God is not mocked. From Crisis:
Biden lurched leftward throughout 2019 and 2020 to the point that, by November 2020, a pro-life Catholic could not in good conscience justify voting for him. Sure, such a pro-life Catholic might not like Donald Trump and couldn’t muster the will to pull the lever for him either. But if the pro-life issue mattered to you and was genuinely the non-negotiable, top-priority issue that it should be for a faithful Catholic, then you could not defend casting a ballot for Biden. What he was intending to do for abortion, and the positions he had already adopted, was too much—morally unacceptable. Thereafter, you could hope and pray that as president he wouldn’t be as awful as his statements suggested.
Well, since placing his hand on that Bible and swearing the oath of office on January 20, 2021, Biden has been that awful and worse. And last week, he staked an especially egregious stance for a Catholic, least of all for the Catholic leader of the free world. To repeat: the “whole of government.” Wow.
We know where this leaves Joe Biden. It leaves him in a dark place. But where does it leave those pro-life Catholics (as well as committed pro-life Protestants) who voted for him?
It leaves them with a serious responsibility. They need to make reparation for their vote that made possible Biden’s reprehensible positions on abortion. They cannot blithely sit back making excuses for what he’s doing, shrug, or say that at least Biden doesn’t send out mean Tweets like Trump did. They need to call the White House, write letters, contact Congress, go to social media, and simply do something. They need to help ameliorate a situation they helped make possible.
Do I think they’ll do this? No, I don’t. I say that, regrettably, from experience. I’ve advised this same response for decades to pro-life Catholic Democrats who reflexively voted for pro-choice Democrats strictly because they had a “D” in front of their party affiliation. I’ve seen it again and again, from Catholic grandmas to Catholic union workers. They were pro-life on Sunday, but voted for the pro-choicer on Tuesday.
I had many a conversation pleading with them to use their voice to keep their beloved Democratic Party from shifting further to the extreme. They typically gave me a blank stare or barked something about “rich” Republicans. As they did, their party moved to a point where you can count on one hand the number of pro-life Democrats in Congress. They aided and abetted that. (Read more.)
From Live Action:
San Francisco’s Catholic Archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post this past week in which he decried the Catholic response to Texas’ new heartbeat law, going so far as to suggest that prominent Catholics who publicly support the slaughter of the preborn should be threatened with excommunication.
In his editorial, the Archbishop, who serves as the bishop for pro-abortion House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, expressed dismay that so many of the most outspoken abortion supporters also call themselves Catholic. “As a faith leader in the Catholic community, I find it especially disturbing that so many of the politicians on the wrong side of the preeminent human rights issue of our time are self-professed Catholics,” he wrote.
He also mentioned the summer’s earlier uproar, in which many people expressed outrage at the idea that pro-abortion politicians should be denied communion. “We were accused of inappropriately injecting religion into politics, of butting in where we didn’t belong,” he said. “I see matters differently.”
Archbishop Cordileone went on to liken today’s fight against abortion to the fight against racism decades ago, calling to mind the actions of New Orleans Archbishop Joseph Rummel, who worked tirelessly to resist racism and segregation within his churches and community despite backlash from many pro-segregation white Catholics. While Rummel urged those Catholics to put aside their racist views, he also used his leadership role to ultimately threaten excommunication to those who persisted in clear opposition to anti-racist Church teaching.
READ: Rasmussen poll: More Americans support Texas Heartbeat Act than oppose it
“Was that wrong? Was that weaponizing the Eucharist?” writes Cordileone. “No. Rummel recognized that prominent, high-profile public advocacy for racism was scandalous: It violated core Catholic teachings and basic principles of justice, and also led others to sin.”
Archbishop Cordileone believes that the approach to the fight against abortion should be similar to the one Rummel used:
In our own time, what could be a more egregious ‘denial of the unity and solidarity of the human race’ than abortion? Abortion kills a unique, irreplaceable human being growing in his or her mother’s womb. Everyone who advocates for abortion, in public or private life, who funds it or who presents it as a legitimate choice participates in a great moral evil.
Since the Roe decision, more than 60 million lives have been lost to abortion. Many millions more have been scarred by this experience, wounded victims whom society ignores.
Abortion is therefore the most pressing human rights challenge of our time. Can we pastors speak softly when the blood of 60 million innocent American children cries out for justice? When their mothers are condemned to silence, secretly suffering the injuries of the culture of ‘choice’?
Cordileone says that the appropriate response to the scourge of abortion is to support mothers and children in crisis, not to encourage them to abort. “The answer to crisis pregnancies is not violence, but love, for both mother and child,” he wrote. “This is hardly inappropriate for a pastor to say. If anything, Catholic political leaders’ response to the situation in Texas highlights the need for us to say it all the louder.” (Read more.)
From Catholic Culture:
To say that the Church teaches when human life begins is to allow the possibility that someone outside the Catholic communion—someone who does not feel himself bound by the authority of the magisterium—could disagree. It is a suggestion that this is religious belief, a sectarian position that other reasonable people might not embrace.
And that, of course, is precisely what pro-abortion apologists want people to believe: that opposition to abortion is based solely on a religious belief. That non-Catholics might allow the killing of unborn humans, just as non-Hindus might slaughter cows, with a clear conscience. If you can persuade enough people that an unborn human life is somehow not a human life, then you may be able to sidestep the condemnation that the Catholic Church—and every other moral authority—attaches to the deliberate killing of innocent human beings.
Forty-eight years and 62 million deaths after Roe v. Wade, Catholic prelates should know enough to avoid obvious rhetorical pitfalls—to give pro-abortion politicians the help they need to keep a spurious argument in circulation.
When President Biden said that he doesn’t agree with people who “think” that human life begins at conception, he exposed the weak flank of his position. (He also exposed the malleability of his principles, since a decade ago he told the world that he did accept that fact.) Anyone moderately familiar with the terms of this debate should pounce.
Let’s focus the debate on that moment of conception. Ask the scientists, ask the doctors to explain what this thing is, growing in a woman’s womb. Is it alive? Absolutely. What kind of life is it, then? Trust the science, President Biden. Trust the science, Cardinal Gregory. (Read more.)
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