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Archbishop Dolan and the sanctity of human life

Some people are afraid to talk about the Catholic Church’s core teachings, especially those relating to the sanctity of human life and the protection of marriage. But look what could…

Some people are afraid to talk about the Catholic Church’s core teachings, especially those relating to the sanctity of human life and the protection of marriage. But look what could happen when someone does.’,’In his homily at his installation Mass as Archbishop of New York (April 15), Archbishop Dolan received a spontaneous standing ovation when he came to this part in his homily:

–The Resurrection of Jesus goes on in our apostolate for the struggling, searching, and marginalized, as thousands of those closest to Christ’s Sacred Heart-the hungry, homeless, sick, troubled, and immigrants–find solace and help in our Catholic charities and healthcare. Conscious are we of former Mayor Ed Koch’s observation that the Catholic Church is the glue that keeps this city together . . . and, and . . . the Resurrection goes on, as His Church continues to embrace and protect the dignity of every human person, the sanctity of human life, from the tiny baby in the womb to the last moment of natural passing into eternal life. As the Servant of God Terrence Cardinal Cooke wrote, “Human life is no less sacred or worthy of respect because it is tiny, pre-born, poor, sick, fragile, or handicapped.” Yes, the Church is a loving mother who has a zest for life and serves life everywhere, but she can become a protective “mamma bear” when the life of her innocent, helpless cubs is threatened. Everyone in this mega-community is a somebody with an extraordinary destiny. Everyone is a somebody in whom God has invested an infinite love. That is why the Church reaches out to the unborn, the suffering, the poor, our elders, the physically and emotionally challenged, those caught in the web of addictions.

In talking with someone who was at the Mass, I learned that the standing ovation went on for several minutes. It’s a beautiful thing and the response demonstrates how hungry people are to hear these fundamental truths defended.
For more on the Archbishop’s installation, vespers in particular, check out this article by Kathryn Lopez.

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Witness for Life at Notre Dame & in LA

As with all bad situations, good can surface. While the official Notre Dame is struggling with its Catholic identity, other parts of the university are quite confident in their Catholic…

As with all bad situations, good can surface. While the official Notre Dame is struggling with its Catholic identity, other parts of the university are quite confident in their Catholic identity.

Just this past week, one of my favorite writers, Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, gave an amazing address at an event sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. The entire address is pasted below, but I’ll take the opportunity to draw your attention to the following excerpts:

For years this university has trumpeted her lay governance.  So what does it say about the Notre Dame brand of leadership, that in the midst of a national debate over a decision that speaks to our Catholic identity, a debate in which thousands of people across the country are standing up to declare themselves “yea” or “nay,” our trustees and fellows – the men and women who bear ultimate responsibility for this decision – remain as silent as Trappist monks?  At a time when we are told to “engage” and hold “dialogue,” their timidity thunders across this campus.  And what will history say of our billions in endowment if the richest Catholic university America has ever known cannot find it within herself to mount a public and spirited defense of the most defenseless among us?

….For those who think this a partisan point, let us stipulate for the record one of the curiosities of the Republican Party.  Notwithstanding the party’s prolife credentials, at the level of possible Presidential contenders, the most prominent pro-choice voices in the GOP arguably belong to Catholics:  from the former Republican mayor and governor of New York, to the Republican Governor of California, the Republican former governor of Pennsylvania, and so on.  Notre Dame must recognize these realities – and the role she has played in bringing us to this day by treating abortion as a political difference rather than the intrinsic evil it is.

The Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture has started a new Fund for the Protection of Human Life. Definitely see how you can support their work which includes bringing people like Bill McGurn to Notre Dame and keeping the Catholic identity alive at a top Catholic university.

It’s been a good week of witness to Catholic identity. You may have heard of Lila Rose who has been coordinating a brilliant expose of Planned Parenthood. Recently, Rachel Campos Duffy wrote this article about her for Catholic News Agency and the LA Times just ran this piece on Rose’s work.
The complete text of Bill McGurn’s address:

A Notre Dame Witness for Life
William McGurn
April 23, 2009

Good evening.

It is an honor to be with you on this campus.  It is a joy to be here under the auspices of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture – and the Notre Dame Fund for the Protection of Human Life.  This date has a special resonance for me:  13 years ago today, in a hotel room in a far part of the world, Chinese officials put a beautiful baby girl in my wife’s arms – and I
became a father.

The precipitate cause of our gathering tonight is the honor and platform our university has extended to a President whose policies reflect clear convictions about unborn life, and about the value the law ought to place on protecting that life.  These convictions are not in doubt.  In July 2007, the candidate spelled them out in a forceful address to a Planned Parenthood convention in our nation’s capital.

Before that audience, he declared that a woman’s “fundamental right” to an abortion was at stake in the coming election.  He spoke about how he had “put Roe at the center” of his “lesson plan on reproductive freedom” when he was a professor – and how he would put it at the center of his agenda as president.  He invoked his record in the Illinois state senate, where he fought restrictions on abortion, famously including one on partial-birth abortion.  He said that the “first thing” he wanted to do as President was to “sign a Freedom of Choice Act.”  And he ended by assuring his audience that “on this fundamental issue,” he, like they, would never yield.

These were his promises as a candidate.  His actions as President – his key appointments, his judicial nominees, his lifting of restrictions on federal funding for abortion providers overseas, the green light given to the destruction of human embryos for research, his targeting of “conscience clause” protections for healthcare workers – all these actions are fully consistent with his promises.  It is precisely this terrible consistency that makes it so dispiriting to see our university extend to this man her most public platform and an honorary doctorate of laws.  There are good men and women working for an America where every child is welcomed in life and protected by law – and when they lift their eyes to Notre Dame,
they ought to find inspiration.

So tonight our hearts carry a great sadness.  But we do not come here this evening to rally against a speaker.  We come to affirm the sacredness of life.  And we come with a great hope:  That a university founded under the patronage of Our Lady might be as consistent in the defense of her principles as the President of the United States has been for advancing his.  In a nation wounded by Roe … in a society that sets mothers against the children they carry in their wombs … we come here tonight because however much our hearts ache, they tell us this:  Our church, our country, and our culture long for the life witness of Notre Dame.

What does it mean to be a witness?  To be a witness, an institution must order itself so that all who look upon it see a consonance between its most profound truths and its most public actions.  For a Catholic university in the 21st century, this requires that those placed in her most critical leadership positions – on the faculty, in the administration, on the board of trustees – share that mission.  We must concede there is no guarantee that the young men and women who come here to learn will assent to her witness – but we must never forget that the university will have failed them if they leave here without at least understanding it.  That is what it means to be a
witness.

This witness is the only real reason for a University of Notre Dame. We believe that there are self-evident truths about the dignity of each human life, and that this dignity derives from our having been fashioned in our Creator’s likeness.  In this new century, these beliefs make us the counterculture.  One does not need to be a Catholic to appreciate that abortion involves the brutal taking of innocent human life.  To argue that this is a Catholic truth, or even a religious truth, is to overlook what science and sonograms tell us – and to insult the Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and, yes, even some atheists, who appreciate that a civilization which sanctions abortion as a human right is in some essential way writing its death warrant.

Over the years, the whole idea of truth – much less our ability to know it – has been rendered doubtful by the slow advance of a soft agnosticism that has itself become orthodoxy at so many universities.  Not so at Notre Dame.  All across this wondrous campus, we pass imagery that sings to us about the hope born of a Jewish woman in a Bethlehem stable.  Yet we kid ourselves if we believe these images are self- sustaining.  Without a witness that keeps these signposts alive, our crosses, statues, and stained- glass windows will ultimately fade into historical curiosities like the Christo et ecclesiae that survives to this day on buildings around Harvard Yard and the seal that still validates every Harvard degree.

For most of her life, Notre Dame has served as a symbol of a Catholic community struggling to find acceptance in America – and yearning to make our own contributions to this great experiment in ordered liberty.  We identify with those who are poor and downtrodden and on the margins of acceptance because that is where the Gospel points – and because we remember whence came our own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

If we are honest, however, we must admit that in many ways we – and the university that nurtured us – are now the rich and powerful and privileged ourselves.  This is a form of success, and we need not be embarrassed by it.  But we must be mindful of the greater responsibilities that come with this success.

For years this university has trumpeted her lay governance.  So what does it say about the Notre Dame brand of leadership, that in the midst of a national debate over a decision that speaks to our Catholic identity, a debate in which thousands of people across the country are standing up to declare themselves “yea” or “nay,” our trustees and fellows – the men and women who bear ultimate responsibility for this decision – remain as silent as Trappist monks?  At a time when we are told to “engage” and hold “dialogue,” their timidity thunders across this campus.  And what will history say of our billions in endowment if the richest Catholic university America has ever known cannot find it within herself to mount a public and spirited defense of the most defenseless among us?

In the past few weeks, we have read more than once the suggestion that to oppose this year’s speaker and honorary degree is to elevate politics over the proper work of a university.  In many ways, we might say that such reasoning lies at the core of the confusion.  As has become clear with America’s debates over the destruction of embryos for scientific research, over human cloning, over assisted suicide, and over other end-of-life issues, abortion as a legal right is less a single issue than an entire ethic that serves as the foundation stone for the culture of death.

With the idea that one human being has the right to take the life of another merely because the other’s life is inconvenient, our culture elevates into law the primacy of the strong over the weak.  The discord that this year’s commencement has unleashed – between Notre Dame and the bishops, between members of the Notre Dame community, between Notre Dame and thousands of discouraged Catholic faithful – all this derives from an approach that for decades has treated abortion as one issue on a political scorecard. This is not the road to engagement.  This is the route to incoherence, and we see its fruit everywhere in our public life.

Twenty-five years ago, on a similar stage on this campus, the then-governor of New York used his Notre Dame platform to advance the personally-opposed-but defense that countless numbers of Catholic politicians have used to paper over their surrender to legalized abortion.   Eight years after that, the school bestowed the Laetare Medal on a United States Senator who had likewise long since cut his conscience to fit the abortion fashion.

Today we have evolved.  Let us note that the present controversy comes at a moment where the incoherence of the Catholic witness in American public life is on view at the highest levels of our government.  Today we have a Catholic vice president, a Catholic Speaker of the House, a Catholic nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, and so on.  These are America’s most prominent Catholics.  And they have one thing in
common:  The assertion that the legal right to terminate a pregnancy – in the chilling euphemism of the day – must remain inviolable.

For those who think this a partisan point, let us stipulate for the record one of the curiosities of the Republican Party.  Notwithstanding the party’s prolife credentials, at the level of possible Presidential contenders, the most prominent pro-choice voices in the GOP arguably belong to Catholics:  from the former Republican mayor and governor of New York, to the Republican Governor of California, the Republican former governor of Pennsylvania, and so on.  Notre Dame must recognize these realities – and the role she has played in bringing us to this day by treating abortion as a political difference rather than the intrinsic evil it is.

In his writings, Pope John Paul II noted the awful contradiction of our times, when more and more legal codes speak of human rights while making the freedom to deprive the innocent of their lives one of those rights.  Several times he uses the word “sinister” to characterize the enshrinement of abortion as a legal right.  And he states that all pleas for other important human rights are “false and illusory” if we do not defend with “maximum determination” the fundamental right to life upon which all other rights
rest.

Maximum determination.  Ladies and gentlemen, the unborn child’s right to life represents the defining civil rights issue of our day – and it ought to be a defining civil rights issue on this campus.

This is not a popular witness.  In our country, those who take it must expect ridicule and derision and a deliberate distortion of our views.  In our culture, so many of our most powerful and influential institutions are hostile to any hint that abortion might be an unsettled question.  And in our public life, one of the most pernicious effects of the imposition of abortion via the Supreme Court is that it has deprived a free people of a fair and open debate.  Notre Dame remains one of the few institutions capable of providing a witness for life in the fullness of its beauty and intellectual integrity – and America is waiting to hear her voice.

Those who say that as Notre Dame engages the world, she cannot expect her guests to share all her beliefs are right.  But that is not the issue. The issue is that we engage them.  Think of how we would have treated an elected Senator or President or Governor whose principles and actions were given over to seeing that segregation enjoyed the full and unqualified protection of American law.  We would have been cordial … we would have been gracious … we would have been more than willing to debate … but we would have betrayed our witness if ever we brought them here on the idea that all that divided us was one political issue.

My friends, the good news is that the witness for life is alive at Notre Dame.  We see this witness in the good work of teachers here in this room.  We see this witness in the new Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human Life.  I have seen this witness in a very personal way, on the cold gym floor of a suburban parochial school on the outskirts of Washington – where 200-plus students spent a freezing January night just so they could raise the Notre Dame banner at the annual March for Life.  These are but a handful of the wonderful things going on at this campus.  And we know that this witness exists too in the other, unheralded acts of love designed to ensure that the unwed sophomore who kneels before the Grotto with an unexpected pregnancy weighing on her mind has a better choice than the cold front door of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Unfortunately, people across this nation – and perhaps even here at this university – know little of these things.  And they do not know because the university keeps this lamp under a basket.  In her most public witness, Notre Dame appears afraid to extend to the cause of the unborn the same enthusiasm she shows for so many other good works here.

If, for example, you click onto www.nd.edu, you will often find a link for the Office of Sustainability, which happily informs you about all the things Notre Dame is doing to be green-friendly.  You will find another link that defines the university with a series of videos that ask, “What would you fight for?”  Each home game during the football season, NBC broadcasts one of these videos.  They are more than a dozen of them – each highlighting members of the Notre Dame community who are fighting for justice, fighting for advances in medicine, fighting for new immigrants, and so forth.

Imagine the witness that Notre Dame might provide on a Fall afternoon, if millions of Americans who had sat down to watch a football game suddenly found themselves face to face with a Notre Dame professor or student standing up to say, “I fight for the unborn.”

Even more important, imagine the larger witness for life that would come from putting first things first.  So often we find support for abortion rights measured against decisions involving war, capital punishment, and so on.  All these issues deserve more serious treatment.  But the debate over these prudential judgments loses coherence if on the intrinsic evil of abortion we do not stand on the same ground.  What a challenge Notre Dame would pose to our culture if she stood united on this proposition:  The unborn belong to no political party … no human right is safe when their right to life is denied … and we will accept no calculus of justice that seeks to trade that right to life for any other.

Now, there are different paths to this witness – and many who say they share it maintain their only problem is with the prolife movement itself:  It’s too Republican, it’s not effective, it’s too militant, and so forth.  We who are prolife must admit that some of these criticisms have an element of truth.  Yet those who advance them must also acknowledge that in practice such criticisms often serve not to strike out a bold new path for a more informed witness, but to rationalize a preference for remaining on the sidelines.

Tonight I ask our prolifers to open up the dialogue to your professors and classmates.  Invite them in.  Say to them:  “Brothers!  Sisters!  We are not perfect, and we will be much improved by your participation.  We are holding a place for you on the front lines.  Come join us – and let us walk together in our witness for life.”

I appreciate that for some people, the idea of Notre Dame as an unequivocal witness for the unborn would be a limit on her work as a Catholic university. The truth is just the opposite.  The more frank and forthright Notre Dame’s witness for life, the more she would be given the benefit of the doubt on the many judgment calls that the life of a great university entails.  At this hour in our nation’s life, America thirsts for an alternative to the relativism that leaves so many of our young people feeling empty and alone.  This alternative is the Catholic witness that Notre Dame was created to provide – that Notre Dame is called to provide – and that in many ways, only Notre Dame can provide.

Let me end with a story about one of our family.  His name is John Raphael; he belongs to the Class of ‘89; and he’s an African-American who runs a high school in New Orleans.  He’s also a Josephite priest.

In his ministry, Father Raphael knows what it is like to answer the knock on his office door and find a woman consumed by the understandable fears that attend an unplanned pregnancy.  He says that one of the greatest lessons he learned about how to respond to these women came from a friend of his, who had come to him in the same circumstances.  The woman was an unmarried college student, and she told him what had surprised and hurt her most was how many friends greeted her news by saying, “Oh, that’s terrible.”

“That young lady taught me something,” says Father Raphael.  “She taught me that what these women need first and foremost is to have their motherhood affirmed.  For too many women, this affirmation never comes.  We need to let these mothers know what their hearts are already telling them:  you may have made a mistake, but the life growing within you is no mistake.  That life is your baby, waiting to love and be loved.”

My young friends, this night I ask you:  Make yours the voice that affirms life and motherhood.  Be to those in need as the words of our alma mater:  tender … strong … and true.  And in your every word and deed, let the world see a reflection of the hope that led a French-born priest in the north woods of Indiana to raise Our Lady atop a dome of gold.

I thank you for your invitation.  I applaud your courage.  And as we go forth this evening, let us pray that our beloved university becomes the Notre Dame our world so desperately needs:  a witness for life that will truly shake down the thunder.

God bless you all.

Porn. The new tobacco?’
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Porn. The new tobacco?

I know. You’re wondering what porn and tobacco have to do with each other especially since cigarettes are practically vilified and porn is widely accepted. But Mary Eberstadt provides yet…

I know. You’re wondering what porn and tobacco have to do with each other especially since cigarettes are practically vilified and porn is widely accepted. But Mary Eberstadt provides yet another interesting analysis in her latest article.

Eberstadt offers a fascinating insight. Porn is mainstreamed and widely accepted just like tobacco was 50 years ago. Everybody accepted smoking even if they themselves didn’t smoke. It was almost considered a right. If people didn’t smoke, they thought that there was nothing they could do about those who did. Smoking was just a given and it was “harmless”. Are you starting to see the similarities?

Like tobacco, Eberstadt sees the potential for educating people about the harm of pornography. She writes:

Despite that synergy, however, there is evidence that pornography does cause harm to at least some people. Consider, for example, its apparent widespread interference in the workplace. According to a 2007 survey by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Journal, 65 percent of corporations now use pornography-detecting software, up from 40 percent in 2001. According to that same study, fully 84 percent of the 30 percent of bosses who said they fired someone for internet misuse cited pornography as the reason why. These facts alone strongly suggests that pornography consumption is both compromising at least some office work on a large scale, and also becoming a risk factor for at least some employees in job loss.

Indirect evidence from other sources, such as divorce cases and reports by clergy and therapists, also suggest that pornography can cause harm. Consider the increasing role played by internet pornography in divorce proceedings. According to a meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, for example, 62 percent of the 350 attendees said that the internet had been a significant factor in cases handled that year — and that was in 2002, well behind today’s levels of pornography consumption. Numerous pastors and priests and ministers and therapists have reported that pornography use is now the leading cause of marital trouble and breakup they encounter as counselors.3  If we accept that marital breakup itself causes distress to both parties as well as to any children involved, then pornography’s potential cast of victims appears to widen significantly by virtue of that fact alone.

Third, the claim that pornography causes harm to at least some users can be also be inferred from the fact that some people will go out of their way to avoid encountering pornography, including by paying for software that blocks it. In this way at least some potential consumers signal tacitly their own decision that pornography is potentially injurious — much the same way as the millions who have joined programs to quit smoking, often at their own expense, have signaled their own consumer view that the substance they want to avoid is injurious.

And she notes the role of women both in the promulgation of tobacco and the mainstreaming of porn. After all, the makers of a product do better when the entire population buys into it rather than just half of the population, especially a half that can be influenced by the other half:

In sum, women’s liberation has been used in the attempt to sell women on pornography in much the same fashion as it was used to sell women on cigarettes beginning almost a century ago. Feminists often echo this theme themselves in their roaming defenses of the newer product. No less an authority than Betty Friedan, for example, endorsed the book Defending Pornography by aclu President Nadine Strossen — with the notion that “free expression is an essential foundation for women’s liberty, equality and security.”

The article is definitely worth a read. Take the time even if you can’t read it all at once.

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R.I.P. Dr. Tom Dillon

Dr. Tom Dillon president of Thomas Aquinas College was killed in a car accident in Ireland on April 16. His wife Terri was with him. She was injured, but is…

Dr. Tom Dillon president of Thomas Aquinas College was killed in a car accident in Ireland on April 16. His wife Terri was with him. She was injured, but is in stable condition. Please pray for them both and their family. Dr. Dillon’s death is a great loss to his family and to the community of Thomas Aquinas College.

Just last month, the college chapel was dedicated. It was the culmination of about ten years of work, driven largely by Dr. Dillon. Take a look at his nunc dimittis and consider giving to the college in his memory. This is one Catholic institution that isn’t confused about its identity thanks to people like Dr. Dillon and the many others who have given so much of themselves to make Catholic education a reality for many of us, including myself.

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Make your voice heard

If you want to save Catholic healthcare, act now. Today! The Obama administration recently announced that the conscience protection regulations passed by the previous administration could be rescinded. Regardless of…

If you want to save Catholic healthcare, act now. Today!

The Obama administration recently announced that the conscience protection regulations passed by the previous administration could be rescinded. Regardless of your opinion of the previous administration, this demands your attention now. In effect, if  conscience protection is rescinded, it means that health care workers (doctors and nurses) could be forced to provide services that violate their conscience. In other words, they could be forced to provide abortion, contraception, sterilizations, and to assist in euthanasia.

For more information, visit the USCCB website here.

Everyone has an obligation to weigh in. Remember, if you don’t speak, you allow others to speak for you. If this regulation passes, Catholic healthcare providers could be forced to shut down if they are forced to provide services that not only violate conscience but destroy human lives.

To submit your opinion to the Department of Health & Human Services (the agency responsible for this regulation), go here.

The deadline is today!

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Denying a holocaust

It seems to be the trendy thing to do. One the one hand, we have a Catholic leader who denies that Nazi Germany killed six million Jews. At the same…

It seems to be the trendy thing to do. One the one hand, we have a Catholic leader who denies that Nazi Germany killed six million Jews. At the same time, there’s a group of Catholics that denies that almost 50 million pre-born children have been killed in the US alone.

George Neumayr has this excellent piece in which he draws out the comparison. It is a tragedy that anyone would deny the historical fact that six million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany. (Unfortunately, many more were killed in Communist Russia.) But as Neumayr points out, it’s even worse to deny what is actually happening now and to support it at the same time, which is exactly what Speaker Pelosi and her cadre do now when it comes to the abortion holocaust.

Neumayr notes the irony of holocaust denier Speaker Pelosi seeking an audience with the Pope. While she got her audience, I’m glad that it was used apparently as a teaching moment.

Regarding the Speaker’s spin/official statement, Neumayr writes:

Global warming? The last time I recall Benedict broaching the subject of global warming he pointedly observed that environmentalists need a “human ecology” with which to stop killing unborn babies.

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Notre Dame & Its Catholic Identity

Well, it appears that Notre Dame University is still somewhat confused about its Catholic identity. When considering who could possibly be invited to address the graduates of one of the…

Well, it appears that Notre Dame University is still somewhat confused about its Catholic identity. When considering who could possibly be invited to address the graduates of one of the most prestigious universities in the country, some of whom will hopefully be Catholic leaders, the university thought it would be good to invite President Obama, a politician who has one of the most extreme pro-abortion/anti-life records of any politician, if not the most extreme.

I weighed for National Review Online’s symposium on the matter.

You can take action here.

Bishop D’Arcy released a statement announcing that he will not be attending the commencement ceremony. You can read it here.

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Life

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had a meeting on Wednesday with Pope Benedict XVI. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall or a mouse in the corner,…

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had a meeting on Wednesday with Pope Benedict XVI. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall or a mouse in the corner, but we’ve got this…

The Vatican issued a statement about the meeting between the Pope and Speaker Pelosi. You may recall that she had a rather odd idea of the Church’s teaching regarding abortion. I wrote about it here. She tripped over her words but insisted that the Church has been debating this for years and that she’s an expert in the topic. More recently, she proposed contraception as a solution to economic woes. Presumably, she considers children a drain on the economy, at least until they make enough to pay taxes.

I have to admit that I spent some time joking with friends about how this meeting might go. When I suggested that the Pope give her a copy of the Catechism, a friend added that it should have the more important parts hi-lighted. National Review Online has this spoof which is in the same vein, only much more developed.

Everyone makes mistakes, but something as public as the Speaker’s statements on abortion, contraception, and her own understanding of Catholicism demands correction in the same public level. It would be one thing if she were to say that she disagrees with the Church’s teaching, but what she claims is the teaching of the Church is absolutely wrong. Imagine her reaction if one of her Democratic colleagues started to go against the party platform or even the stimulus bill.

For more on the Speaker’s visit with the Pope, John Allen has this analysis and there are many news reports like this one.

Meanwhile, North Dakota passed legislation defining the fertilized egg as having all the rights of a person. This is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade in which the court based its decision on the findings, or lack thereof, namely that the court did not know when life begins.

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