Like so many Americans who suffered through it, I was deeply disappointed by the passionless sleeper of a debate that Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain served up Tuesday night.

And more than disappointed, I find myself simply amazed that not one of the moderators thus far — Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, or Tom Brokaw — solicited the candidates’ views on abortion.

Maybe I just don’t get it. As many otherwise pro-life Catholics voting for Obama this time around might want to remind me, “it’s the economy, stupid” — now more than ever, right?

Indeed, the common wisdom appears to be that in election 2008, the economy trumps every other issue in urgency and magnitude — even abortion. If pro-lifers think the pro-choice, pro-Freedom of Choice Act, pro-partial-birth-abortion candidate is more qualified to handle America’s looming economic disaster, why should they hesitate to vote for him?

Catholic bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton responded to this logic in his pastoral letter for Respect Life Sunday (celebrated on October 5th this year in all Catholic parishes in the United States):

This reasoning is sound only if other issues carry the same moral weight as abortion does, such as in the case of euthanasia and destruction of embryos for research purposes. Health care, education, economic security, immigration, and taxes are very important concerns. Neglect of any one of them has dire consequences as the recent financial crisis demonstrates. However, the solutions to problems in these areas do not usually involve a rejection of the sanctity of human life in the way that abortion does.

Do the two issues — economy and abortion — bear the same moral weight? The bishop, standing on the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church, says no. One moral evil, that of abortion, is intrinsically gravely evil. An economic crisis — even one of the current magnitude — is simply not an intrinsic evil. In fact, the sense in which it even constitutes a genuine “crisis” sorely demands further examination.

First allow me to suggest that not every crisis, even the current economic one, is an all and all tragedy. “Crisis” in its Greek root means a separation, a choosing, a turning point. A crisis is a moment of high drama where we are afforded an opportunity. The present economic crisis can be a crisis in that sense.

Am I waxing Pollyannaish here? Don’t think so. I think what the pope said over the weekend rings deeply true. Addressing the bishops at the opening of their international synod on the theme of the Word of God, the Holy Father stated:

At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord speaks to us of the two possible ways of constructing the edifice of one’s life: building on sand or building on solid ground. He who builds on sand is the one who builds only on the foundation of visible and tangible things: success, one’s career, money. As if these were the true realities. But one day all of these things will pass away. We see that now in the crash of the great banks: all this money disappears; it’s nothing. And in like fashion all these things, which would appear to be the true reality to count on, are only second-order realities. Whoever builds his life on these realities, on material things, on success, on appearances, builds on sand.

Now, in the MSM this became “Pope says the global financial crisis shows the futility of money and ambition.” In fact, he did not say money is futile. He was suggesting, rather, that one should not make money (or more generally, material goods) the ultimate point of reference around which to build one’s life project. To put it another way, one should not choose material well being as one’s ultimate end. But he was saying something even more fundamental than that. Pope Benedict was actually reiterating a recurrent line of his own thought. As then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in his homily at the mass beginning the papal conclave that would elect him pope, he said:

All people desire to leave a lasting mark. But what endures? Money does not. Even buildings do not, nor books. After a certain time, longer or shorter, all these things disappear. The only thing that lasts forever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity.

To say that the soul is what lasts is an invitation to focus on what matters for eternity, to form our lives around the well being of our souls — of ourselves as persons who have an eternal destiny.

The current economic crisis may well be a chance to do just that. A chance to reorient ourselves toward being grounded in those things that are eternally real.

An honest analysis, in the end, will confirm that it is simplistic in the extreme to claim that the current financial meltdown in the United States was simply brought upon us by Wall Street greed. This crisis is, in large part, the result of something much more profuse: a collective chink in our American armor, a flaw in our fabric, a cultural deficit. In the end we have, all of us, built our houses, if not completely, at least partially, on the sand of a materialism, instant gratification, and over-consumption. I don’t believe most people seek money as their ultimate end in life; but the pursuit of comfort and status comes close to that at times and in many ways is even worse. Far too many Americans have built their houses on sand. This episode in our country’s history will involve real hardship for many Americans. But comparing its effects to the true humanitarian travesty of abortion-on-demand, can we possibly believe they hold comparable moral magnitude?

Hardly.

An economic crisis like the present means that millions of Americans will experience negative, discomforting and, in many cases, dire consequences. But no expert I know of is suggesting the crisis will reach bread-line proportions. And even it if did, the suffering of such consequences comes nowhere close to the moral gravity of human beings directly targeting and destroying the lives of 50 million unborn babies as has been the case under America’s abortion-on-demand regime.

We can all agree that we must attend to the urgent task of getting our economy — a second-order reality — out of chaos. But we don’t have to swallow our convictions about the intrinsic dignity of unborn human life and the value of the human soul — a first-order reality — in order to do so.

– Father Thomas Berg, L.C., Ph.D., is executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person.