They were able then to hear each other and forged together a document which attracted the attention and stirred the conscience of the entire country. The document which came out against first use of nuclear weapons. That s correct. And explain the seamless garment of ethics that he talked about. Well, Cardinal Bernardin introduced devotion of a consistent ethic of life.
Some people do refer to it as the seamless garment.
Because he wanted to identify in the life that he lived so fully that became itself symbolic of being pro-life. Abortion, of course, was the principal one, as he well recognized, but he saw others about which he hoped that Catholics and others would, indeed, search their own consciences, including capital punishment, uh, food programs, and so forth. He did not hold all these as having the same moral valence, but he did feel that if we were going to look at life and be moral at all, we had to be consistent and not selective in the issues which, in fact, symbolize that. He did that. He was given a very unusual calling for a man who had risen to be the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago.