70 cardinals, bishops, and theologians gathered recently to discuss Pope Francis and the Church in the United States. Having published an address to attendees by Massimo Faggioli, the National Catholic Reporter has published another address by M. Therese Lysaught, a medical school professor at Loyola University Chicago.

As she called for “charity, the practice of self-gift or self-emptying love for the good of others,” Lysaught offered strong criticism of an American pro-life movement that she believes is driven by “neoliberal idolatry” and dominated by “Catho-capitalists” and “culture warriors.”

Lysaught, appointed a corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2020, offered particularly strong criticism of National Catholic Bioethics Center, which published an article criticizing her moral analysis of the “death of a child by dilation and curettage.” Lysaught told the assembled cardinals, bishops, and theologians that the Center’s materials “misrepresent Church teaching” by “cherry-picking sentences from authoritative documents and distorting their meaning.”

Lysaught also took aim at some of the pro-life advocates who sought to save the life of Terri Schiavo from starvation and dehydration. She described them as “the culture warriors who held vigil and stormed the media in her case, fomenting enmity and hatred rather than embodying the healing and reconciling presence of Christ to her family.”