Posted on 11/11/2008 9:39:56 AM PST by presidio9
The head of the U.S. Catholic bishops' group said on Monday that Barack Obama's election as president should be celebrated but he made it clear the church would not compromise its strict stand against abortion.
Obama won solid support from Catholics in last week's election, exit polls indicated, even though the church opposes the view, supported by the Illinois Democratic senator, that a woman has the right to choose whether to have an abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalized abortion.
Obama's election "is a moment that touches more than our history when a country that once enshrined race slavery in its very constitutional order should come to elect an African- American to the presidency," said Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.
"In this, I truly believe, we must all rejoice," the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told the group's semi-annual meeting in Baltimore.
George said the country may have reached a point where "all races are safely within the American consensus." But he voiced concern that Catholics face political pressure when seeking office to compromise on "fundamental Catholic teachings."
The central Christian teaching, George added, was that God became man and "took flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, nine months before Jesus was born in Bethlehem."
"This truth is celebrated in our liturgy because it is branded into our spirit. The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice," he said.
"If the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision that African- Americans were other people's property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be president of the United States," George said, referring to the 1857 decision
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
At the moment, we're actually much more concerned that President is going greatly expand the scope of Roe Vs. Wade. He has already said that you are personally going to be paying for women's abortions out of your own pocket, and that parents of underage girls have absolutely no right to know when their daughter has an abortion. And that's just for starters. This debate moved far away from any reasonable claim to simply being about "reproductive privacy" a long time ago.
Ok, more threats.
But this humble member of the laity of the Roman Catholic Church wants to know when the hammer is going to be brought down.
That is the big E.
Excommunicate Biden.
And Kerry, and Pelosi, and Kerry, and the Kennedys.
Can someone inform Father Flager of this.
Bishop George is orthodox but cautious. He presides over Chicago, Obama’s home base, and evidently has to deal with threats like the Daley machine and Louis Farrakhan, as was suggested by his quick restoration of Fr. Pfleger to his parish.
“The head of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ group said on Monday that Barack Obama’s election as president should be celebrated.”
I have to ask, why on earth should the Catholic Church “celebrate” the election of a baby-killer. I wish Cardinal George had not said this. It’s as good as saying, “Oh, he may be a baby killer, but let’s just put that aside and celebrate his enthronement.”
I don’t think the Church, in the person of its bishops, can continue to back down like this. It’s crunch time. NO BISHOPS should attend Obama’s coronation.
I think that those polled likely claimed to be Catholic because they were baptized Catholic. I want to know how many of those polled are practicing Catholics in good standing with the Church. That is the question. Any so called “Catholic” voter who favors abortion is by definition NOT a Catholic, but a heretic. These need to be publicly exposed and excommunicated. The Bishops must act on this scandal. Let these heretics go join some group of their choosing, but let them not be called Catholics.
The exit polls show that voters who claimed to be Catholics who attend Mass weekly voted McCain by a ten point margin.
Adjust for the liars and it may be even greater.
The data suggest but do not confirm that white Catholics who attended Mass weekly voted McCain by twenty points or more.
White Catholics as a whole, whether practicing or not, voted for McCain and not Obama.
The problem here is something called the Americanist Heresy. We here have the Americanized Catholic Church rather than the Catholic Church in America. That is why so many Catholic Bishops are such spineless wonders. Freedom of expression, or conscience, or whatever you call it, is more important to these charlatans than ENFORCING the constant teachings of the Catholic Church. The present theological lip service given by the USCCB is the empty BS of cowards... They are the wolves among the flock.
“I have to ask, why on earth should the Catholic Church “celebrate” the election of a baby-killer. I wish Cardinal George had not said this. It’s as good as saying, “Oh, he may be a baby killer, but let’s just put that aside and celebrate his enthronement.””
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Well said.
I initially reponded to just the headline, but reading the body of the article, leaves me much more disturbed than encouraged. I can’t really say it any better than you did.
It is well past time for the Bishops to act.
Further, they need to act without fear of the Daly machine or any other powerful metropolitan Democrat political entity. What are they going to do, close down the Archdiocese?
Then where do they get this 53 percent BS?
It’s only taken them 40 years to finally speak out loudly. Action to follow. God willing.
We need to tell the Bishops they can’t have it both ways. Either they stand for the Church’s teachings, or they step down. Period.
I cannot describe how insulted I feel being told I should “rejoice” over Hussein’s election.
Nothing will be done, bank on it. If it is to be be done in the most dramatic fashion, it should play out like this: the Holy Father - Pope Benedict, calls a news conference and proclaims the excommunication of the following, then and only then will I believe that they are serious about this./Just Asking - seoul62......
It’s surprising how many catechists, even, have never heard of Americanism, the controversy surrounding it, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testem_Benevolentiae_Nostrae, the simple response of the American hierarchy to which was bland denial that there was even a problem.
That is exactly the gist of what the pastor of my parish said this past Sunday.
53% of the people who told exit pollers they were Catholic voted for Obama.
Of course, as every Catholic knows, Patrick - who goes to Mass daily and says his rosary daily with his wife and his six homeschooled kids, and Patrick's cousin Billy, who runs a transgender theater company with his life partner and last saw the inside of a Catholic Church when his grandmother died in '87, will both claim to be "Catholic" when the exit pollster says: "What religious tradition do you belong to: Catholic, Mainstream Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon or other?"
The tragedy of slavery is effectively completely over. The tragedy of abortion continues.
As far as I’m concerned, the primary requirement for calling oneself a Catholic is regular church attendance. If you aren’t going to church, you are not practicing Cathlicism, therefore you are not a Catholic. Laura Ingram was reading poll figures the other night which said that among people who call themselves Catholics, the split is about 55% to 45% who are pro-life. However, when you ask only the people who go to Mass every week, the numbers go up to almost 90% to 10%. So, it’s tempting to say, politically, that the only Catholics are the ones who go to Mass, but the problem with that is that only about 1/3 of all Catholics do so. So when you throw out all the CINOs, you suddenly find that Catholics are a mush less vital voting block then they are now.
Yes, there’s something in what you say. Yet there is nothing “American” about celebrating a baby killer, either. The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are enshrined in our Constitution. Roe v. Wade not only was unsupported by anything in the Constitution, it flatly violates the Constitution.
There are at least as many reasons for opposing abortion as a good American as there are as a good Catholic. Not to mention simply being a good human being.
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