Political hands have a term for this: "muddying the waters". Unfortunately, no genuinely pro-life spokesman with a title that confers authority in this area appeared to challenge her. There's only one CHA, and there are over a 100 bishops and no single bishop speaks for them all. Looking to the future, it is a fantasy for the CHA to think this is good for their hospitals. They won't have "their" hospitals much longer. New York City recently lost Cabrini, St. John's, Mary Immaculate, and St. Vincents. Catholic heath-care is extinct in New York City and it is because the government at all levels would not fund the indigent care which was mandated by the licenses of these hospitals. The government will standby as all the CHA hospitals fail in like manner and Catholic health care will be extinct in this country.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
US bishops laud Stupak amendment’s passage; no comment on Pelosi plan
Divide and conquer. The bill lacks:
It included:
While the bishops are not libertarians but statists, but this bill has no recognition of subsidiarity.
The pro-abortion people are not sweating, they are certain Stupak will be killed in "reconciliation" process.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Most Catholics, yes, most Catholics are responsible for there being legal abortion today in the United States. Not abstaining from voting, most Catholics voted for Clinton and most Catholic voted for Obama. Pro-life Catholics do not need to become Republican. The political agenda for pro-life Catholics is (a) vote for the the pro-life candidate and (b) urge everyone to vote pro-life. The sooner "Faithful Citizenship" is repudiated the better as its statement that "Catholics are not single issue voters" was the permission slip to vote for the murder of the unborn.
(Some full disclosure, I was part of the Catholic blogger outreach in the successful 2004 campaign to reelect President George Bush.)
The primary author Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship was Bishop Dimarzio
and you can see and hear him talk about a "hierarchy of values" immediately, then mentioning a dozen other issues, and then mentioning "life" as "most important" rather matter-of-factly at timestamp 00:50.
I don't doubt for an instant the sincerity and intelligence of Bishop Dimarzio. I believe his error was allowing language to make abortion merely seem to be only one of many moral issues of varying weight, and perhaps as a single issue, abortion carries the most weight.
He simply overestimated the ability of the average Catholic voter reading this to see nuance. He underestimated the rhetorical power of one clear unambiguous "Catholics are not single issue voters".
These six words were the tool in the hands of Obama's media outlets to hand out a bishops-endorsed permission slips to vote for Obama. It frankly cut us off at the knees from insisting that abortion was such a critical moral flaw of America that Catholic teaching required us to become single issue voters to deal with it. ("us" is not merely the Catholic bloggers and talk-show-callers, but serious Catholic opinion leaders like EWTN, Catholic Answers, and Priests for Life)
