"I'm a Conservative Catholic"
Good girl*, Nancy! Tick off legit Catholics FIRST! this is going to be good!
* I'm using 'girl' in the sexist and pejorative way that I would suspect would get under Nancy's skin. I mean no offense to anyone else!
In other news, Ms. Pelosi has announced a new tool in the Democrats arsenal of influence:
Well, that's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to the Left.
In her first major interview as House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi has told a bald-faced LIE and has besmirched the reputations of REAL conservative, practising Catholics. This woman is a hypocrite and a liar of the highest order.
Nancy Pelosi advocates abortion on demand, partial birth abortion, abortion for minors without parental consent, gay marriage, and gay adoptions. For her to claim herself to be a "conservative Catholic" is truly despicable. She ought to be ex-communicated from the church for the public policy evil she has helped perpetrate on this country.
This is as good an example of what I've talked about all along as can be found. How can you trust anyone who can't even tell the truth to THEMSELVES?
We need to keep informing people that there are NO medical reasons at all for PBA. If the mother's life is in danger, the baby can be delivered - alive. Killing the child does not improve the mother's health.
As for the "Safety and Soundness" theme, that is easily answered. Democrats: Unsafe on national defense, Unsound on the economy.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco
One Peter Yorke Way
San Francisco, CA 94109
The Archbishop should definitely hear about this. Sometimes it is necessary to put a little pressure on bishops to get them to act. Pelosi should not be allowed to get off with this claim scott-free.
Most Rev. William J. Levada
Archbishop of San Francisco
United for Life Dinner Talk
April 1, 2000
United Irish Cultural Center
Mother Teresa, in her famous address at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC on February 3, 1994, said, "Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people love, but to use violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion." While many of Mother Teresa's listeners, including President and Mrs. Clinton, took issue with what she said, the truth of her words has never been seen as clearly as today.
We are living in the midst of a culture that often resorts to violence as a solution for our most complex problems. Ours is a culture the Holy Father accurately calls "A Culture of Death". We see this so clearly as the killing of children is done in the name of "choice" and the elderly and infirm are encouraged to consider death once their "quality of life" diminishes. When legalized killing is offered as the solution to society's problems, why do we wonder that killing has become the solution of choice for personal problems?
A few weeks ago, the nation looked in disbelief at the photo of Kayla Rolland, shot and killed by her six-year-old classmate in Flint, Michigan. We were reminded of the recent spate of school killings and once again the tragedy at Colorado's Columbine High School. In a May 27, 1999 address to the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee, Darrell Scott, father of victim Rachel Scott, made the following observations. "The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used. Neither was it the NCA, the National Club Association. The true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be found in Cain's heart." This was not a statement for or against gun control laws. It was rather a plea that we look to the heart of the problem—how we as a society form the hearts and consciences of our children, our citizens.
In so many of these cases of mindless violence, we can find reasons why people are not being educated to prize the gift of life and to abhor the very idea of killing innocent life. The boy in Michigan, we are told, came from a home situation that was very detrimental to his moral education. However, the tragedy of each individual situation has a common origin. The same father of the Columbine victim wrote the following poem, which captures the heart of the matter:
Your laws ignore our deepest needs,
Your words are empty air
You've stripped away our heritage
You've outlawed simple prayer.
Now gunshots fill our classrooms
And precious children die
You seek for answers everywhere
And ask the question "Why?"
You regulate restrictive laws
Through legislative creed
And yet you fail to understand
That God is what we need.
Perhaps this man's answer may seem simplistic, paying no attention to the complexities of public policy and social discourse. But, does not his poem seem to touch the heart of the matter?
You who work in the pro-life movement know this well. You have seen first-hand the disastrous choices that people can make when they do not follow God's law of life. Those of you working in post-abortion ministry see the devastating effects these choices have not only on the woman's life, but so often on her family, the child's father and everyone with whom she interacts.
By making a "woman's right to choose" the trump card in every election, our country has made freedom as license (to do whatever I want) the focus of civic life. Such a public stance will not only not contribute to forming virtuous people whose consciences know which choices are good and which are bad, but it can positively undermine the efforts of the best-intentioned among us to provide the common moral vision without which a society like ours cannot long endure.
So it should not surprise us so much that society is reaping the consequences of its embrace of freedom divorced from moral judgement. Of course we should recognize in media violence and Internet pornography the massive contributions to the deadening of conscience in our land.
But so too have almost 3 decades of almost unrestricted abortions made their contribution. Every abortion, every action that destroys the dignity of a human life, has consequences. There are immediate consequences, but there are also long-range cultural consequences, those that change the moral climate of an entire people. And in our culture, can we not see these consequences dramatically played out as school children shoot and kill their classmates?
However, the Good News that was given once and for all is pertinent today no less than in any other age. In this Jubilee Year, this year of favor from the Lord, the words of Christ take on a special meaning. The Holy Father writes in Incarnationis Mysterium, "Conversion and penance ... are the beginning and the path of man's healing, and the necessary condition for him to recover what he could never attain by his own strength: God's friendship and grace, the supernatural life which alone can bring fulfillment to the deepest aspirations of the human heart." (IM, 2) In a spirit of reconciliation, the Bishops of the United States have asked that this year be a particular time of reaching out to those women who have had abortions, inviting them back into the healing embrace of our forgiving Lord.
Let me refer to the example of our Holy Father, Pope John Paul, who recently took the occasion of the beginning of Lent in the Jubilee Year to call the whole Catholic Church to an act of pardon and repentance for sins committed throughout her history in the name of Christ and of His Church.
This example is not simply a mea culpa for us Catholics; it is intended to set an example of how all of us in the broader community may take stock of how we may have contributed, by acts of commission or omission, to promoting in our own way this culture of death and failing to build up the civilization of love which is the great promise of living according to the Gospel.
This Jubilee Year also provides us with an opportunity to examine ourselves. Being proponents of the right to life is difficult work. It is work that very often goes overlooked, that is very often done in the midst of contention, that very rarely sees dramatic results. Yet it is the very work of the Gospel of Life, as the recent encyclical of Pope John Paul II illustrates. In Matthew's Gospel we hear Jesus say, "Whoever receives one such child receives me." And in receiving this child, our hearts are healed and we are blessed. Not blessed by the world, but by our Heavenly Father whose blessing is infinitely greater.
We know by experience that this great culture war, between the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death, will not be won solely by our efforts. The problems of our world, many though they are, are not, at their origin, political or social. They are spiritual. And we must prepare ourselves for battle on the spiritual level as we do for battle on the temporal. The words of the psalmist say, "Create a clean heart in me, 0 God, put a steadfast spirit within me." It is only through our ongoing personal conversion, made new each day as we ask God to re-create our hearts, that we will have the courage and wisdom to continue this work on behalf of life. It is necessary witness we must give to our fellow citizens. Even if efforts have proven ineffective against a culture steeped in relativism, we must never give in to discouragement.
In this Jubilee Year, the Holy Father is asking us to look once more at the mystery of the Incarnation, and in a specific way to let that mystery be for us the foundation of what we do, particularly in our work to support the dignity of all human life. In the Pope's Apostolic Letter, On the Coming of the Third Millennium, he quotes the Second Vatican Council and writes, "God united himself in some sense with every person. He labored with human hands, thought with a human mind, acted with a human will, and loved with a human heart. Born of Mary the Virgin he truly became one of us and, sin apart, was like us in every way." (TMA, 4)
It is precisely the mystery of Christ's Incarnation that led Pope John Paul II on his spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which we witnessed this past week to such dramatic effect. Walking in the footsteps of Jesus, he demonstrated amply how it is through the humanity of Jesus that we come face to face with the eternal love of God, and grow in respect for all those who prepared the way for Jesus - our Jewish brothers and sisters - as well as those who share our common faith in the God of Abraham, our father in faith - the followers of Islam.
This essential tenet of the Christian faith is the theological foundation for all Catholic social teaching. We uphold the value of each human life because we believe that God created all persons in the image of the Trinity and sent his Son to become united with each person. We see clearly that each rejection of any person is in some way a rejection of Christ. We are given the great gift of this Year of Jubilee so that we can once again turn our focus to the salvation given us by Jesus, so that we can work ever harder to reconcile our hearts to His. And so that we will be given a renewed ardor to work for the dignity of all people.
In this Jubilee Year, let us renew our energy and look with new eyes on the world. Let us seek new ways to reach out to the poorest of God's children - the unborn, the forsaken elderly, the grieving woman, the abandoned child, the broken family - the starving and the victims of violence. Let us remember than no one is outside the gaze of our Heavenly Father. Let us help to restore the innocence of children, respect for the elderly, awe at the gift of new life, forgiveness of our neighbor and all of those small acts of charity which change people from strangers into brothers and sisters - in deed, which can change a culture of death into the culture of life - and can create - even here in the United States - the Civilization of Love.