I want to thank all of the Cardinals and Bishops who have spoken out for the unborn at this time. These good men have been working hard to correct the statements of some ‘Catholic’ politicians like Jospeh Biden and Nancy Pelosi that distort and misrepresent Catholic teaching.  Here is a letter from Cardinal George who heads the Archdiocese of Chicago. Since Barak Obama comes from Chicago I think it is an important statement. I also found it interesting because Cardinal George mentions Christ in Mary’s womb in his letter.

Archdiocese of Chicago

Office of the Cardinal

September 2, 2008

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

In the midst of a lengthy political campaign, matters of public policy that are also moral issues sometimes are misrepresented or are presented in a partial or manipulative fashion. While everyone could be expected to know the Church’s position on the immorality of abortion and the role of law in protecting unborn children, it seems some profess not to know it and others, even in the Church, dispute it. Since this teaching has recently been falsely presented, the following clarification may be helpful.

The Catholic Church, from its first days, condemned the aborting of unborn children as gravely sinful. Not only Scripture’s teaching about God’s protection of life in the womb (consider the prophets and the psalms and the Gospel stories about John the Baptist and Jesus himself in Mary’s womb) but also the first century catechism (the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles) said: “You shall not slay the child by abortions. You shall not kill what is generated.” The teaching of the Church was clear in a Roman Empire that permitted abortion. This same teaching has been constantly reiterated in every place and time up to Vatican II, which condemned abortion as a “heinous crime.” This is true today and will be so tomorrow. Any other comments, by politicians, professors, pundits or the occasional priest, are erroneous and cannot be proposed in good faith.

This teaching has consequences for those charged with caring for the common good, those who hold public office. The unborn child, who is alive and is a member of the human family, cannot defend himself or herself. Good law defends the defenseless. Our present laws permit unborn children to be privately killed. Laws that place unborn children outside the protection of law destroy both the children killed and the common good, which is the controlling principle of Catholic social teaching. One cannot favor the legal status quo on abortion and also be working for the common good.

This explains why the abortion issue will not disappear and why it is central to the Church’s teaching on a just social order. The Church does not endorse candidates for office, but she does teach the principles according to which Catholics should form their social consciences. The teaching, which covers intrinsic evils such as abortion and many other issues that are matters of prudential judgment, could not be clearer; the practice often falls short because we are all sinners. There is no room for self-righteousness in Catholic moral teaching.

The Conference of Bishops in this country and the Bishops of Illinois have issued statements about Catholic social teaching and political life. They are available in our parishes. All of us should keep our country and all the candidates for office in the next election in our prayers. God bless you and your families.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.
Archbishop of Chicago

A funeral was held at St. Aloysius Church on Thursday, February 1, 2007 for former congressman Fr. Robert Drinan. Eulogists included Senator Edward Kennedy and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rev. Drinan was a Roman Catholic priest who served in the House of Representatives from 1971-1981. Excerpts from these Eulogies

Last week in a post entitled: The Catholic priest who killed the soul of the Democratic Party we talked about Father Robert Drinan’s deadly influence on Catholic politicians. Here is another account of how Father Drinan and the Kennedy family actually planned a strategy that would allow Catholics to support abortion when Robert Kennedy was running for the U.S. Senate in New York in 1964. The account would sound like a conspiracy theory except that it is well sourced from other priests who actually attended the meeting. We have also added three other sources at the end of the account (one from the Boston Globe) which talks about this 1964 meeting.

Here is an account of the meeting from Paul Likoudis in an article entitled Pro-Abortion Congressman Father Robert Drinan Dies in D. C. At 86:
Drinan came into political prominence in 1964, when he was asked to participate at a meeting in Hyannisport with Senator Edward Kennedy, with Robert Kennedy, then considering a run for the U.S. Senate from New York, and with leading [dissident] Catholic theologians. The point of the meeting was to formulate a “Catholic”position on government support for national and international birth control programs.

His [Drinan’s] role was disclosed by former Jesuit Albert Jonsen in the Joseph P. Kennedy Institute’s Ethics Journal, voL 4, no. 1 (1994) in an article entitled, “Theological Ethics, Moral Philosophy and Public Moral Discourse.” “In July 1964, Fr. Joseph Fuchs, SJ. a renowned [dissident] Catholic moral theologian and a professor at the Gregorian University in Rome, was among the guest faculty of an ethics course I was teaching at the Summer School of the University of San Francisco. Walking across campus one morning, Fr. Fuchs hailed me and told me that he had, on the previous day, received a phone call inviting him to join several other leading theologians in a meeting with Senator Ted Kennedy and Robert Kennedy at Hyannisport.

“Robert Kennedy was running for the New York Senate seat, and the Kennedy family and their political advisers wished to discuss the position that a Catholic politician should take on abortion. “Fr. Fuchs then astonished me by saying that since he knew nothing of American politics, he wanted me to accompany him. If I would agree, he would accept the invitation on the condition that I come as his companion. I agreed and they agreed.

Two days later, the distinguished German theologian and the American novice traveled to Cape Cod to join Catholic theologians Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School [dissident] Richard McCormick; [dissident] Charles Curran; and a bishop whose name I do not recall; as well as Andre Hellegers, an obstetrician and a fetal physiologist who was to be the technical adviser… “Our colloquium at Hyannisport, as I recall it… reached the conclusion that Catholic politicians in a democratic polity might advocate legal restriction on abortion, but in so doing might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances, if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order. This position, which, of course, is much more nuanced than I have stated, seems to have informed the politics of the Kennedys.”

Another Jesuit in on the Hyannisport meeting was Giles Milhaven, who recounted at a breakfast briefing for Catholicsfor a Free Choice, on September 14, 1984: “Having been asked to make a presentation this morning on Catholic options in public policy on abortion, I cannot but recall the last time I was invited to do so. It was 15 years ago [note: at least 16, since Robert Kennedy was murdered in 1968]. I remember vividly, Other theologians and I were driving down Route 3 to Cape Cod, with Bob Drinan at the wheel. We were to meet the Senators Kennedy and the Shrivers at their request. “I remember it vividly because the traffic lanes were jammed and halted, presumably because of an accident ahead, and Bob Drinan drove 60 miles an hour down the breakdown lane. Despite my misgivings each time we swept around a curve, we theologians arrived safely at the Kennedy compound.

“The theologians worked for a day and a half among ourselves at a nearby hotel. In the evening, we answered questions from the Kennedys and the Shrivers. Though the theologians disagreed on many a point, they concurred on certain basics. These include statements which I will make shortly. What was striking then and remains striking today is the difference between what [some] Catholic theologians say about abortion and what the Catholic Hierarchy say on the same subject …[In] flat contradiction to the Pope and the bishops in certain situations abortion is morally licit and may even be obligatory. ” [Yes, you read that right]. Internet source: Pastor’s Page By Fr. George Welzbacher.

Here are other sources which give an account of this meeting:

Separation anxiety – John Kerry’s religion problem — and the Catholic Democrat who can help him solve it. by Scott Stossel | May 23, 2004Boston Globe

Ted Kennedy’s Good Fortune by Thomas F. Roeser, Chicago Daily Observer, May 27, 2008

The Politics of Abortion, Anne Hendershott

How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma by Anne Hendershott

Two Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, who claim to be Catholics, yet support abortion ‘rights’ have been in the news this week. Many are asking themselves how did we get into a situation like this where two Catholics with such prominent roles in public life could so vocally and publicly promote abortion.

Let me start with a personal story. In 1974, when I was 23 years old my uncle from Louisiana came to visit our family. It just so happened that, at the time, my uncle was a Supreme Court Judge in Louisiana. (He was later elevated to the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.) One evening when my uncle and I were talking he shocked me when he told me that he agreed with Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision that had been handed down the year before by the U. S. Supreme Court. “How can you be Catholic and support abortion?” I asked incredulously.

He began to speak to me about a priest who he admired. The priest was Jesuit Father Robert Drinan, who had been elected to Congress a few years before the Roe v. Wade decision. (Father Drinan served 5 terms in Congress, 1971 – 1981.) It turned out that Father Robert Drinan supported abortion and was one of the originators of the slogan, “I am personally opposed to abortion but … I can’t impose my morality on a secular society.” My uncle basically told me that if a Catholic priest could support Roe v. Wade why couldn’t he. My uncle also mentioned his admiration for the liberal Jesuit magazine, America. At one point he chided me for being a ‘William Buckley Catholic’. At 23, I was obviously no match for my 54 year old Supreme Court Justice uncle, but I valiantly tried to stick up for the Church’s position against abortion.

In the years that followed I could see the sinister influence Drinan had on numerous leading Catholic Democrats, many of whom, changed from a pro-life position to a pro-abortion position. When the people of Massachusetts elected Drinan to serve 5 terms in Congress they were sending the slyest of foxes into the hen house of Congress. He gained instant prestige as a priest/politician deceiving many because of his position in the Church.

Drinan was one of the chief architects of the culture of death in the United States of America. In a future post we will talk about his 1964 meeting with the Kennedys in Hyannis Port to develop a phony ‘Catholic’ rationale that would mislead Catholics into supporting abortion.

During the Meet the Press interview on August 24, Nancy Pelosi responded to a question about when human life begins by saying that “as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition . . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”

For the entire transcript click here.

Denver’s Archbishop Chaput and the Auxilary Bishop James D. Conley issued a statement this morning refuting Nancy Pelosi’s terrible lie. Below is their statement –

ON THE SEPARATION OF SENSE AND STATE: A CLARIFICATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH IN NORTHERN COLORADO

To Catholics of the Archdiocese of Denver:

Catholic public leaders inconvenienced by the abortion debate tend to take a hard line in talking about the “separation of Church and state.” But their idea of separation often seems to work one way. In fact, some officials also seem comfortable in the role of theologian. And that warrants some interest, not as a “political” issue, but as a matter of accuracy and justice.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a gifted public servant of strong convictions and many professional skills. Regrettably, knowledge of Catholic history and teaching does not seem to be one of them. Interviewed on Meet the Press August 24, Speaker Pelosi was asked when human life begins. She said the following:

“I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time.And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”

Since Speaker Pelosi has, in her words, studied the issue “for a long time,” she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery’s Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977). Here’s how Connery concludes his study:

“The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion.”

Or to put it in the blunter words of the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended tocreate a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.”

Ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or “ensouled.” But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide.

In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong. Of course, we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today’s religious alibis for abortion and a so-called “right to choose” are nothing more than that – alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief. Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it – whether they’re famous or not – fool only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith.

The duty of the Church and other religious communities is moral witness. The duty of the state and its officials is to serve the common good, which is always rooted in moral truth. A proper understanding of the “separation of Church and state” does not imply a separation of faith from political life. But of course, it’s always important to know what our faith actually teaches.

+Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. Archbishop of Denver

+James D. Conley Auxiliary Bishop of Denver

We need GOOD CHANGE…and your voice! I’m going to participate…will you?

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