DO YOU KNOW THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS OUR NATION’S ONLY HOPE TO PREVENT AN OBAMA PRESIDENCY?
FINALLY, AN END TO CHURCH SILENCE!
Justin Cardinal Rigali is Chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishiops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities. He finally broke our Catholic leadership’s silence with a section of his statement on Respect Life Sunday regarding the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA): He said:
“Today, we face the threat of a federal bill that, if enacted, would obliterate all gains of the past 35 years and cause the abortion rate to skyrocket. The ‘Freedom of Choice Act’ has many Congressional sponsors, some of whom have pledged to act swiftly to help enact this proposed legislation when Congress reconvenes in January.
“FOCA establishes abortion as a ‘fundamental right’ throughout the nine months of pregnancy, and forbids any law or policy that could ’interfere’ with that right or ‘discriminate’ against it in public funding and programs.
“If FOCA became law, hundreds of reasonable, widely supported, and constitutionally sound abortion regulations now in place would be invalidated.
“Gone would be laws providing for informed consent, and parental consent or notification in the case of minors.
“Laws protecting women from unsafe abortion clinics and from abortion practioners who are not physicians would be overridden.
“Restrictions on partial-birth abortions and other late term abortions would be eliminated.
“FOCA would knock down laws protecting the conscience rights of nurses, doctors, and hospitals with moral objections to abortion, and force taxpayers to fund abortions throughout the U.S.”
“We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot tolerate an even greater loss of innocent human lives… We look forward to the day when these counseling services are no longer needed, when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law. If FOCA is enacted, however, that day may recede into the very distant future.”
Notice, there is no reference to the fact that Barrack Obama, on July 28th, 2008, in a speech to Planned Parenethood, told them his first act as president would be to enact FOCA. Following is our email to Cardinal Rigali on October 5th, 2008:
TO: Justin Cardinal Rigali
Chairman, USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities
Dear Cardinal Rigali,
As a Parish Pro-Life Advocate for the last ten years, I’m one of your sidewalk counselors at an abortion clinic here where we are currently holding the 40 Days For Life prayer vigil and working to maximize our Catholic pro-life vote in this year’s election.
Because of Bishop Farrell’s and Bishop Vann’s leadership here in the Dallas and Ft. Worth dioceses in preparing and educating our parishioners for this election through their Catholic Pro-Life Committees and Knights of Columbus organizations, we believe we will turnout a Catholic pro-life vote much higher than the national average of about 50% that voted in the last four presidential elections.
Doesn’t just a 50% pro-life vote indicate there is a huge gap between what our Church teaches on our moral obligations for voting and what some of our parishioners know and believe about our moral obligations?
Texas will vote pro-life anyway even without help here, but what about the rest of the nation or just nine or ten swing states? We have email addresses for 42 diocesan bishops ready to go in 11 swing states for this message, Your Eminence, but it would carry tons of more clout coming from you as Chairman of USCCB Pro-Life Activities.
What inspired me to write this email to you to spread the word about the election efforts Bishops Farrell and Vann have undertaken is your STATEMENT FOR RESPECT LIFE SUNDAY, and specifically the disturbing information you provide there about FOCA. And, isn’t the knowledge that Barrack Obama told Planned Parenthood on 7/28/08 that enacting FOCA would be his first action after his inauguration just as important to influence Catholic voters as the consequences of FOCA itself? See attachment #2, which includes his anti-life record.
The objective of this, then, Your Eminence, is to ask you, as Chairman of the USCCB’s Pro-Life Activities, to be a catalyst in bringing the voting power of Catholics being Catholic instead of being political to preventing the disaster you describe by making sure those four powerful vote changers below are being disseminated in at least those 42 dioceses of the major swing states through homilies and bulletin stuffers. See attachment #1 for an example of a concise flyer that eliminates non-essentials.
Your Eminence, those three paragraphs in your statement, along with the knowledge of the other three below, if made a part of every Catholic voter’s well-formed conscience, we believe could change the hearts and minds of enough of our Catholic voters who voted pro-choice last time to raise that pro-life 50% to 70% and win this election for our pro-life candidates for president and the senate where it matters the most to reverse Roe v Wade and prevent the passage of FOCA. In Dallas, we don’t believe Faithful Citizenship has sufficient clarity, brievity, and persuavive power to be massively effective.
Short of an attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities, isn’t getting a larger percentage of the Catholic vote the only event that can change the dynamics of this race to prevent your warning from becoming reality? And, you’re the first member of our leadership to mention this one of these four most important pieces of information our voters need to know in order to influence the way they vote without explicitly telling them how to vote.
1) What’s at stake in this election, that being about 35 million unborn babies over 30 years.
2) The clear Church teaching about the superior moral equivalence of abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell destruction, human cloning, and homosexual marriage, which eliminates all other issues this year.
3) The sinful consequences of violating that teaching, which are never clearly identified and of which many of those Catholic pro-choice voters are not aware or intentionally ignore.
4) The drastic consequences of FOCA to pro-life progress in your statement along with the candidates’ positions on the life issues.
Please visit our Blogsite, www.viewsfromthepews.wordpress.com, Articles #3 through #10 and Article #13 for a suggested diocesan plan and background on the practicality of this stratgy.
Your Eminence, isn’t this election the opportunity the Holy Spirit is presenting all Catholics to once again be Catholic in order to re-cultivate our Catholic identity in this country as exhorted to us by our Pope last April, and begin to restore our Church’s leadership as the standard of morality in the United States?
Because of Barrack Obama’s extreme anti-life radicalism, isn’t it time for our Catholic Church leadership at USCCB to require our diocesan bishops and pastors to end their silence from the pulpit about this election, FOCA, and the sinful consequences of voting for anti-life candidates? Pro-lifers are doing it, but, it means 1000% more and covers millions more of our voters when it comes from the pulpit on Sunday.
Is this your last chance to avoid waking up on November 5th to discover that you didn’t do all you could to prevent the most anti-life candidate for president in our history, a thug of Mayor Daley’s Chicago political machine, from becoming president? November 5th is too late to contemplate that question. Catholics voting as a block in America would tell the entire world that the Pope inspired an upset victory for Right-to-Life.
God give you courage, wisdom, and peace, Your Eminence.
IS IT A MORTAL SIN TO VOTE FOR ANTI-LIFE PRO-ABORTION POLITICIANS?
Section #1857 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
“For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.
“Unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense. But no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man.”
The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the document Declaration on Procured Abortion on November 18th 1974. Paragraph 22 states:
“…man can never obey a law which is in itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the liceity of abortion. Nor can he take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it.”
Any politician who votes for an abortion law is a formal accomplice to that law and any citizen who votes for that politician is a material accomplice to the abortions which will ensue from the election of that pro-death politician. Material cooperation in the evil of abortion is a mortal sin.
Many who call themselves Catholic support the legalized murder of unborn children. They continually reject the Church’s immutable and constant teaching throughout her 2000 years of history that abortion is a grave sin against God. As we see is section 62c of Pope John Paul II’s The Gospel of Life, they cannot claim invincible ignorance of the intrinsic evil of pre-natal murder:
“I declare that direct abortion…always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. …No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself and proclaimed by the Church.”
To say that a pro-abortion candidate’s stance on other issues, such as war, capital punishment, racism, social justice for the poor and hungry, the environment, immigration, etc. provide a morally equivalent reason for voting for him is absolutely false. These are not always intrinsically evil and do not always result in the death of innocent human beings. The 1998 American Bishops’ “Living the Gospel of Life,” in section 23, states:
“Any politics of human dignity must seriously address issues of racism, poverty, hunger, employment, education, housing, and health care. Therefore, Catholics should eagerly involve themselves as advocates for the weak and marginalized in all these areas…But being ‘right’ in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding attacks on innocent human life.” (Italics in original.)
In the current presidential election, we have an unmistakably clear choice between a staunch pro-life candidate, Republican John McCain, and a virulently anti-life pro-abortion candidate, democrat Barrack Obama, whose rabid support of pre-natal murder disqualifies him from holding any public office. Catholics, no matter what their party affiliation, cannot in good conscience vote for Obama. To do so is to put their immortal souls in grave danger.
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