precisely: this is the defence reported from Healey’s office, not a quotation we have independently retrieved from a gubernatorial press release. But if accurately reported — and it has now circulated publicly without apparent correction — its significance is considerable.
Until now it might at least have been argued that Healey regarded her Catholicism as a private affiliation which she simply compartmentalised when exercising political office. That familiar distinction is morally inadequate where intrinsic evil is concerned, but it attempts to keep religious profession and political action in separate boxes. The new defence does something more revealing. Healey’s Catholic identity is no longer incidental to the controversy. It is invoked positively while defending the very action which her bishops have condemned as gravely immoral. She is presented as a “proud Catholic” precisely in the course of appealing to “kindness and empathy” as the moral vocabulary by which her abortion policy should be understood.
The difficulty is not that kindness and empathy are somehow un-Catholic. Quite the opposite. Compassion for a frightened woman, a family confronted by terrible medical news, a mother living in poverty or anyone facing a crisis pregnancy is profoundly Catholic. The question is why that compassion has been constructed so that one human being disappears entirely from its field of vision. The statement speaks of women and families deserving kindness and empathy. Of course they do. But so does the child. The unborn child is not an extraneous theological complication inserted into an otherwise straightforward medical decision. His presence is the reason abortion presents a moral question of this order in the first place. If there were only one human life involved, there would be no controversy about abortion as such.
That omission becomes still more striking after viability. Massachusetts has not enacted a law permitting a physician deliberately to kill an infant after a live birth, and accuracy requires us to keep saying so. Its born-alive protections remain. But the legislation Healey signed removes the previous statutory reasons required for abortions after twenty-four weeks and substitutes the professional judgment of the physician, without writing a later gestational ceiling into the statute.³ The child at thirty, thirty-five or thirty-eight weeks may therefore be biologically indistinguishable in any morally relevant respect from a premature infant receiving intensive care in a neighbouring hospital. The law may treat his location as decisive. Catholic moral reasoning cannot.
“Kindness and empathy” therefore cannot be allowed to function as a verbal solvent which dissolves the existence of one of the persons involved. Compassion ceases to be Christian when it is made selective in precisely the manner necessary to justify the killing of the vulnerable. Catholic charity does not solve the suffering of one human being by declaring another human being disposable. It seeks to accompany both. The frightened mother and the unborn child are not competitors for human dignity. Both possess it. Both are entitled to protection. Both must remain within the sentence when a politician who calls herself Catholic speaks of compassion.
The same problem attends the word care. Healey’s administration consistently presents abortion in the language of health care, patient access and medical decision-making. At the signing ceremony she insisted that decisions should be made by women, families and physicians rather than politicians, and the Commonwealth’s own announcement framed the legislation as strengthening abortion protections and ensuring access to care.⁴ But moral reality is not created by vocabulary. Calling an act “care” does not make the intentional destruction of innocent human life therapeutic. The Catholic objection to abortion is not that the Church happens to prefer a different linguistic framing for the same morally neutral procedure. It is that direct abortion is intrinsically wrong because innocent human life is deliberately destroyed. Euphemism can disguise the object of an act; it cannot alter it.
This is why Healey’s invocation of being a “proud Catholic” matters more than an ordinary instance of political dissent. Catholics sin. Catholics misunderstand teaching. Catholics struggle against teachings they find difficult, fail to live by them, repent and begin again. The Church has never claimed to be a society of the morally flawless; she exists to reconcile sinners. But there is a substantial difference between a Catholic who admits, “I have acted contrary to what my Church teaches,” and a Catholic public official who knowingly exercises the authority of the state in opposition to that teaching, persists after her bishops publicly condemn the action, and then invokes Catholic identity while defending the act in the moral language of compassion.
The first situation contains an acknowledged contradiction and therefore at least the possibility of repentance. The second risks constructing an alternative Catholicism.
That alternative is increasingly familiar in Western public life. It retains Catholic words — compassion, dignity, conscience, justice, inclusion — while detaching them from the doctrinal and moral content the Church gives them. It wishes to preserve the cultural authority and emotional resonance of the Catholic name while reserving the right to determine independently which Catholic teachings have practical force. Catholicism becomes not a faith received, but an identity reconstructed: “Catholic” means whatever moral synthesis the individual who claims the name is prepared to recognise.
That cannot be reconciled with the nature of the Church. Catholicism is not merely ancestry, sentiment, community or a collection of humanitarian instincts. It makes objective claims about God, human nature, moral action and the sacramental life. Those claims may be accepted or rejected; Catholics may conform themselves to them imperfectly; pastors may exercise patience towards those struggling to do so. But the meaning of Catholic cannot finally be determined by the unilateral declaration of the person claiming the adjective. If it could, the Church would cease to possess a faith capable of being received at all.
Nor does the defence that Healey is governor “for all people of all faiths” solve the problem. Of course she is. No serious Catholic argument suggests that the Governor of Massachusetts holds office only for Catholics, or that civil legislation should consist of denominational observances imposed upon unbelievers. The prohibition against intentionally killing innocent human beings is not comparable to fasting before Communion or abstaining from meat on Friday. Catholic teaching claims that the right to life belongs to the natural moral law and is accessible to reason independently of revealed religion. Saint John Paul II therefore taught in Evangelium Vitae that laws permitting abortion are radically contrary to the fundamental right to life and the common good, and that Catholics have a “grave and clear obligation” to oppose intrinsically unjust laws of this kind.⁵
Religious pluralism is consequently no answer to moral responsibility. A Catholic public official does not impose Catholicism by refusing to participate in an intrinsic evil any more than a Jewish politician “imposes Judaism” by refusing corruption or an atheist legislator “imposes atheism” by opposing torture. A governor’s duty to citizens of every religion does not confer moral permission to facilitate an act which the natural law forbids. The Church is not asking Catholic politicians to establish a confessional state. She is asking them not to cooperate in the deliberate destruction of innocent life.
The significance of the chronology should now be obvious. Before Healey signed the legislation, the four Catholic bishops of Massachusetts publicly described the elimination of the existing restrictions upon late-term abortion as “a radical measure which is gravely immoral”.⁶ She signed it nonetheless on 10 August. The following day Archbishop Henning described its passage and signing as “a grave offense against the sanctity and dignity of every person”.⁷ The defence now attributed to Healey’s office does not suggest uncertainty, reconsideration or even discreet silence in response to that condemnation. It invokes her status as a “proud Catholic” while defending the policy through the language of kindness and empathy.
That sequence does not establish every element required for every possible canonical sanction, and Nuntiatoria has deliberately resisted pretending otherwise. We have already cautioned against confidently asserting that Healey automatically incurred excommunication under Canon 1397 simply by signing a general statute. That is a specific juridical proposition requiring more than indignation to establish. But the fixation upon automatic excommunication has always risked obscuring the more immediate question of Eucharistic discipline.
Canon 915 provides that those “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion”.⁸ This is not simply another form of excommunication. Nor does its application depend upon first proving that a latae sententiae penalty has been incurred. It concerns the public reception of the Eucharist where objective conduct has become gravely and manifestly incompatible with what sacramental communion signifies. The issue is not primarily whether a politician is secretly a sufficiently bad Catholic to deserve punishment. It is whether the Church may publicly signify full sacramental communion while an equally public course of conduct contradicts a grave moral teaching of the same Church.
The principle is hardly novel. In 2004 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger addressed the question of Catholic politicians whose cooperation with abortion becomes manifest through consistent campaigning and voting for permissive legislation. He explained that the pastor should meet such a politician, instruct him in the Church’s teaching, inform him that he is not to present himself for Communion while the objective situation persists, and warn him that Communion will otherwise be refused. If the politician nevertheless persists, Ratzinger stated that the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it. Importantly, he explained that such refusal was not properly a punishment or judgment upon subjective guilt, but a response to the objective public situation.⁹
That remains relevant precisely because the question now concerns persistence. We do not know what private pastoral communication may have occurred between Healey and Archbishop Henning or any other priest or bishop. It would be irresponsible to invent such knowledge. A private admonition may already have been given; conversations may be continuing; canonical advice may be under consideration. A bishop does not owe the public a transcript of pastoral encounters with a soul entrusted to his care.
But a public scandal cannot be repaired indefinitely by measures known only in private. At some point the external forum matters because it is in the external forum that the contradiction has arisen. The legislation is public. Healey’s signature is public. The episcopal condemnation is public. Her defence is public. Her invocation of Catholic identity is public. Whatever private pastoral processes are appropriate, the faithful are eventually entitled to know whether public profession of the Catholic Faith carries any objective relationship to public conduct.
This is not ecclesiastical vengeance. It is not a demand for bishops to excommunicate politicians whenever social media becomes angry. Discipline is medicinal because its aim is conversion, the restoration of justice and the repair of scandal. A prohibition upon receiving Communion does not declare that somebody is beyond mercy; it declares precisely that reconciliation matters enough not to counterfeit it sacramentally. If a person publicly persists in conduct gravely incompatible with Catholic communion, allowing the outward sign of communion to proceed as though nothing were wrong may look merciful, but it risks becoming the opposite. It leaves the sinner without the clarity which could call her to repentance and leaves the faithful to conclude that the Church’s moral language has no practical content.
There is a pastoral injustice in that ambiguity which is rarely acknowledged. Think of the Catholic physician who has sacrificed professional advancement rather than participate in abortion. Think of the politician who has accepted electoral defeat rather than vote for what conscience and the Church forbid. Think of the woman who has endured an agonising pregnancy because she believed both her life and the life within her mattered before God. Think of ordinary Catholics who struggle, imperfectly but seriously, to conform their lives to teachings which contemporary culture mocks as antiquated or cruel. They are being told that fidelity costs something. They are entitled to ask why public repudiation by the powerful so often appears to cost nothing.
This is how doctrine is hollowed out without changing a single doctrinal sentence. The bishops may continue to say that abortion is gravely wrong. The Catechism may remain unchanged. Evangelium Vitae may continue to be quoted. Pro-life offices may continue their work and Respect Life Sundays may continue to appear in the calendar. Yet if a prominent Catholic can deliberately contradict that teaching in the exercise of public power, celebrate the result, invoke Catholic identity in its defence and remain for all outward purposes ecclesiastically indistinguishable from one who accepts the teaching, another catechesis is being communicated by practice.
What is tolerated teaches.
There is therefore a point at which pastoral patience ceases to look like patience and begins to be understood as permission. There is a point at which accompaniment without any visible destination ceases to accompany anyone anywhere. And there is a point at which endlessly repeating that an act is grave while refusing to allow gravity any observable consequence empties the word itself.
The Church should also resist the familiar claim that applying Eucharistic discipline would “politicise the Eucharist”. The Eucharist is already being dragged into politics when a Catholic politician publicly invokes Catholic identity while defending a political programme the Church has expressly condemned. Refusing to acknowledge that contradiction does not protect the altar from politics. It permits political power to determine how little Catholic communion need mean in practice.
None of this requires Archbishop Henning to conduct pastoral care through press conferences, nor does it require those outside his jurisdiction to prescribe the precise canonical measure he must take tomorrow morning. It requires something both more modest and more fundamental: confidence that Catholic discipline must eventually correspond to Catholic doctrine. If the governor has been privately admonished and responds with repentance, the public nature of the original scandal will still require some corresponding public repair. If she persists, the Church possesses both principles and procedures by which persistence can be addressed. What cannot endure indefinitely is the contradiction itself.
Maura Healey is legally entitled to describe herself as Catholic. The state will not and should not adjudicate the authenticity of that religious profession. But the Catholic Church is under no corresponding obligation to surrender the meaning of her own name. She alone can say what communion with her faith entails, what conduct contradicts it, and when a public contradiction has become so grave that sacramental discipline is required.
That is why the latest development matters. The question is no longer merely whether a Catholic governor signed a law her bishops condemned. It is whether Catholic identity itself may now be recruited to defend the contradiction.
Her bishops said the legislation was gravely immoral. Her archbishop said its signing was a grave offence. Healey’s office has now answered the resulting criticism, according to the report, by invoking her as a “proud Catholic” and defending what she did in the language of kindness and empathy.
The contradiction could hardly be clearer.
Catholic compassion includes the woman. It includes the family. It includes those frightened, poor, abandoned, ill or desperate.
And it includes the child.
If “proud Catholic” is to mean anything more than a private label attached to whatever moral conclusions an individual has already chosen, someone with authority in the Catholic Church must eventually say so.
¹ Archbishop Richard G. Henning, statement of 11 August 2026; Massachusetts Catholic bishops, joint statement of 29 July 2026; Massachusetts General Court, Acts of 2026, Chapter 188: An Act Prioritizing Patient Access to Care.
² Steven Ertelt, “Maura Healey Defends Signing Abortions Up to Birth: I’m a ‘Proud Catholic’,” LifeNews, 17 August 2026; subsequent public response by Kelsey Reinhardt of CatholicVote. The quotation is attributed to Healey’s office in those reports; Nuntiatoria has not independently located the original statement on an official gubernatorial webpage.
³ Massachusetts General Court, Acts of 2026, Chapter 188, provisions amending Massachusetts law governing abortion after twenty-four weeks; Massachusetts General Laws, ch. 112, §12O, concerning a live birth following abortion.
⁴ Office of Governor Maura Healey, official announcement accompanying the signing of the legislation, 10 August 2026.
⁵ St John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 25 March 1995, §§72–74, especially §73.
⁶ Archbishop Richard G. Henning, Bishop Robert J. McManus, Bishop Edgar M. da Cunha and Bishop William D. Byrne, joint statement concerning the proposed legislation, 29 July 2026.
⁷ Archbishop Richard G. Henning, statement on the passage and signing of the Massachusetts legislation, 11 August 2026.
⁸ Codex Iuris Canonici, canon 915.
⁹ Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles, 2004, especially nos. 5–6.
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