[Alex Murphy]

Not only is it church policy, but the vast majority of Catholics, leaders or followers, actually subscribe to it.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid:

...The disagreement over Notre Dame and Obama is essentially the same as the disagreement among clashing American Catholic camps over the issue of the moral and legal status of abortion itself. In fact, 61 percent of the “attend less often” Catholics believe that abortion rights should be protected in all or most cases, as opposed to 30 percent (still an interesting number) among the “attend weekly” Catholics.

-- from the thread Those consistently complex “Catholic voters”

How Catholic Universities Support Planned Parenthood
Guttmacher Report on Catholic Contraceptive Use
Guttmacher Report on Catholic Contraceptive Use

[pgyanke]

Alex, xzins said "vast majority". We have our bad apples, as any collection of humanity will... but the vast majority of the more than 1 billion Catholics worldwide are pro-life!

I pray daily for the Church to deal more forcefully and publicly with the openly scandalous in our midst.

[Claud]

Um...did you just admit that contraception and abortion are related there, Alex? ;)

[Campion]

61 percent of the “attend less often” Catholics believe that abortion rights should be protected in all or most cases

I guess I don't really see the relevance to Catholicism per se of the opinions of people who can't be bothered to order their life according to the precept "a Catholic is required under pain of grave sin to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation". If you can't do that, in what sense are you really living as a Catholic? And if you aren't living as a Catholic, in what sense, beside the merely juridical, are you a Catholic at all?

Someone whose relationship to the Church (setting aside their relationship to God -- but a Catholic ought not to see their relationships to God and to the Church as separable items) doesn't even rise to spending one hour a week (plus one hour or less on 5 or 6 other days a year) has none of what lawyers call "standing" to associate their opinions with Catholicism as a belief system.

This thread is about pro-lifers who are joining the Catholic Church, not pro-lifers who are associating themselves with people whose connection with the Catholic Church is marked mostly by their own disobedience to it.

[xzins]

I think I had a fair caveat built into my post. Western Catholicism has its tares, but it has a lot of wheat, too. Non-western Catholicism adheres even more closely to the pro-life position espoused by the Catholic church. I can’t really speak to Orthodoxy, if one is including other strands of catholicism. (I don’t include Anglicanism). I assume the Orthodox are also pro-life, but I don’t know that.