U.S. bishops damaging rich Catholic faith tradition
(NOTE: This article was sent to us by a friend of ours, a Catholic nun who, well past 70, is still an outspoken advocate for peace and human rights.)
By Lisa Sowle Cahill
Published: October 16, 2008
National Catholic Reporter
The Catholic church has a problem on its hands. Just weeks before the presidential election, a few bishops and prelates have come dangerously close to making implicit political endorsements by telling Catholics that abortion trumps all other moral issues and lashing out against the Democratic Party.
For those who support an essential role for faith in public life, this is a disturbing trend for both religion and democracy.
In Scranton, Pa., a blue-collar bellwether for Catholic swing voters, Bishop Joseph Martino ordered priests to read a letter at all Sunday Masses that excoriated pro-choice candidates for supporting "homicide" and named abortion as the most important issue for Catholic voters. Other grave threats to the sanctity of life such as war, torture, racism and the silent genocide of poverty that kills 30,000 children every day around the world were downplayed.
Former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke recently called the Democrats a "party of death" from his new post as head of the Vatican's highest court. The president of the AFL-CIO in Missouri was so fed up with partisanship from the pulpit that he stormed out of a Mass recently after the priest invoked Hitler's name in condemning pro-choice Democrats.
Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston has suggested in the past that Catholic support for the Democratic Party "borders on scandal," and a few weeks ago publicly praised Gov. Sarah Palin's Down syndrome child as the "star" of the political conventions at a rally on Boston Common.
(Continued here.)
By Lisa Sowle Cahill
Published: October 16, 2008
National Catholic Reporter
The Catholic church has a problem on its hands. Just weeks before the presidential election, a few bishops and prelates have come dangerously close to making implicit political endorsements by telling Catholics that abortion trumps all other moral issues and lashing out against the Democratic Party.
For those who support an essential role for faith in public life, this is a disturbing trend for both religion and democracy.
In Scranton, Pa., a blue-collar bellwether for Catholic swing voters, Bishop Joseph Martino ordered priests to read a letter at all Sunday Masses that excoriated pro-choice candidates for supporting "homicide" and named abortion as the most important issue for Catholic voters. Other grave threats to the sanctity of life such as war, torture, racism and the silent genocide of poverty that kills 30,000 children every day around the world were downplayed.
Former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke recently called the Democrats a "party of death" from his new post as head of the Vatican's highest court. The president of the AFL-CIO in Missouri was so fed up with partisanship from the pulpit that he stormed out of a Mass recently after the priest invoked Hitler's name in condemning pro-choice Democrats.
Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston has suggested in the past that Catholic support for the Democratic Party "borders on scandal," and a few weeks ago publicly praised Gov. Sarah Palin's Down syndrome child as the "star" of the political conventions at a rally on Boston Common.
(Continued here.)
Powered by Blogger
1 Comments:
Election Day may have come and gone, but Cardinal J. Francis Stafford in a November 13th speech compared America’s future with Obama as president to Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane:
“On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake.”
“If 1968 was the year of America’s ‘suicide attempt,’ 2008 is the year of America’s exhaustion, ” said Stafford, an American Cardinal and Major Penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary for the Tribunal of the Holy See. “In the intervening 40 years since Humanae Vitae, the United States has been thrown upon ruins.”
Douglas Kmiec, former Dean of the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University and a supporter of Obama reacted : The Cardinal is a great churchmen and defender of the Faith, but sometimes all of us — even the wisest among us – are given to speak not from personal knowledge but from that which has been portrayed as true, but is really a caricature. Political partisans from the conservative ranks portray the President-elect as anti-life. He is not; the new President merely intends to use compassion and assistance, not condemnation and prohibition to promote human life. The Cardinal I believe is reacting to a false portrayal that has obscured this fact. When the Cardinal comes to know the new President better, he will readily see that President Obama has far more in common with our great faith tradition than any political administration in recent memory. Quite obviously, and quite sincerely, President Obama shares with our Church a concern for the most vulnerable and the poor, the average family, health care as a human right, bringing to an end an unjust war, welcoming the stranger in a reformed immigration system, treasuring the environment. All this suggests to me that the Holy See and the Barack Obama administration will be working more closely together in the service to others than any other administration in modern memory. With all due respect, it is my expectation that when the Cardinal comes to know the new president better, he will see the extent to which his initial impression was more the product of GOP distortion than truth. In short, he will find himself not in the Garden of Gethsemane but in the company of a fellow Christian apostle, who, like the Cardinal himself, seeks only to carry forward, with as much charity toward each other as can be manifest, Christ’s transformative mission of here on earth. The secret yet to be revealed: the “change” President Obama speaks of is the same transformation of culture that the Cardinal has worked for all his life in Christ’s name.
Gosh, I just wish people would wait until Obama does something before condemning him.
Post a Comment
<< Home