Posted on 08/03/2016 2:51:21 PM PDT by NYer
.- Catholics need to stop voting for pro-abortion politicians, Supreme Knight Carl Anderson told an international gathering of the Knights of Columbus.
“Pope Francis has emphasized how important it is for Catholics to be engaged in the political process,” Anderson said Aug 2. “His words regarding the importance of Catholics being faithful citizens are especially important for us.”
Anderson’s remarks to the Supreme Convention of the Knights of Columbus meeting in Toronto reiterated his comments to the 2008 Supreme Convention in Quebec.
“We need to end the political manipulation of Catholic voters by abortion advocates,” he said. “It is time to end the entanglement of Catholic people with abortion killing. It is time to stop creating excuses for voting for pro-abortion politicians.”
“Abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale,” he added.
Anderson said politics does not mean partisanship, but a stand for the common good and for moral and religious values that make free, democratic institutions possible.
Foremost among these values, he said, is “the equal dignity of every human life and the right of every person to freely practice their religion.”
“We will never succeed in building a culture of life if we continue to vote for politicians who support a culture of death.”
He reflected on the political question of whether one should support a candidate attractive for many reasons but who supports abortion.
“Some partisan advocates have sought to excuse support for pro-abortion candidates through a complex balancing act. They claim other issues are important enough to offset a candidate’s support for abortion,” he said.
“But the right to abortion is not just another political issue,” Anderson said. “It is in reality a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.”
He noted that 40 million is a figure greater than the entire population of Canada.
“What political issue could possibly outweigh this human devastation?” he asked. “The answer, of course, is that there is none.”
His 2008 remarks urged faithful Catholics to build a new politics not according to the status quo, but according to their dedication to “building up a new culture of life.”
In his latest remarks Anderson said he would add that Catholics need to “think in new ways” to build “a civilization of love.”
His speech discussed legalized euthanasia, threats to religious freedom, the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians and the 2015 racial murders at a black church in South Carolina and new racial violence in the U.S. this year.
Anderson added that about 8 in 10 Americans would significantly restrict abortion, while almost 6 in 10 Canadians would support substantial restrictions.
A significant majority of Americans consider abortion morally wrong and do not want taxpayer funding of abortion, he said.
One of the most persuasive explanations can be found in a video at THIS link. It is from Prager Univ with this introduction: "Is abortion right, or is it wrong? Dennis Prager answers the most important question about abortion."
Black, if he is urging others to vote pro-life, then he would certainly approve of urging others to vote.
Perhaps it is an idea for the Knights to address and act on that problem. Less than 10% of those attending Sunday Mass in CT vote in our August primaries.
the fact that he himself is not informed on his local election dynamics could be responsible for his mis-diagnosis.
“Catholics need to stop voting for pro-abortion politicians”
Wrong. They have stopped. They have stopped voting. At least in many east coast states.
“Catholics need to start voting for pro-life politicians” would be the way to state it.
In the first 80 years of the Knights of Columbus (ca. 1883-1963) the Knights posed as non-partisan when the reality was that the Knights were overwhelmingly Democrat. By the 1950s, Joe McCarthy was getting a lot of K of C sympathy in spite of his being a Republican. The Supreme Knight of that era was Luke Hart, a Goldwater Republican from Missouri and the first Republican Supreme Knight but the non-partisan pose continued while the Democrat reality eroded.
In the early days, American Catholics and Knights were deeply resentful of remarks at an 1884 NY Republican fundraiser for presidential nominee and notorious anti-Catholic James G. Blaine, by some now forgotten Presbyterian preacher who labeled the Democrat Party as the party of "rum, Romanism and rebellion." This in the home state of the distinguished all Irish Catholic Fighting 69th division of the Union Army.
Earlier, in the Mexican War, Irish American soldiers deserted en masse and formed the San Patricio Brigade of the Mexican Army when they became convinced that their Whig generals (the party that preceded the Republicans) were motivated by anti-Catholic bigotry against Mexico. Captured late in the war, the San Patricios were branded on their faces with a D for deserter or more commonly executed.
In the 1920s, the uber Catholic Cristero Rebellion was launched in Mexico against the viciously anti-Catholic dictator Placido Callas. Calvin Coolidge sent a New Jersey Republican Senator to Mexico as his ambassador to arm Callas with military aircraft and other modern weapons to resist and defeat the Cristeros. During the suppression of the Cristeros, a very young Jesuit (Blessed Miguel Pro) was discovered by authorities emerging from the basement of a Catholic family in Mexico City after saying Mass for them and their friends. He was arrested, tried by a kangaroo court, condemned to death and executed by firing squad. The Mexican government filmed the martyrdom of Miguel Pro and it appears in full as the background for the closing credits in the film For Greater Glory. The Knights have not forgotten but sponsor a traveling display of the relics of many of the Cristero martyrs, many of whom have been formally canonized as saints.
From the 1920s to the 1990s and again today, Mexico was ruled by a corrupt combine of Marxists and gangsters known as the PRI or Institutional Revolutionary Party. Vincente Fox was the only non-PRI president of Mexico inthe last 90+ years.
In 1939, Fr. Pro's brother, also a priest, refused to discuss the contents of a sacramental confession by one who was suspected of directing the assassination of another Mexican dictator (Obregon) and that refusal led to his indictment as a co-conspirator with a view toward executing him. The still quite Democrat Knights' leadership met with FDR in the Oval Office to demand American intervention on behalf of the priest. FDR called his decidedly anti-Catholic Secretary of State Cordell Hull to the meeting and ordered him, in the presence of the Knights' leadership to communicate with the Mexican dictatorship that the priest and his entire family would be released or the US Army woud head for Mexico City to depose the government. The priest was released and he and his family (and their property) were welcomed in Cuba by Fulgencio Batista. This was at a time when FDR had already lost the support for re-nomination to an unprecedented third term of DNC Chairman James J. Farley and Joseph Kennedy and many leading Irish Democrats as well as his own VPOTUS John Nance Garner. Al Smith had supported Alf Landon i 1936.
After the JFK assassination, Democrat Knights successfully urged that a "Living Rosary" be said by each council on the anniversary (something of a rarity nowadays) to remind us (wthout saying so) of Catholic American historical ties to the Democrat Party. After all, JFK had been a Knight.
Left Democrats overplayed their hand by electing John Griffin, PhD, a Massachusetts gummint skewel superintendent/commissar, as Supreme Knight, gutting the traditional rituals, trying to lurch the order leftward in the era of McGovern, adding leftist priests (including one leftist Jesuit Fr. McPeake) to the HQ staff, and generally trying to restore Democrat power in the order (however informal) and move it leftward in the era when McGovern was seizing permanent control of the Democrat Party for the Marxist left.
An internal rebellion then forced the retirement of Griffin and the election of Virgil Dechant of Kansas, a solidly conservative long-time Kansas Republican State Central Committee member who was Supreme night for about 30 years and was succeeded by Carl Anderson, a former aide to Jesse Helms and Ronaldus Maximus. The order will never proclaim itself Republican but read the tea leaves when life issues and family issues are foremost in our minds.
The Knights of Columbus organization has two aspects. From the very beginning, it has been a first rate life insurance company, originating at New Haven as a Catholic burial society and has developed into one of the top rated two or three life insurance companies according to A. A. Best rating agency. Secondly, it is a fraternal organization with a few million members, mostly in the US but also in Mexico, Canada, the Phillipines and Poland.
Are there reasons OTHER than Catholicism why so few Catholics vote in CT primaries?
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