Pope Francis’ address to Congress was, in the biblical sense, all things to all people. Conservatives could seize upon its reference to the sanctity of life as a subtle rebuke to the Congress itself, which had just failed to defund Planned Parenthood. Liberals could point to the long criticism of the death penalty, and Pope Francis’ “golden rule” argument in favor of expanding immigration. Even the four Americans whom Francis cited as noble examples of human conduct could be read through political filters. Joe Biden could nod and applaud at the following names, linking each in turn with a theme that rang his constituents’ bells. As the vice president watched the papal speech, it was easy to read his mind:

Abraham Lincoln. Freed the slaves. Yeah, that’s good. Gonna be hard turning out the black vote with no Obama on the ticket. Maybe we can paint low minimum wage as a form of slavery, and the Republicans as Confederates.

Martin Luther King: Natch. Civil rights movement still unfinished, while inequality exists. Black Lives Matter. Wonder if I can mend fences with Al Sharpton before November?

Dorothy Day: Soup kitchens, homeless, yadda yadda. Hard to get those people registered, not to mention turn them out to vote. But we can point to them and blame the One Percent, the Republicans. Show them up as Pharisees, maybe suppress the Christian Right vote in a couple of swing states.

Thomas Merton: He was some kind of mystic, right? We’ve got a lock on the “spiritual but not religious” types already. They seem to love this pope, too. The more people who go to ashrams or Burning Man instead of churches, the better off we are.

But there is a deeper reading we could make of Pope Francis’ address, and it’s one that should trouble Democrats. The two non-Catholic political figures whom the pope mentioned, Lincoln and King, were squarely on the opposite side from the Democrats of their day — and of our day — on the most critical question of political philosophy: Which factor should finally decide the making of laws: principle or power? Is there a “higher law” that is inherent in man’s own nature by which we judge all laws passed by Congress? Or is the final measure of law the voice of those who hold power, including the power to vote? In their days, both Lincoln and King faced solid, Democratic majorities that favored power over principle.

Abraham Lincoln: Pro-Life Radical

Lincoln fought Democrats who sought to extend slavery to new states and even to spread it into neighboring countries such as Mexico. These Democrats were pro-choice before their time. They argued that it was the basic Constitutional right of every white man to choose whether or not to own a slave, and to choose whether or not slavery would be legal in his state of the Union. By contrast, Lincoln was pro-life, citing the life and human dignity of the slave as a more important good than a white slave-owner’s choice.

In countless speeches, beginning in 1854 in Peoria, Illinois, Lincoln pointed out that the same human dignity (given by God, recognized by the Declaration of Independence) which gave white men the right to own property and to vote also granted the same rights to black men — assuming that they were human beings at all. So that was the question, which Lincoln proceeded to answer by citing evidence that even slave-owners knew the truth — that black people are fully human. Here is a long quote from Lincoln, which illustrates how masterfully he argued the pro-life case:

Equal justice to the south, it is said, requires us to consent to the extending of slavery to new countries. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes. But while you thus require me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask whether you of the south yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much? … In 1820 you joined the north, almost unanimously, in declaring the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing to it the punishment of death. Why did you do this? If you did not feel that it was wrong, why did you join in providing that men should be hung for it? The practice was no more than bringing wild negroes from Africa, to sell to such as would buy them. But you never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes or wild bears.

By the time Lincoln was finished, there was no more room for a principled defense of expanding slavery — or even for keeping it legal in the South. That was why, when he narrowly won the 1860 presidential election, the Southern states turned to force. The white voters in power in the states that chose to secede would argue with bullets and cannon that the black human beings whom they ruled over should continue to be exploited. Whites would fight for the claims of power over principle. Providentially, they lost.

The pro-life cause of our day, ending legal abortion, can be argued with equal force along Lincoln’s lines. If honest Abe were alive today, he would answer today’s pro-choicers in terms like these:

You too, sir, have seen or should have seen those videos from Planned Parenthood. Why should there be a secret traffic in those children’s organs for transplant or research were they were not human? Are pig or monkey organs sold surreptitiously, such that undercover reporters must ferret out the details in secret films? Ah, you say that there are laws forbidding the sale for profit of such organs from the unborn. But why were such laws made, if these tiny creatures were animals, or extraneous pieces of tissue from their mothers? Are there similar strict laws forbidding the sale of human hair from barber shops? If these fetuses were never truly alive, why should these doctors have to pierce their hearts and cut open their heads to stop them from moving?

Martin Luther King: Religious Zealot

Martin Luther King, Jr., faced Democrats determined to keep in place the crippling and humiliating conditions of Jim Crow segregation, a hundred years after slavery had been finally killed by force. These segregationists constantly cited the sanctity of law, and tried to portray the Civil Rights demonstrators as lawbreakers, radicals, and revolutionaries. And indeed, across much of our country right up until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law was on the segregationists’ side. It was a law that rested not on principle but on power — the power of white voters to deny black citizens access to the ballot box.

King wanted to change such laws, but given the stranglehold that whites held on the right to vote, he knew that such a change must begin in the streets — not with violent revolution, such as Malcolm X was already advocating, but with peaceful, stoic defiance. To those who accused him of advocating anarchy, King responded in his Letter from Birmingham Jail:

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. … An unjust law is a code out of harmony with the moral law.  To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”

A citizen confronted with a gravely unjust law has the right to simply defy it. Out of concern for public order and peace, he will do so non-violently, and accept whatever punishment the state dishes out to him for doing it, confident that his witness will awaken the country’s conscience. King’s witness worked, and in an astonishingly short time (by historical standards), legal segregation was disgraced, outlawed and relegated to the trash heap of history.

Thanks to unprincipled majorities on the Supreme Court, our laws on life today stand squarely behind the powerful. That’s how things tend to fall out in a fallen world, which is why Christians and other people of conscience can never sleep in their vigilance. Where slave-owners stood in 1854, and white sheriffs stood in 1954, sexually active adults stand today: they are the people with power, whom our legal system allows to abuse without any limit the people who are powerless.

But we can defend the unborn by following the principled, prudent examples of men such as Lincoln and King. We must be willing to make this stance our first and abiding priority, becoming if need be “single-issue” voters who wield a “litmus test.” While other issues of the common good can never be quite forgotten, they rightly should take a back seat to something so utterly fundamental as the sanctity of life. If we cannot get that issue right, if we cannot even protect innocent children from destruction, then our Republic is utterly and quite deservedly doomed.