This Did Not Just Happen, part one

[34] Justice exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable. (Proverbs 14: 34.)

The United States of America has long sanctioned sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance under cover of the civil law and in every nook and cranny of what passes for popular culture and, very tragically, many of the conciliar “bishops” here in the United States of America have enabled and indemnified pro-death politicians, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, even before the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973.

The State of New York passed legislation in 1970, albeit by one vote in the State Senate (cast by a Catholic, State Senator Edward Speno of East Meadow, Long Island, New York), to permit baby-killing through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy:

The pre-Roe statutes allowed abortion on demand through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.  After the twenty-fourth week, an abortion could be performed on a pregnant woman only if there was “a reasonable belief that such is necessary to preserve her life.  In a pre-Roe decision, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the law brought by a guardian ad litem for unborn children  The legality of abortion would not be affected by the overruling of Roe v. Wade.  The pre-Roe statutes, which have not been repealed, allow abortion on demand through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.  After the twenty-fourth week, however, abortions could be performed only to preserve the woman’s life.

Regardless of Roe, any attempt to prohibit abortion (at least before viability) in New York probably would be barred by language in the New York Court of Appeals’ decision in Hope v. Perales, a challenge to the New York Prenatal Care Assistance Program.  In Hope, the court of appeals noted in passing that “it is undisputed by defendants that the fundamental right of reproductive choice, inherent in the due process liberty right guaranteed by our State Constitution, is at least as extensive as the Federal constitutional right [recognized in Roe v. Wade].” New York, Life Legal Defense Fund. 

It is instructive at this point to note that, despite his rhetorical opposition to abortion from the pulpit, the conciliar archbishop of New York, Terence "Cardinal" Cooke, did not believe that it was his business to personally lobby Catholic members of the New York State Legislature to remind them to oppose then Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller's dreadful bill in 1970:

During the year after Terence Cooke was named cardinal, a tremendous battle raged in the New York State legislature over abortion. This battle placed Cardinal Cooke in a dilemma, because he was opposed to any action that even looked like an attempt to directly influence a legislator. He believed that an informed electorate should influence the legislature. He was not the slightest bit bashful, however, in trying to inform that electorate about pertinent issues concerning morality. But the cardinal was not at all comfortable with the idea of politicians being controlled by religious leaders. He felt that that was a style that belonged to an earlier day, when anti-Catholic prejudice was strong and as a result there were semi-official, pro-Catholic political leaders. (Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., Thy Will Be Done: A Spiritual Portrait of Terence Cardinal Cooke, 1990, Alba House, p. 216.)

Such is the difference between conciliarism and Catholicism that Terence Cooke did not believe that it was his solemn duty as a bishop (he was a true bishop) to remind Catholic legislators of the fact that their own immortal souls would be imperiled by voting for Rockefeller's baby-killing bill fifty-two years ago whereas Pope Pius XI had not hesitated to remind magistrates who supported the killing of the innocent preborn that they would have to face the Avenger of innocent blood at the moment of their Particular Judgment for doing so:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

The abdication of duty by "Cardinal" Cooke set the tone for the conciliar "bishops" from that time to the present day, noting a few exceptions here and there. A false church that endorses the falsehood called "separation of Church and State" cannot have its prelates (true or false) "imposing" their "views" upon elected officials.

Moreover, not one Catholic pro-abort in public life has ever faced any sanction whatsoever for having done so, and the late New York State Edward Speno, though denied a so-called "Mass of Christian Burial" in his home parish of the Church of Saint Raphael in East Meadow, New York, was permitted by the founding bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre to have such a service at Sacred Heart Church in North Merrick, New York:

Although the Senator, a Catholic, was identified with his church on school aid, he broke with the hierarchy last year and voted for abortion liberealization. He explained his stand by saying that he did not want to impose his personal beliefs on others. (The New York Times, "Senator Edward Speno Dies; Favored Parochial School Aid, February 17, 1971. This is one of those articles that I had to purchase to get the exact quote that I wanted before typing in the text manually. I may not be--and have never claimed to be an intellectual., great or otherwise. I am, however, a pretty decent researcher.)

Edward Speno did not "want to impose his personal beliefs on others." He was reminded at the moment of his own Particular Judgment that morality exists in the very nature of things. The tenets of the Natural Law are knowable by reason. The Catholic Church is merely the eternal guardian and infallible explicator of those tenets so as to remove confusion from the minds of men so clouded by, at least in some instances, Original Sin (and its vestigial after-effects in the souls of the baptized) and Actual Sins to aid them in understanding the Natural Law more clearly and to strengthen their wills by means of Holy Mother Church's sanctifying offices to speak up in their defense. There also happens to be Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill.

As Pope Leo XIII explained in Sapientiae Christianae, January 11, 1890:

Now, if the natural law enjoins us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we had birth, and in which we were brought up, so that every good citizen hesitates not to face death for his native land, very much more is it the urgent duty of Christians to be ever quickened by like feelings toward the Church. For the Church is the holy City of the living God, born of God Himself, and by Him built up and established. Upon this earth, indeed, she accomplishes her pilgrimage, but by instructing and guiding men she summons them to eternal happiness. We are bound, then, to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love, with ardent love, the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure forever. For fitting it is to prefer the good of the soul to the well-being of the body, inasmuch as duties toward God are of a far more hallowed character than those toward men.

Moreover, if we would judge aright, the supernatural love for the Church and the natural love of our own country proceed from the same eternal principle, since God Himself is their Author and originating Cause. Consequently, it follows that between the duties they respectively enjoin, neither can come into collision with the other. We can, certainly, and should love ourselves, bear ourselves kindly toward our fellow men, nourish affection for the State and the governing powers; but at the same time we can and must cherish toward the Church a feeling of filial piety, and love God with the deepest love of which we are capable. The order of precedence of these duties is, however, at times, either under stress of public calamities, or through the perverse will of men, inverted. For, instances occur where the State seems to require from men as subjects one thing, and religion, from men as Christians, quite another; and this in reality without any other ground, than that the rulers of the State either hold the sacred power of the Church of no account, or endeavor to subject it to their own will. Hence arises a conflict, and an occasion, through such conflict, of virtue being put to the proof. The two powers are confronted and urge their behests in a contrary sense; to obey both is wholly impossible. No man can serve two masters, for to please the one amounts to contemning the other.

As to which should be preferred no one ought to balance for an instant. It is a high crime indeed to withdraw allegiance from God in order to please men, an act of consummate wickedness to break the laws of Jesus Christ, in order to yield obedience to earthly rulers, or, under pretext of keeping the civil law, to ignore the rights of the Church; "we ought to obey God rather than men." This answer, which of old Peter and the other Apostles were used to give the civil authorities who enjoined unrighteous things, we must, in like circumstances, give always and without hesitation. No better citizen is there, whether in time of peace or war, than the Christian who is mindful of his duty; but such a one should be ready to suffer all things, even death itself, rather than abandon the cause of God or of the Church. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.) 

Did Edward Speno know this?

Well, perhaps he was taught this at Niagara University, which is under the control of the Congregation of the Mission (the Vincentian Fathers of Saint Vincent de Paul) when he studied there from 1938 to 1944. Perhaps. He sure did not learn it from his own bishop, Walter P. Kellenberg (who was the bishop who confirmed me at Saint Aloysius Church on March 21, 1961).

Why not?

Well, the bishop who consecrated Father Walter P. Kellenberg, a native of the Borough of the Bronx in the City of New York, as a auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of New York on October 5, 1953, was none other than Francis Cardinal Spellman, who, as noted just bellow in this commentary, enabled the Sangerite forces on Puerto Rico fifty-seven years ago to make it more possible for United States Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) to become the first Catholic to be elected to the American presidency later that year, 1960.

Although Bishop Walter Kellenberg did not insist that the pastor, Father Francis Bain, of Saint Raphael's Church in East Meadow, New York, who refused Speno a "Mass of Christian" Burial reverse himself, he did permit such a "service" to be staged at Sacred Heart Church in North Merrick, New York. This was the first known instance, at least to me, of a Catholic who cooperated formally in making surgical baby-killing "available" under cover of the civil law receiving what purported to be a Catholic funeral service. Many have been the occasions since this that this has been done, scandalizing "pro-life" Catholics and "pro-life" non-Catholics alike.

Thus began the conciliar indemnification, partly out of fear of losing the tax-exempt status of various parishes and diocese and partly out of a desire to placate Catholics in public life who, though pro-abortion, were committed to "social justice" (statism, collectivism, feminism, globalism, opposition to the death penalty, etc.) that has continued to this very day. The names may have changed from the likes of Edward Speno, William Brennan, Peter Rodino, Charles Rangel, Edward Moore Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Hugh Leo Carey, Thomas Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, Mario Matthew Cuomo, Thomas Harkin, and Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr., to the likes of Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, Richard Durbin, Christopher Newsom, Michelle Lujan Grisham, Kathleen Hochul, Andrew Mark Cuomo, Kirsten Gillebrand, Susan Collins, Patricia Murray, Lawrence Hogan, Edward Markey, Philip Murphy, Robert Edward ("Beto") O'Rourke, and, among so many others, Christopher Murphy, although one name has remained rather consistent, that of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. No one has been excommunicated. No one has been threatened with excommunication. The babies continue to be slaughtered while the conciliar "bishops" and their chancery factotums praise "dialogue" over punishment. 

Conciliarism's Refusal to Exhort Catholics to Defend the Truth

Although many of the Americanist bishops of the Catholic Church had made their "peace" with the "social justice" wing of the Democratic Party during the administrations of Presidents Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there were still enough bishops before the "Second" Vatican Council who spoke out on moral issues and who were not afraid to run risk of criticism from the press for doing so. This was especially so of the bishops associated with the Legion of Decency. 

Archbishop John T. McNicholas, who was the archbishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, from August 12, 1925, to the time of his death on April 22, 1950, led the formation of the Legion of Decency to combat the promotion of immorality in motion pictures. Catholics took their pledges to the Legion of Decency seriously, which is why Hollywood producers, many of them Jews who were concerned about losing money from Catholic moviegoers, had to agree to have produce films that conformed to moral standards.

The Legion of Decency was started in 1934 at a time when Catholics were, by and large, obedient to their bishops and cared about the sanctification and salvation of their immortal souls. Believe it or not, Catholics at that time were capable of being scandalized, and they recognized sin when they saw it.

Unlike the conciliar officials, who permit indecently attired women and men to serve as “lectors” and “Eucharistic ministers” and who celebrate “rock” music and men such as Archbishop John T. McNicholas were concerned about the sanctification of souls and desired to keep Catholics from that which was injurious to their salvation.

Fathers Gerald Kelly, S.J., and John C. Ford provided a history of the Legion of Decency that included both the long and short versions of the Legion’s Pledge:

I wish to join the Legion of Decency, which condemns vile and unwholesome moving pictures. I unite with all who protest against them as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and to religion.

I condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land.

I shall do all that I can to arouse public opinion against the portrayal of vice as a normal condition of affairs, and against depicting criminals of any class as heroes and heroines, presenting their filthy philosophy of life as something acceptable to decent men and women.

I unite with all who condemn the display of suggestive advertisements on billboards, at theatre entrances, and the favorable notices given to immoral motion pictures.

Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality. I promise further to secure as many members as possible for the Legion of Decency.

I make this protest in a spirit of self-respect and with the cdfiviction that the American public does not demand filthy pictures, but clean entertainment and educational features.

A shorter formula, which is in general use even at the present time, was adopted at the bishops' meeting in November, 1934. The text is as follows:

I condemn indecent and immoral pictures, and those which glorify crime and criminals.

I promise to do all that I can to strengthen public opinion against the production of indecent and immoral films, and to unite with all who protest them. I acknowledge my obligation to form a right conscience about pictures that are dangerous to my moral life.

As a member of the Legion of Decency, I pledge myself to remain away from them. I promise, further, to stay away altogether from places of amusement which show them as a matter of policy.

There are are, as we shall see later, obligations deriving from natural law itself concerning attendance at indecent motion pictures. But it seems appropriate even at this point to ask whether the taking of the pledge of the Legion adds any new obligation. We have seen private explanations to the effect that the pledge itself is a promise binding in conscience—in fact that it is a promise made to God and, in effect, a vow. This can hardly be squared with interpretations given by bishops when the Legion was inaugurated. For instance, Archbishop John Gregory Murray stated: "Everything contained in the pledge is a duty of conscience independently of the pledge and independently of membership in the Legion of Decency., ' And Archbishop Francis J. L. Beckman was even more explicit. "In the matter of the obligatory force of the pledge," he said, "it may be stated in the instruction and to those who make inquiries, that it.. . does not itself bind in conscience."

It seems, therefore, that the pledge does not per se add any new obligation on those who take it. We say "per se" because, obviously, an individual who wishes to bind himself under pain of sin may do so. But this added obligation is not to be presumed.  (Kelly-Ford Study on The Legion of Decency.)

Bishops have an obligation to correct error and to call to correction, and they have an obligation to warn Catholics to avoid all near occasions of sin and to shun anything that is itself an incentive to sin. A Catholic bishop can never be indifferent to the horror of sin as the very thought of coming into contact with its effects caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to sweat droplets of blood during His Agony on the Garden of Gethsemane and imposed unspeakable sufferings upon Him in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday.

Pope Pius XI, making the cause of the Legion of Decency his own, warned Catholics very specifically about the dangerous nature of many motion pictures when he issued Vigilanti Cura, June 29, 1936:

There is no need to point out the fact that millions of people go to the motion pictures every day; that motion picture theatres are being opened in ever increasing number in civilized and semi-civilized countries; that the motion picture has become the most popular form of diversion which is offered for the leisure hours not only of the rich but of all classes of society.

At the same time, there does not exist today a means of influencing the masses more potent than the cinema. The reason for this is to be sought for in the very nature of the pictures projected upon the screen, in the popularity of motion picture plays, and in the circumstances which accompany them.

The power of the motion picture consists in this, that it speaks by means of vivid and concrete imagery which the mind takes in with enjoyment and without fatigue. Even the crudest and most primitive minds which have neither the capacity nor the desire to make the efforts necessary for abstraction or deductive reasoning are captivated by the cinema. In place of the effort which reading or listening demands, there is the continued pleasure of a succession of concrete and, so to speak, living pictures.

This power is still greater in the talking picture for the reason that interpretation becomes even easier and the charm of music is added to the action of the drama. Dances and variety acts which are sometimes introduced between the films serve to increase the stimulation of the passions.

It must be Elevated

Since then the cinema is in reality a sort of object lesson which, for good or for evil, teaches the majority of men more effectively than abstract reasoning, it must be elevated to conformity with the aims of a Christian conscience and saved from depraving and demoralizing effects.

Everyone knows what damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. They are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage, affection for the family. They are capable also of creating prejudices among individuals and misunderstandings among nations, among social classes, among entire races.

On the other hand, good motion pictures are capable of exercising a profoundly moral influence upon those who see them. In addition to affording recreation, they are able to arouse noble ideals of life, to communicate valuable conceptions, to impart a better knowledge of the history and the beauties of the Fatherland and of other countries, to present truth and virtue under attractive forms, to create, or at least to favour understanding among nations, social classes, and races, to champion the cause of justice, to give new life to the claims of virtue, and to contribute positively to the genesis of a just social order in the world.  (Pope Pius XI, Vigilanti Cura, June 29, 1936.)

By the time of the middle-1960s, however, the spirit of accommodation and non-confrontation had entered into the hearts of the men who were true bishops but part of the revolutionary vanguard of conciliarism's embrace of the world. 

Ah, but it was the infamous Americanist enabler of the Kennedy clan, the notorious Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was appointed as the Archbishop of Boston by Pope Pius XII in 1944, was the first American prelate to encourage Catholics to attend a “Billy Graham Crusade,” doing so in 1950 (Pope Saint Pius X would have removed Cushing once he had gotten word of this outrage, but Pope Pius XII left him in place). It was during the “Second” Vatican Council that Cushing gave Graham an even more public elegy of praise:

By 1961, Mr. Graham and President Kennedy prayed side by side at a Washington prayer breakfast. A few years later, in 1964, Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston (who, as archbishop, had even endorsed a Graham crusade in Boston in 1950) met with Mr. Graham upon returning from Rome and the Second Vatican Council, declaring before a national television audience that Mr. Graham’s message was good for Catholics.

Cardinal Cushing said, “God will bless [Graham’s] preaching and crusade.” Mr. Graham responded with gratitude, stating that he felt much closer to Catholics and Catholic tradition than he did to what was more alien to his message: liberal Protestantism. (How Billy Graham Shaped American Catholicism. For a review of some of Cushing’s other outrageous comments, please see Determined Not To Accept the Truth of Truth Himself, Christ the King, part two.)

Cushing had no problem with Billy Graham's support of contraception, which is, after all, what led the gradual acceptance of baby-killing in the 1960s in the event that contraceptives "failed," and, along with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's errand boy in a miter, Francis Cardinal Spellman, worked to defeat an bill supported by the Puerto Rican bishops to oppose the anti-family policies of Puerto Rico Governor Luis Munoz Marin:

In 1960, the Puerto Rico hierarchy decided to make one last concerted effort to drive the Sangerite forces from the island. The Catholic resistance was led by two American Bishops--James F. Davis of San Juan and James E. McManus of Ponce. The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico helped to organize a national political party--the Christian Action Party (CAP). The new political front was composed primarily of Catholic laymen and its platform included opposition to existing permissive legislation on birth control and sterilization.

When increasing numbers of CAP flags began to fly from the rooftops of Puerto Rico's Catholic homes, the leaders of the opposition parties, who favored turning Puerto Rico into an international Sangerite playground for massive U.S.-based contraceptive/abortifacient/sterilization experimental programs, became increasingly concerned for their own political futures. Then unexpected help arrived in the unlikely person of His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York.

One month before the hotly contested national election, Spellman arrived in Puerto Rico ostensibly to preside over two formal Church functions. While on the island, Spellman agreed to meet with CAP's major political rival, Governor Luis Munoz Marin, leader of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) and a supporter of federal population control programs for Puerto Rico.

In an interview that followed his meeting with Munoz, Spellman, known for years as FDR's errand boy with a miter, claimed that politics were outside his purview. The cardinal's statement was interpreted by the press as an indictment of the partisan politics of Bishops Davis and McManus. To underscore his message, as soon as Spellman returned to the States he made a public statement in opposition to the latest directives of the Puerto Rico bishops prohibiting Catholics from voting for Munoz and his anti-life PDP cohorts. Catholic voters in Puerto Rico should vote their conscience without the threat of Church penalties, Spellman said.

Boston's Cardinal Cushing, John F. Kennedy's "political godfather," joined Spellman in expressed "feigned horror" at the thought of ecclesiastical authority attempting to dictate political voting. "This has never been a part of our history, and I pray God that it will never be!" said Cushing. Cushing's main concern was not the Puerto Rican people. His main worry was that the flack caused by the Puerto Rican birth control affair might overflow into the upcoming presidential campaign and hurt John Kennedy's bid for the White House.

The national election turned out to be a political disaster for CAP. Munoz and the PDP won by a landslide. Bishop Davis was forced to end the tragic state of confusion among the Catholic laity by declaring just before the election that no penalties would be imposed on those who voted for PDP.  

Two years later, with the knowledge and approval of the American hierarchy and the Holy See, the Puerto Rican hierarchy was pressured into singing a secret concordat of "non-interference" in government-sponsored birth control programs--a sop being that the programs would now include instruction in the "rhythm method." While insisting on their right to hold and express legitimate opposition to such programs, the Puerto Rican bishops promised they would "never impose their own moral doctrines upon individuals who do not accept the Catholic teaching."

When the Sangerite storm hit the mainland in the late 1960s, AmChurch would echo this same theme song, opening the floodgates to a multi-billion dollar federal-life-prevention (and destruction) program. (Randy Engel, The Rite of Sodomy, pp. 647-649)

It was five years after this travesty that “Cardinal” Cushing told a Boston radio station that he could not interfere with the “consciences” of state legislators as they considered whether to support or to oppose a bill in the Massachusetts General Court (the state legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts). This made it far easier for the Kennedys and the Careys and Cuomos and the Bidens and the O’Neills, among others, to support the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn in the 1970s with the full support of the ultra-progressives in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, one of whose leaders, Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, another true bishop, invented the “consistent ethic of life” (“the seamless garment) slogan to provide pro-abortion Catholics with the cover of “respectability” as long as they opposed the death penalty and supported one statist measure after another to confiscate wealth and then to redistribute it to the poor while “empowering” illegal immigrants at the same time:

Early in the summer of 1965, the Massachusetts legislature took up a proposal to repeal the state's Birth Control law, which barred the use of contraceptives. (As a matter of historical interest, the repeal effort was sponsored by a young state representative named Michael Dukakis, who would be the Democratic Party's candidate for the US presidency 23 years later.) In a state where Catholics constituted a voting majority, and dominated the legislature, the prospects for repeal appeared remote. Then on June 22, Cardinal Cushing appeared on a local radio program, "An Afternoon with Haywood Vincent,” and effectively scuttled the opposition.

Cardinal Cushing announced:

“My position in this matter is that birth control in accordance with artificial means is immoral, and not permissible. But this is Catholic teaching. I am also convinced that I should not impose my position—moral beliefs or religious beliefs—upon those of other faiths.”

Warming to the subject, the cardinal told his radio audience that "I could not in conscience approve the legislation" that had been proposed. However, he quickly added, "I will make no effort to impose my opinion upon others."

So there it was: the "personally opposed" argument, in fully developed form, enunciated by a Prince of the Church nearly 40 years ago! Notice how the unvarying teaching of the Catholic Church, which condemned artificial contraception as an offense against natural law, is reduced here to a matter of the cardinal's personal belief. And notice how he makes no effort to persuade legislators with the force of his arguments; any such effort is condemned in advance as a bid to "impose" his opinion.

Cardinal Cushing conceded that in the past, Catholic leaders had opposed any effort to alter the Birth Control law. "But my thinking has changed on that matter," he reported, "for the simple reason that I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not accept the same faith as I do."

(Notice that the Catholic position is reduced still further here, to a matter of purely sectarian belief—as if it would be impossible for a non-Catholic to support the purpose of the Birth Control law. The cardinal did not explain why that law was enacted in 1899 by the heirs of the Puritans in Massachusetts, long before Catholics came to power in the legislature.)

Before the end of his fateful radio broadcast, Cardinal Cushing gave his advice to the Catholic members of the Massachusetts legislature: "If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it. You represent them. You don't represent the Catholic Church."

Dozens of Catholic legislators did vote for the bill, and the Birth Control law was abolished. Perhaps more important in the long run, the "personally opposed" politician had his rationale. (Cushing's Use of The "Personally Opposed" Argument.)

Today’s Pontius Pilates had lots and lots of help from true bishops and true priests in the 1960s abd 1970s as their consciences were massaged to make it possible for them to support each of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

It is no accident that the “peace and justice” crowd at the now-named United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, whose work had been “divided,” so they say, in 1966 between the so-called National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United States Catholic Conference, associated with one pro-abortion and pro-sodomite group after another, many of which received funding from both Catholic Charities and the “Catholic Campaign for Human Development (see the following two news stories of the past decade, although like examples abound today all around the world: Signs of Apostasy Abound and Randy Engel on Catholic Relief Services.)

Indifference Even on January 22, 1973

Indifference is what has characterized the past forty-nine years since state legislatures began to "liberalize" existing statutes concerning abortion and the past thirty-seven years since the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade. Indifference.

There was even indifference on the actual day of Roe as two other events overshadowed the Supreme Court's decision: the death of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the announcement made by President Richard Milhous Nixon that a "peace accord" had been reached at the Paris Peace Talks between National Security Adviser Dr. Henry Alfred Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the representative of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Communist North Vietnam) to bring American involvement in Vietnam to a close while permitting North Vietnamese army regulars and Viet Cong guerillas (whose interests were represented Madame Nguyen Thi Binh) to remain in "enclaves" in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam,). These two events overshadowed the decision in Roe, which would lead to a period in American history with a casualty figure eclipsing that of the American dead in the Vietnam War by well over a thousand times.

The "Strategy" of the Conciliar "Bishops" in the Aftermath of Roe v. Wade

"Ya gotta do something. Nothing else will work."

It is upon that false premise that the conciliar "bishops" have embraced a ready acceptance of the "right to life mother exception" in legislative proposals without even attempting to pressure supposedly pro-life members of various legislatures, including those in both houses of the Congress of the United States of America, believing that doing so will help to convince "reasonable" people that they and the politicians they support are not "radicals" or "extremists," that such concessions are "necessary" to make in the realm prudence.

This is, of course, the exact same moral casuistry that gave us "natural family planning" and explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments that has corrupted what passes for Catholic moral theology in so many places that high level officials in the Vatican itself can speak of "therapeutic" abortions as being within the moral law (see So Long to the Fifth Commandment and Rotten To The Very Roots).

Some tried very hard to warn the "bishops" as early as the first years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 2, 1973, that the acceptance of "exceptions" would lead to the further institutionalization of baby-killing under the cover of the civil law in the mistaken belief that some killings would be prevented.

One of those who did so was Mrs. Randy Engel, the Director of the U.S. Coalition for Life, who testified in 1974. before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the United States Senate Committee for the Judiciary. Mrs. Engel saw things with prophetic clarity: there could never be any compromise with the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment, and for this, of course, she has been hated by the "pro-life establishment" ever since:

I am Randy Engel, National Director of the United States Coalition for Life, an international research center and clearing- house specializing in domestic federal anti-life programs within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Agency for International Development. Thank you for your invitation to appear before the sub-committee today in order that I may express the views of the Coalition, its distinguished national and international board of advisors, some of whom have already testified at earlier Senate hearings on the Human Life Amendment, and that of thousands of grassroots people whom we have had the honor of serving on a day to day basis since the Coalition opened its offices almost two years ago.

Mr. Chairman, about four months ago, the Coalition filed with your office, the transcript of a speech made by Louise Tyrer , M.D., Family Planning Division of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, before the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians' 12th Annual Meeting, Memphis, Tennessee on Tuesday, April 16, 1974, on the status of the various Human Life Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. (Attachment A) According to Dr. Tyrer' s assessment of the Congressional scene there are two basic approaches. One - a "state's rights" approach which would return the power of lawmaking in the area of abortion to the individual States. The second - which would guarantee the full protection of the law to the unborn child from the moment of fertilization. The "State's rights" approach she states, and correctly so, is unacceptable to the majority of Pro-Life people yet very attractive to the legislators because " it sought of takes the ones off their backs from making any decisions."

The remainder of her talk stresses the necessity of stalling the hearings of this sub-committee by having Planned Parenthood physicians flood the sub-committee with requests to testify. This, Dr. Tyrer suggests would be politically expedient and politically NECESSARY for you Mr. Chairman, in order to keep the amendments bottled up in sub-committee until you had gone through the election process in the Fall. Now, Mr. Chairman, I have no desire to embarrass you in any manner. Not because I fell Dr. Tyrer was incorrect in her judgment of the political realities of the Senate and House Committees dealing with the abortion issue or her assessment that stalling these subcommittee hearings by dragging them out month by month would be politically expedient for you and others who might prefer not to have a roll call vote on a Human Life Amendment before election time. But rather, because with few exceptions, almost every Senator and Representative in Congress would like nothing better than to get rid of the abortion issue tomorrow, if not before, or at least dump the matter back into the lap of the State legislatures.

This is not our affair - they say.

The massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent unborn children is not a federal matter - they say.

We are not responsible for the Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1972 which is now the law of the land - they say.

Well, I am here Mr. Chairman to tell you and every other Senator and Congressman that like it or not - Abortion IS your affair. That the massive slaughter of unborn children in this country IS a proper matter of federal concern. Moreover that this Congress IS directly responsible for the almost inevitable Supreme Court decision which stripped unborn children of their inalienable right to life. Congress IS responsible because over the last ten years it has permitted an anti-life philosophy and anti-life programs and policies to become matters of NATIONAL POLICY , promoted and supported by tax dollars.

It is the Federal Government - at all levels - Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches - which has posed the greatest threat to unborn children in recent years. The Executive Branch because it has failed to correct the anti-life abuses primarily within the bureaucracies of HEW and AID and has permitted key anti-life leaders such as Dr. Louis Hellman the Office of Population Affairs and Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, Director Population Bureau for Population and Humanitarian Affairs [and the man who coined the phrase "Natural Family Planning"] to remain in office. The Legislative Branch, because it has authorized legislation and appropriated funds year after year to initiate, promote and sustain anti-life programs in virtually every conceivable federal bureaucracy including the Office of Economic Opportunity, Office of Environmental Education, Office of Education, Department of Defense Office of Population Affairs (HEW), National Institutes of Health, Agriculture Department, Food and Drug Administration, Public Health Service Social Security, MedicAID, Aid to Dependent Children, U.S. Information Agency Population Office(AID). Contraceptive Research Branch (NIH) Federal Communication Commission).

As I said the Supreme Court abortion decision was an inevitable one. All the cliches of that decision - terms like "unwanted children", "a woman's right to control her own body.", the population explosion stem from the Sangerite ethic. It represented the culmination of more than half a century of dedication and tireless efforts by the Sangerites and the Malthusians to convince the American public of the righteousness of the CAUSE and to elevate the SANGERITE-MALTHUSIAN philosophy to that of Public Policy .

This final achievement is portrayed quite candidly in this book Breeding Ourselves to Death - the Story of the Hugh Moore Fund by abortion leader Lawrence Lader. In the section on gaining Congressional Support, former N.Y. Senator Kenneth Keating, then newly appointed National Director of the Population Crisis Committee tells about eating in the Senate Dining Room where he could spread the gospel of family planning among old friends, particularly among the Republican leadership. This fight to influence by other population control leaders in Congress goes on today.

But what does all this have to do with this subcommittee hearing on the Human Life Amendment? Simply this:

For more than a year the Hogan-Helms Human Life Amendment and similar bills have been buried in the House, where Representative Don Edwards has refused to hold hearings, and in the Senate - hearings are dragged out month after month to get Senators and Representatives through the November watershed without a floor vote on such as the HLA.

Obviously there is no sense of urgency about the matter, with the exception of a handful of dedicated men, the Congress doesn't appear to be the least concerned that its inaction will result in the death of hundreds of thousands of unborn children. The fact that millions of federal tax dollars are used to promote a myriad of anti-life schemes- from direct abortion payments (Medicaid-ADC; to the research development and promoting of new abortion techniques to the indoctrination of young children of an anti-life ethic appears to raise no particular concern at family planning authorization or appropriation hearings.

Equally obvious is the fact that under these conditions we will have a difficult time getting a Human Life Amendment passed by both Houses. of Congress and on its way to the states for ratification. My purpose here today is to point out the current commitment of the Federal Government including this Congress to the anti-life establishment, and briefly how such a commitment was obtained and at what price.

Mr. Chairman, this Congress OWES its vigorous support for a Human Life Amendment which would protect Human Life from conception until natural death to the American people. The Coalition would agree that the Hogan-Helms Amendment or the newer Roncallo Amendment would provide such protection.

Apart from the merit of these amendments themselves, we feel that Congress should recognize the fact that through its indifference, ignorance and its inability to withstand the pressures of the anti-life movement, it must bear its share of guilt for the 1972 Abortion decision, and its share of responsibility in seeing a Human Life Amendment is passed to protect the unborn child.

Your responsibility, Mr. Chairman, in this matter is very plain. As for our part, I believe the Coalition and the Pro-Life Movement in the U. S. will continue to fight at all levels - including the Halls of Congress and yes, even in Senate dining rooms - to educate and to promote an ideal that is as revolutionary in our day as the Sangerite ideal was fifty years ago. That ideal is based on the sanctity and innate goodness of all human life. (Full text of "Abortion : hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments.)

Even though the efforts made by Mrs. Engel and others were valiant, we can see now with perfect hindsight that which was not understood by very many at the time: that these noble efforts were doomed to failure precisely because the "pro-life establishment," headed by the National Not-So-Right to Life Committee, rallied around the constitutional amendment that had been proposed by United States Senator James Buckley (C-New York; the "c" reflects Buckley's election in a three-way race in 1970 as the candidate of the Conservative Party of the State of New York) that permitted the "life of the mother" exception.

Only four American bishops, Timothy Cardinal Manning of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, John Cardinal Krol of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Humberto Medeiros of the Archdiocese of Boston and John Cardinal Cody of the Archdiocese of Chicago testified against the Buckley Amendment on the grounds that the civil law could never permit the direct taking of a single, solitary innocent human life from the first moment of conception through all subsequent stages until natural death. These cardinals, however, although part of the conciliar church by that time, were opposed by the entire "pro-life" establishment whose machinations were being orchestrated, at least to a very large extent, by the then Monsignor James Timothy McHugh of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. McHugh did not have a qualm of conscience whatsoever about the "life of the mother exception" as a matter of legislative expedience or as a core moral principle of the National Right to Life Committee his work at the then named Family Life Bureau of the United States Catholic Conference helped to launch.

No, the well-intentioned efforts of Mrs. Engel and her associates were doomed from the start as, unbeknownst to them, a false church had arisen filled with men who had lost the Catholic Faith, men who had surrendered to the prevailing ethos of Judeo-Masonry, a surrender that has devastated the world in which we live and that must be considered nothing other than one of the worst chastisements of our time for neither Popes Pius XI or XII consecrating Russia collegially to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world's bishops. Treasonous priests and their leftist apparatchiks and toadies worked against efforts to provide full constitutional protection. And this is what must happen when men who claim to be Catholic make their "reconciliations" with the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity.

It is no wonder that "conservatives" and even tradtionally-minded priests and presbyters praise the late "Bishop" James Timothy McHugh for his "pro-life" work as they have become so accustomed to the moral casuistry of conciliarism and of its embrace of the ethos of naturalism that they are incapable of seeing Catholic truth clearly, less yet of embracing it openly as the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Despite much tough talk from several of the conciliar “bishops” about denying the pro-abortion likes of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., and Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi from the reception of what purports to be Holy Communion in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service, the statement they issued near the end of their annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2023 wound up being just another forgettable exercise in what has become a half-century of weasel words and cowardice in the face of the daily slaughter of the innocent preborn. These men and their predecessors have enabled and emboldened, either by canonical inaction or active support, fully three generations of pro-abortion Catholics in public life, not one of whom was ever excommunicated and many of them having been buried with full honors as Catholics in good standing within what is considered by all but a handful of largely fratricidal Catholics to be—but is not—the Catholic Church.

There is no need to run through the entire Dishonor List of Pro-Abortion Catholics who have been enabled and emboldened by the American “bishops” of the past and present as I have provided such a list many times before on this website and in hundreds of articles in The Wanderer during the 1990s. Suffice it to say that there have been three generations of Kennedys, two generations of Cuomos to go along with the likes of Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Carol Mosely Braun, Gavin Newsom, Michelle Lujan Grisham, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Barbara Mikulski, Thomas Dodd, James Florio, Rudolph William Giuliani, George Pataki, Rick Lazio, Thomas Ridge, Thomas Harkin, Carol Mosely Braun, David Patterson, Kathleen Hochul, Christopher Dodd, Jack Reed, Edward Markey, Edmund Muskie, John Kerry, Patricia Murray, Richard Durbin, Larry Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Loretta Sanchez, Leon Panetta, Bill Richardson, Janet Reno, Charles Rangel, Robert Torricelli, Robert Menendez, Carolyn McCarthy, Thomas Menino, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Thomas P. O’Neill, Thomas Foley, and every single current Catholic who is within the Democratic Caucus of the United States House of Representatives, among so many scores of others at the state and local levels. (As a native New Yorker, I think that it is interesting to point out that the state of my birth on November 24, 1951, has had seven consecutive pro-abortion governors dating back to Hugh Leo Carey in 1975, and of these seven six have been Catholics: Hugh Leo Carey, Mario Matthew Cuomo, George Elmer Pataki, David Patterson, Andrew Mark Cuomo, and Kathleen Courtney Hochul.)

Noting that the retired “archbishop” of Kansas City, Kansas, John Naumann, had requested the pro-abortion Catholic Governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, a personal friend of a campaign donor to us as George The Killer Tiller, not to approach what purports to be Holy Communion in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical abomination, only “Archbishop” Salvatore Cordileone of the Archdiocese of San Francisco absolutely forbade a  pro-abort Catholic in public life, namely, the notorious  Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi, from doing so. Cordileone was joined by “Bishops” Robert Vasa, Joseph Strickland, before he was removed from the See of Tyler, Texas, and James Conley at the time. As is well known, Jorge  Mario Bergoglio personally kneecapped Cordileone by making it a point to call Pelosi to the conciliar occupied Vatican and gave the proud octogenarian “Holy Communion.” Cordileone’s action against Pelosi, though, was not an excommunication.

No conciliar “pope” or “bishop” has ever excommunicated a single pro-baby killing Catholic in public and some of these pro-death public officials have even been buried with high honors and praise.

Consider the case of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America William F. Brennan, who consistently voted to protect the non-existent “right” for women to butcher their babies with legal impunity after he had helped to create that “right” in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.

Brennan as given a "Mass of Christian Burial" at Saint Matthew's Church on July 29, 1997. This was permitted by the then conciliar "archbishop" of Washington, D.C., James "Cardinal" Hickey, despite the fact that Brennan cast one of the seven affirmative votes in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, and despite the fact that Brennan served also as one of the seven affirmative votes in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965, that invalidated a long-unenforced Connecticut state statute that banned the sale of contraceptives to married couples, a case that provided a good deal of the "legal reasoning," such as it was, for the Roe and Doe cases, especially by inventing the so-called "right to privacy" as found in what were called the "penumbras" (little shadows or emanations) from could be found various provisions of the Bill of Rights and made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment's liberty and due process of law clauses.

William Brennan's "Mass of Christian Burial" was a travesty from beginning to end. The pro-abortion, pro-Communist, pro-Fidel Castro, pro-South Central Los Angeles rioters United States Representative Maxine Waters was so impressed by that travesty, which featured an auxiliary "bishop," William Lori, now the conciliar "bishop" of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in attendance as the official representative of the archdiocese, that she asked that its program be inserted into the Congressional Record .

One of those who gave a "eulogy," a tribute that used to be forbidden, at least formally, even by the rules of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, at this travesty was then President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton. United States Senator Edward Moore Kennedy did so as well. Another featured eulogist was none other than Father "Death" himself, the pro-abortion Reverend Robert Drinan, S.J., who was himself buried as a Catholic priest in "good standing" in the conciliar structures following his death on January 20, 2007.

The late United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York) was permitted to have a "Mass of Christian Burial" at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in the Borough of Manhattan of the City of New York, New York, in 2003 despite his consistent support for abortion "rights," mitigated, some believe, because he did vote to partially ban partial-birth abortions. To oppose a particular form of child-killing while maintaining the "right" of women to murder their children by other means does not constitute a "mitigation" of one's support for a sin that cries out to Heaven for vengeance.

Noting the fact that Mario Matthew Cuomo died on January 1, 2015, during the conciliar presidency, shall we say, of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a final example from the Wojtyla-Ratzinger years of a pro-abort being buried in good standing out of Catholic church in conciliar captivity was the notorious pro-abort named Geraldine Ann Ferraro-Zaccaro, who died on March 26, 2011 (see To Fall Into The Hands of the Living God and  Just Another Ordinary Outrage Permitted by a Conciliar "Ordinary").

Yes, despite the fact that some “pro-life” “bishops” made noises now and again about this or that pro-abortion politician, the fact remains that these “bishops” took no action against the pro-aborts as they took refuge in their annual calls for “dialogue.”

how did over twenty-four years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late William Brennan, a Catholic who cast a vote in favor the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January, 22, 1973, while he served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, decisions he reaffirmed in subsequent cases?

How did twenty years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Thomas P. O'Neill (D-Massachusetts)?

How did over thirty years of “engagement and dialogue” change the late New York State Senators Ralph Marino and John Marchi?

How is any ongoing “engagement and dialogue” changing prominent Catholic pro-aborts Kathy Hochul, Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York, or New York State Senator Sean Ryan?

How did over thirty-six years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late United States Senator Edward Moore Kennedy (D-Massachusetts)?

How did over thirty-three years of "engagement and dialogue" change the late United States Representative Geraldine Anne Ferraro-Zaccarro (D-New York).

How did over forty-two years of "engagement and dialogue change the late Governor of New York, Mario Matthew Cuomo?

How did over forty years of “engagement and dialogue” change the thirty-third degree Freemason Charles Rangel, the disgraced former United States Representative from Harlem in the Borough of Manhattan and the longtime Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee?

How has over thirty-three years of "engagement and dialogue" changed the reprobate named Rudolph William Giuliani?

How has nearly thirty years of "engagement and dialogue" changed current Governor of New York, Andrew Mark Cuomo?

How has forty years of “engagement and dialogue” changed United States Representative Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi?

How has twenty years of "engagement and dialogue" changed United States Senator Kirsten Gillebrand (D-New York)?

How has fifty-three  years of "engagement and dialogue" changed the former President In Name Only Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. (D-Delaware; see, for example, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., Demagogue Update).

How has forty years of “engagement and dialogue” changed United States Senators Susan Collins, Patricia Murphy, Richard Durbin, Edward Markey, Maria Cantwell, Timothy Michael Kaine, Patrick Leahy, Lisa Murkowski, Jack Reed, Robert Menendez, Alex Padilla, or Catherine Cortez Masto?

How has twenty years of “engagement and dialogue” changed California Governor Gavin Michael Newsom or his comrade Xavier Becerra, the militantly pro-death former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services?

How did decades upon decades of “engagement and dialogue” change former officeholders such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis, Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr., Barbara Mikulski, Richard Riordan, Rick Lazio, Susan Molinari, George Elmer Pataki, David Paterson, Christopher Dodd, Peter Rodino, Carol Mosely Braun or Robert Torricelli?

How has a decade of “engagement and dialogue” changed New Jersey Governor Philip Murphy?

How is any ongoing “engagement and dialogue” changing former Rhode Island Governor and former United States Secretary of Commerce Gina Marie Raimondo or the former Rhode Island Secretary of State, Nellie Gorbea?

The conciliar sect’s nearly half of a century of "engagement and dialogue" has been and continues to be an abysmal failure as it does the work of the devil himself, not the work of Christ the King, Whose Social Kingship over men and their nations its leaders reject both in theory and in practice. Indeed, the conciliar sect’s half century of “engagement and dialogue” remains what it has been: a gigantic smokescreen to make possible the indemnification of “social justice” Catholics in public life who do not understand that there can be no true justice in the world as men persist in their sins unrepentantly and as they themselves suborn each of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

Moreover, the voices of the conciliar “bishops” were always in conflict with the likes of the late Joseph Bernardin, the conciliar archbishop of Chicago, Illinois, from 1982 to 1996, who invented the “consistent ethic of life” to lessen the overriding importance of the daily slaughterer of the preborn in order to provide theological cover for pro-abortion Democrats who were said to have supported issues of “social justice” that were just as important as protecting innocent human life.

The apologia Bernardin gave on December 6, 1983, at Fordham University, on behalf of the so-called “consistent ethic of life” (the “seamless garment”) ttied opposition to abortion with the entire statist, anti-national security platform of the Democratic Party. Here is an excerpt from Bernardin’s address, which was designed to convince Catholics that they could vote for the likes of New York Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo, who took the “I’m personally opposed to abortion but can’t impose my morality on the people” stand that he learned from his mentor, then former Governor Hugh Leo Carey, against the partly pro-life, partly pro-abortion President Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1984:

The substance of a Catholic position on a consistent ethic of life is rooted in a religious vision. But the citizenry of the United States is radically pluralistic in moral and religious conviction. So we face the challenge of stating our case, which is shaped in terms of our faith and our religious convictions, in non-religious terms which others of different faith convictions might find morally persuasive. . . . As we seek to shape and share the vision of a consistent ethic of life, I suggest a style governed by the following rule: We should maintain and clearly communicate our religious convictions but also maintain our civil courtesy. We should be vigorous in stating a case and attentive in hearing another's case; we should test everyone's logic but not question his or her motives. ("A Consistent Ethic of Life: An American-Catholic Dialogue".)

“Cardinal” Bernardin was hit with a torrent of criticism after the Fordham address. Thus it was that he sought to make some “clarifications” and “distinctions” in an address at Saint Louis University in March of 1984 that acknowledged that abortion and capital punishment were different issues but, he added, were “related” to each other in the “practical” realm of political “choices” that required “dialogue” to treat “seamlessly”:

Some of the responses I have received on the Fordham address correctly say that abortion and capital punishment are not identical issues. The principle which protects innocent life distinguishes the unborn child from the convicted murderer.

Other letters stress that while nuclear war is a threat to life, abortion involves the actual taking of life, here and now. I accept both of these distinctions, of course, but I also find compelling the need to relate the cases while keeping them in distinct categories.

Abortion is taking of life in ever growing numbers in our society. Those concerned about it, I believe, will find their case enhanced by taking note of the rapidly expanding use of public execution. In a similar way, those who are particularly concerned about these executions, even if the accused has taken another life, should recognize the elementary truth that a society which can be indifferent to the innocent life of an unborn child will not be easily stirred to concern for a convicted criminal. There is, I maintain, a political and psychological linkage among the life issues—from war to welfare concerns—which we ignore at our own peril: a systemic vision of life seeks to expand the moral imagination of a society, not partition it into airtight categories.

A third level of the question before us involves how we relate a commitment to principles to our public witness of life. As I have said, no one can do everything. There are limits to both competency and energy; both point to the wisdom of setting priorities and defining distinct functions. The Church, however, must be credible across a wide range of issues; the very scope of our moral vision requires a commitment to a multiplicity of questions. In this way the teaching of the Church will sustain a variety of individual commitments.

Neither the Fordham address nor this one is intended to constrain wise and vigorous efforts to protect and promote life through specific, precise forms of action. Both addresses do seek to cultivate a dialogue within the Church and in the wider society among individuals and groups which draw on common principles (e.g., the prohibition against killing the innocent) but seem convinced that they do not share common ground. The appeal here is not for anyone to do everything, but to recognize points of interdependence which should be stressed, not denied.

A fourth level, one where dialogue is sorely needed, is the relationship between moral principles and concrete political choices. The moral questions of abortion, the arms race, the fate of social programs for the poor, and the role of human rights in foreign policy are public moral issues. The arena in which they are ultimately decided is not the academy or the Church but the political process. A consistent ethic of life seeks to present a coherent linkage among a diverse set of issues. It can and should be used to test party platforms, public policies, and political candidates. The Church legitimately fulfills a public role by articulating a framework for political choices by relating that framework to specific issues and by calling for systematic moral analysis of all areas of public policy. (The Seamless Garment and a Consistent Pro-Life Ethic.)

This was just moral casuistry of the highest order.

I, for one, prefer the clarity offered by the late Dr. Charles E. Rice in The Wanderer in 1998:

Sen. D'Amato will face a pro-abortion Democratic opponent in the fall. While a voter could morally vote for a pro-abortion candidate who is less objectionable on abortion than his opponent, he should not. The tactic of voting for the less objectionable of two pro-abortion candidates is a tactic of incremental surrender. The incremental strategy of accepting the legalization of abortion in some cases concedes that some innocent human life is negotiable after all. The pro-death movement is a guaranteed winner against an opposition that qualifies its own position by conceding that there are some innocent human beings whom it will allow to be directly and intentionally killed. That approach in practice has mortgaged the pro-life effort to the interests and judgment of what Paul Johnson called "the great human scourge of the 20th century, the professional politician." (Modern Times, 1985, p. 510.)

When a politician says he favors legalized abortion in life of the mother, rape and incest, or other cases, he affirms the nonpersonhood of the unborn child by proposing that he be subjected to execution at the discretion of another. The politician's pro-life rhetoric will be drowned out by the loud and clear message of his position, that he concedes that the law can validly tolerate the intentional killing of innocent human beings. Apart from exceptions, of course, Sen. D'Amato is objectionable as well for some of his other stands on abortion and for his positions on other issues, including especially the homosexual issue.

Pro-lifers could increase their political impact if they were single-issue voters, treating abortion as an absolutely disqualifying issue. Any candidate who believes that the law should treat any innocent human beings as nonpersons by tolerating their execution is unworthy to hold any public office, whether President, trustee of a mosquito abatement district, or senator. (Dr. Charles E. Rice, "Pro-Life Reflections on Sen. D'Amato, The Wanderer, August 27, 1998.)

Quite correct then. Quite correct now, although I would stipulate that no one can be considered “pro-life” who supports contraception, “brain death”/human organ vivisection and transplantation, the starvation and dehydration of innocent human beings and the whole concept of “palliative care” and hospice “care.”

In answer, therefore, to the Bernardin “seamless garment” sophistry, of course, one must ask the following question: To what must a Catholic listen on the issue of the taking of innocent human life?

Those who support the chemical and/or surgical taking of innocent human life in the womb do not have a "case." They have lies. Such people, if they are non-Catholics, must be converted to the Catholic Faith. Those who are Catholics must be told that they excommunicate themselves from the Church's maternal bosom by supporting willful murder, one the four crimes that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

The Bernardin approach to "life issues" contrasts, of course, very sharply with that of the true popes of the Catholic Church, who taught clearly and unequivocally that Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. We do not speak in "non-religious" terms. We make proper Catholic distinctions when speaking about moral issues, remembering always to speak as Catholics at all times without ever dissenting from anything contained within the Deposit of Faith at any time for any reason, something that Pope Leo XIII made clear Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890:

The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

The very reason that contraception and abortion are part of our culture and protected by civil law is because the Protestant Revolution overthrew the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century in many parts of Europe and the revolutions and movements inspired by the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry finished the job in the rest while creating entirely new nations elsewhere, such as in the United States of America, whose people were to celebrate religious "diversity" as a "protection" against tyranny and a "guarantee" of individual liberties rather than as the means by which the devil can propagate and then institutionalize Every Error Imaginable.

Always eager to find “common ground” between truth and error, Joseph Louis Bernardin even started what he called the “Common Ground Initiative” in 1996 to produce “dialogue” between those who support unrestricted baby-killing on demand in all circumstances as a matter of “human rights” and a woman’s supposed “right to choose” (to kill a baby, of course!) and those who oppose such killing in all circumstances without exception. There is no “common ground” between truth and error. None. Truth must be proclaimed. Those in error must be corrected. Civil law that defies the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law has no binding force over men and must be opposed and defied, not accepted as “settled law” or made subject to “discussions.” The truths of the moral law are non-negotiable. Then again, the conciliar revolutionaries believe that everything contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith is subject to “discussion,” “reflection” and “adaptation” according to alleged “pastoral needs” that, to recall the words uttered by Pope Pius XII to the Jesuits sixty-eight years ago, “would draw norms for action for eternal salvation from what is actually done, rather than from what should be done.”

Thus, Blase Cupich’s decision to honor the pro-abortion, pro-perversity United States Senator Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) is nothing new, and part two of this commentary will delve into Durbin’s egregiously demagogic and thuggish pro-death record as well as Cupich’s own efforts to out-Bernardin Bernardin by making it appear that the direct, intentional slaughter of preborn human being is no more important that the “rights” of foreign nationals to violate the just laws of another nation government a legal and orderly process of immigration while saying at the same that the protection of the environment is the same issue morally as baby-slaughter.

For the moment on this Feast of Our Lady of Ransom (Mercy), please pray an extra Rosary today in reparation for Blase Cupich’s having honored Richard Durbin despite the latter’s unrepentant support for baby butchery and perversity.

Our Lady of Ransom, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.