Posted on 03/10/2006 4:41:55 PM PST by Coleus
The bishops of the United States have countered a “statement of principles” issued by 55 Catholic Democrats with a statement of their own by calling on all Catholics to “shape our consciences in accord with the moral teaching of the Church,” Our Sunday Visitor has learned.
“As the Church carries out its central responsibility to teach clearly and help form consciences, and as Catholic legislators seek to act in accord with their own consciences, it is essential to remember that conscience must be consistent with fundamental moral principles,” said the bishops’ statement, which was released March 10 on the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The “Statement on Responsibilities of Catholics in Public Life” was signed by Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities; Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., chairman of the Task Force on Catholic Bishops; and Catholic Politicians; and Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn, chairman of the bishops’ Committee on Domestic Policy.
Their 682-word document was a direct response to the 55 of 73 Catholic House Democrats’ statement last month that said while they seek the Church’s guidance on moral issues, they also believe “in the primacy of conscience” that can lead them to dissent from the Church’s position.
That statement, released Feb. 28 on the website of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), was widely seen as a thinly veiled defense of Catholic legislators who support laws that protect or expand legal abortion.
The representatives said they “agree with the Catholic Church about the value of human life and the undesirability of abortion” and would work to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and promote alternatives to abortion. However, they also said they “acknowledge and accept the tension that comes with being in disagreement with the Church in some areas.”
The 55 Catholic legislators said they were “committed to making real the basic principles that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching,” including “helping the poor and disadvantaged,” “reducing the rising rates of poverty,” “pressing for increased access to health care” and “protecting the most vulnerable among us.”
But the bishops and the legislators, most of who support the pro-choice position on abortion, part company on whether unborn children must be counted among those most vulnerable and thus warrant legal protection.
“We encourage and will continue to work with those in both parties who seek to act on these essential principles in defense of the poor and vulnerable,” the bishops said. “At the same time, we also need to reaffirm the Catholic Church’s constant teaching that abortion is a grave violation of the most fundamental human right — the right to live that is inherent in all human beings and that grounds every other right we possess.”
The teaching of the Church, they said, “calls all Catholics to work actively to restrain, restrict and bring to an end the destruction of human life.”
The exchange of statements is in part a sequel to the very public debates that took place across the country during the national election of 2004 over the role of faith and conscience in arriving at political positions. The debate was sparked in part by the nomination of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a Catholic who supports legal abortion, as the Democratic nominee for president.
While individual bishops have taken different stances on whether pro-choice Catholic politicians should be allowed to receive Communion, the U.S. bishops were unanimous in urging all Catholic politicians to form public policy positions that are informed by Catholic moral and social teachings.
That encouragement will continue, the bishops said.
“As bishops, we too are bound by our own consciences to teach faithfully and to recommit ourselves to continued reflection and discussion on how Catholic faith and public service can work together to promote human life and dignity and advance the common good,” their statement said. “Through dialogue, especially the irreplaceable dialogue between Catholic political leaders and their own bishops, we hope to promote a better understanding of how the Church’s teaching on human life and dignity challenges us all.”
Bishops' Statement on Responsibilities of Catholics in Public Life (March 10, 2006) (on the U.S. Bishops' web site)
House Democrats Release Historic Catholic Statement of Principles (on web site of the U.S. House of Representatives)
Well, the definition of a Catholic is one who is in communion with a licitly consecrated bishop in communion with the See of Peter.
You may have your own definition, but unless you are Benedict XVI posting with a somewhat unusual handle, your definition doesn't count.
That is called Protestantism or heresy. Throw them out of the Church. There are plenty of other Churches that will be a fit for their ideas of morality. - tom
Some key quotes.
First, from the "Catholic" Democrats: "In all these issues, we seek the Church's guidance and assistance but believe also in the primacy of conscience. In recognizing the Church's role in providing moral leadership, we acknowledge and accept the tension that comes with being in disagreement with the Church in some areas."
To which the Bishops responded: "As the Church carries out its central responsibility to teach clearly and help form consciences, and as Catholic legislators seek to act in accord with their own consciences, it is essential to remember that conscience must be consistent with fundamental moral principles."
There is no way that you can maintain the moral high ground of defending life after birth if you choose to advocate the systematic extermination of life prior to birth.
You can attempt to cloak it in platitudes such as "conscience" or "choice", but in the final analysis you're still culpable.
"I think that more and more of the bishops are realizing that this "seamless garment" and "don't balance the budget on the backs of the poor" have aided and abetted pro-choicers who argue, "I believe in a woman's right to choose [abortion], but I also back social programs for the poor."
The problem is, the converse of that argument is often expressed by conservatives. Or to rephrase it: "I believe that life starts at conception, but I don't want to pay to support a bunch of welfare queens."
In my view, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't demand that people defend life while in the womb and then turn around and essentially say: we're not going to pay to defend and nurture this life once it's been born.
Another "crystal clear" message of "gobbledegook"!
Christianity teaches us to help the poor. It does not teach us to set up a government program to do so.
What? That is quite clear.
First the numbers: of the 55 rats who signed, 6 have 100% perfect PRO LIFE voting records.
33 have ZERO ratings ( both as per the Nat. Right to Life Comm )
The average for this group is 21%.
frenchie started this in 2004 when he tried to hold himself up as a practicing Catholic.
It was because of that position that Catholics Against Kerry was formed.
As a very proud board member of CaK I can say that until he realized we were out here he gave us an endless amount of material to beat him with.
In 2000 Catholics went for algore 50 / 47. In 2004 W beat frenchie 53/ 48.
If these people had any respect for our intelligence they would just shut up and keep voting for death. They don't so they won't.
We waited for Cardinal McCarrick to join the fight, but he never did. Maybe he has grown a spine since 2004. Maybe he has just remembered why he became a priest, either way his coming aboard is a great thing.
"Christianity teaches us to help the poor. It does not teach us to set up a government program to do so."
Agreed. I'm just concerned that the first sentence of your statement not be forgotten while we rush to emphasize the second.
1. The "Catholic" politician who materially supports abortion by, say, resisting the outlawing of abrtion or by supporting gummint funding of abortion has, according to Canon Law, committed a mortal sin.
2. All that is necessary to excommunication is the unrepented commission of mortal sin (must be grave matter, must be known by the sinner to be grave matter, must nevertheless be chosen by the sinner). Contrary to widespread error, all excommunications are not showy public affairs with lots of publicity. In fact, very few are.
3. Today's bishops (successors to the apostles) are not immune from mortal sin. See Judas who is the behavioral ancestor of all too many of them.
4. St. John Chrysostom famously observed that the floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.
5. One way for a bishop to commit a mortal sin and to excommunicate himself is to give the Holy Eucharist to be consumed by the pro-abort likes of Traitor John Kerry, Ted the Swimmer Kennedy, Rosa "Emily's List Executive Director" DeLauro, Face Lift Pelosi, et al.
6. It is hard to imagine such bishops as being truly in communion with the Bishop of Rome, even if he takes no action against them.
Penultimately, consider that Rome and B-XVI are engaged in a campaign of re-Catholicizing AmChurch by attrition. Most recent American appointments to bishoprics have been very much more Catholic than their rebellious predecessors.
Finally, of course, God bless you and yours, Jim, and may God and B-XVI send to New Hampshire a Catholic bishop (for a change) with an attitude and soon.
It may be so that many politicians, "thinking Catholics", "seamless garment but still pro-death" Catholics, and all their bishops (those whose skulls are not paving the floor of Hades already) have been invisibly excommunicated already.
I hope so.
But it is in the nature of a visible hierarchy which desires to be seen as in authority that public acts matter.
Giving Holy Communion to Kennedy matters, because of the effect on all of this who witness the act.
Kennedy's hypothetical private and invisible excommunication does not matter, now because no one knows, and later because "It is written: " 'As surely as I live,' says the Lord, 'every knee will bow before me; every tongue will confess to God.' " So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God." (Romans 14:11-12).
Invisible excommunications which do not exclude the invisibly excommunicated from the Eucharist are unnecessary, per Romans.
It would be better, IMVHO, for the swimmer and all of his buddies to get the boot.
In Connecticut, where I lived until 6 years ago, these included a Pentecostal church, Living Word Ministries of West Haven, Connecticut, which has stockpiled and distributed diapers, clothing, food, and many other necessities to be distributed to such mothers. An interior wall of that church building has the photgraphs of hundreds of children who were born because the members of that church persuaded their mothers not to abort them. The persuasion took place on each and every killing day at Summit Women's Center in Bridgeport. To thwart such successful efforts to interfere with the baby-killing, Summit Killing Center moved to the upper floors of an office building and abandoned the free-standing building that it used for more than 25 years.
Parishioners of St. Agatha's (?) Roman Catholic Church in Milford, Connecticut have, for many years, been picking up discarded furniture on "large trash pickup days" in Connecticut, brought same to their Church basement for the men of the parish to rehabilitate, re-upholster and repair and to be given to mothers who decided against abortion. They also find and pay for apartments for these women and their children and remain available to help them thereafter.
Women whose minds were changed against abortion have made a practice (in their poverty) of inviting some of the sidewalk counselors (elderly and single) to their homes for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
There is a lot of the love of Jesus Christ going on out there without government subsidy.
The Knights of Columbus councils that I am acquainted with do much both monetarily and physically to help keep the Right to Life establishments going.
We have always dedicated much of our funds to the needy mothers and their (and the babies') welfare. Since it is given in the spirit of true charity by real people (as opposed to faceless, nameless, government bureaucracy), the gratitude and the appreciation are incredible to behold. As opposed to the entitlement attitude taken by the welfare queens who merely take what they can.
I have a theory as to what happened to the vigorous American version of Roman Catholicism that flourished under such giants as Bishop Fulton Sheen, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Richard Cardinal Cushing (soft on birth control and Kennedys but good on the rest), James Cardinal McIntyre, Samuel Cardinal Stritch, John Cardinal Carberry, et al.
American Catholics were brought up on (true) tales of how unfairly the 1928 Catholic Democrat nominee Al Smith had been treated. Al Smith was really, really Catholic and much more admired among Catholics than non-Catholics had suspected. The next Catholic nominee was, of course, JFK, a philanderer and phony of the first order BUT Catholics (and many other Americans) fell in love with a wealthy, handsome, glib, superficially educated young senator who displayed major league profile, however deficient his courage.
Many Catholics, traditionally Democrat, then fell so in love with JFK that they began to imagine that submission to JFK was in and of itself Catholicism. RFK succeeded the slain JFK in this respect. Ted the Swimmer has not been confused with any of his elder brothers but Catholics have never recovered completely. Abortion and homosexuality are the issues that are bringing Catholics to our senses ever soooooo slowly, along with a patriotism and martial spirit that was seemingly embodied by JFK but utterly abandoned by his political party since 1972 and the McGovern coup. JFK was a supply sider to some extent and often cited by Jack Kemp.
Under Ronaldus Maximus and now under Dubya, Catholics have voted majority GOP. Did you know that Ronald Reagan was baptized a Catholic in Dixon, Illinois? After his parents split, his mother brought him up in the Church of the Nazarene but she continued to bring up his elder brother, Neal "Moon" Reagan as a Catholic. "Moon" remained a very active Catholic layman to the day he died. He was a successful construction contractor.
If Rome will simply continue to do its job of replacing apostate bishops with determined Catholic bishops, you will see Catholics become a steadfast GOP voting bloc. That result will not be Rome's motive but it will be the result of increasing Mass attendance, increasing devotion to the Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, the increase in confessions, that will all result from far more Catholic bishops. Why, we may even become irresistible to Jim Noble and many other good and presently non-Catholic folks who are similar to him.
One more Kennedy matter: The annulment of the marriage of Jackie Kennedy's sister Lee Radziwell, the apparent annulments of Ted Kennedy's longtime marriage to his first wife Joan, and of his nephew Joseph Kennedy from his first wife Sheila Rauch, has done great damage to the AmChurch's reputation for integrity leading people to reasonably imagine that rich Catholics can get divorces while Catholics of modest means cannot. The answer again is that there are bishops who are successors to Judas and some of my fellow Irish who think they are Henry VIII. No other public excommunication would restore the integrity of AmChurch than that of Ted Kennedy and his current "wife" Victoria (herself a "divorced" "Catholic"). If Sean Cardinal O'Malley won't do it, send him to Rome and bring Archbishop Ray Burke in from St. Louis to do what needs doing. Ray can also deal with Voice of the Apostates, Call to Apostasy, "Renew", ex-priest/Boston Globe anti-Catholic and anti-American columnist James Carroll, and all of the other termites emerging from Law's woodwork in Boston.
That was a very good point you made about how it matters that the bad guys publicly receive communion. We call that the sin of scandal and, under the circumstances, each instance would also seem to be a mortal sin. AmChurch does not seem to grasp the concept of scandal.
Who can disagree that Ted the Swimmer and his buddies should get the boot, at the very least? Personally, I would prefer more vigorous means: The auto da fe is God's chosen way to purge sin from the land! Another soul to heaven from Torquemada's band!!!! Iron maiden. Thumbscrews. Pit and Pendulum. Strappado. Rope. Rack..........
On behalf of the Society and Gentlemen's Club of St. Tomas de Torquemada, Arrogant Bustard is reputed to be spending his engineering skills rehabilitating the disciplinary instruments and the Ladies Auxliary ar preparing refreshments to be enjoyed by the observers.
The love of Jesus Christ rrumps socialist thievery and loot distribution any day. I am also a Knight of Columbus these last 42 years and counting.
Whoops! rrumps=trumps in #35
This debate will continue to grow more heated. I fear that eventually some leftists will favor the use of state power to silence their enemies in the church. It will not work.
"Conscience" means CON + SCIENCE = WITH KNOWLEDGE.
As Pope Pius XII said, "Conscience is a student, not a teacher." Our primary responsibility is to form conscience by virtue, and to inform conscience with the truth.
Catholic philosophers would insist that conscience means "thinking with the Church."
The best way of saying it is, "Put on the mind of Christ" (Philippians 2:5)
It in simply outrageous for these 55 pro-abortion Congress-critters to prattle on about the "primacy of conscience" (what do they mean by that? Opinion? Preference?) without acknowledging their responsibility to form and conform themselves according to the Law of God.
"I've often thought it unfortunate that the word "conscience" was ever coined, because there is in fact no such entity. "Conscience" is nothing but the intellect itself, engaged in a particular type of judgment. The "conscience" is in no sense the origin of any data.
"Consider Man A and Man B. Man A says: "The Church says that X is a sin, but I choose to do X anyway, because it feels good."
"Man B says: "The Church says that X is a sin, but I choose to do X anyway, because my conscience tells me that the Church is mistaken."
"Conventional wisdom holds that these two men are making a very different kind of judgment, on the grounds that Man B is appealing to some source of data distinct from the Church, while Man A is not. But the fact is that they are both making precisely the same choice, namely: I choose not to align my intellect and will with the intellect and will of the Word made Flesh. The only difference is that Man B has indulged in the rhetorical flourish of falsely reifying something (his "conscience"), that supposedly speaks "to" him, but which is in fact nothing other than his own mind.
"The volumes spewed from the presses since Humanae Vitae about "conscience" have been all about proving that there is a crucial difference between saying:
"1) "I have decided to ignore the Church" and
2) "My mind has told me to decide to ignore the Church."
"Of course, there is no meaningful difference. But it was never the purpose of the dissenters to say anything meaningful. Their real purpose is found in the sequelae: The man who says (1) is likely later to say: "I decided to ignore the Church--Father forgive me" while the man who says (2) is heavily padded, heavily drugged, and heavily armed against the intrusion of reality or a sense of responsibility for his choices. He has been equipped with a powerful delusion, an elaborate tale, about his choices' having been dictated to him by someone other than himself--namely, his "conscience."
"As Orwell saw, it is one thing to deny some proposition, but it is a far more powerful strategy to make the multitudes incapable even of thinking that proposition. The despairing denial of the Incarnation (Luther), the blundering denial of the unity of body and mind (Descartes), and the belief in sanctity through self-delusion (Rousseau), have mired the multitudes not so much in heresy as in the incapacity even to think orthodox thoughts, even when they know the words of the Creed.
"After training by the state's schools and the audio/video oobleck industry, the people in the pews may or may not know the definitions of the words "adultery," "lying," "fornication," "theft," "murder"--the words that are really meaningless to them are "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not." To an extent greater, I think, than at any time in history, the people have been trained to feel in their gut that those words are the spiel of a racketeer, that they are radically presumptuous and radically hostile--a frontal attack on what they imagine is their true birthright as humans--absolute autonomy, accompanied by bliss."
Right you are. Precisely because these killer congress-critters ARE Catholics, their statements are even more serious examples of the sin of scandal, and their participation in the Blessed Sacrament (without Confession and repentance) is a sacrilege which works to their own condemnation.
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