It’s been going around all the blogs and comboxes, not to mention actual conversations in everyday life.
What do we do now?
During the campaign, some Catholics who were calling themselves pro-life were saying that it’s time to give up the legal fight to reverse Roe v. Wade. “Abortion is legal and it’s here to stay,” they say. “Let’s commit ourselves to limiting the number of abortions through social programs to help women.” Which to them, of course, meant voting for Obama, in spite of the fact that he was the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to run for President.
Some pro-choicers, both before and after mocking us so-called “social conservatives,” saying “why not give up? You are never going to win. Stay down on your red-state farms where you belong, and don’t try to bring religious issues into the political sphere. Abortion is legal, and it’s here to stay.”
What I say to all of these people is: you just don’t understand.
It’s true that changing the law is not as immediately vital as saving lives of babies through individual social actions, including sidewalk counseling, crisis pregnancy centers, pro-life education and other kinds of community action. And government social programs to help women are vitally important too. But statements like the above ignore the fundamental meaning of the law and why we should all be interested in what it says.
Why do we have laws against certain behavior? Not because we think outlawing something will completely stop it. If that were the case, we would have given up on our laws against murder and drunk driving, years ago, because in spite of all the laws, people still commit thousands of murders a year, and thousands of people drive drunk, killing still more innocent people.
No, we have laws because they signal what it is is what we believe in, what we strive to uphold, what we stand for and against as a society. They are statements that attempt to put up a wall between civilization and barbarity. Laws of course, give us the ability to punish offenders who want to destroy this civilization. Even more important, what is enshrined in law is enshrined in people’s hearts. It’s also enshrined in public policy. And what we have enshrined in our public policy now is horrendous. And it’s only going to become more so.
Declaring abortion legal in the United States in 1973 meant declaring that a certain class of human beings in our society are not really human, have no rights and are not protected under law. This is a fundamental evil that destroys human rights and dignity because it breaks the bonds of the human family and the social compact that binds us as a people. It is the same evil that is behind racism, genocide and the Holocaust.
Enshrining this evil in our hearts as a people is leading now and will lead in the future to more intolerable evils in public policy and in American life. As far back as the 70’s, doctors, ethicists and others who wanted to shape public policy began to advocate the right to kill defective children after birth, voluntary and even compulsory euthanasia, all based on the principle asserted in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton that the human right to life is not absolute. This is bearing poisonous fruit today in the assisted suicide movement, and a movement, still muted, but steadily growing, for compulsory euthanasia in some cases. The idea that other lives are not worthy of protection is now being enshrined in law.
This has to be stopped.
Look at Nazi Germany in the late 20’s and early 30’s before Hitler came to power, and you will see that the same things: euthanasia, and compulsory killing of the handicapped and the mentally ill were being advocated then. And look what happened. All it will take for us to follow suit in the U.S. is the right demagogue. (Let’s hope Obama is not the one).
This is why the fundamental right to life of all human beings must be solidly established in law.
As a historian, I don’t put much stock in the “abortion is here to stay” argument. The entire human mindset has been changed more than once in history. When Christianity came into the world in the Roman empire, abortion was very common and infanticide (in the form of the exposure of unwanted babies) was an established part of the Roman law and family structure. Christians were the only people to combat this evil through their assertion that all human beings are valuable because created by God. They created a revolution in society in favor of the protection of all human life, an understanding that over the course of centuries, became enshrined in law, which even if it wavered here and there in different ages, remained basically solid.
Now another revolution in mindset seems to have been taking place over the last 30-40 years, one that wants to enshrine human convenience and utilitarian ethics as the foundation of law and public policy, and is seeking to destroy the fundamental principles that protect human life and dignity. But the majority of the American people still seem to think otherwise, if the polls indicating that the majority of Americans still want restrictions on abortion. (Over 80% are opposed to partial-birth abortions). Only a small minority of pro-abortion people are at the controls in government now. Only time can tell whether this will be a fundamental mindset change or is just a mere glitch in our nation’s consciousness. From the viewpoint of centuries, a 30-40 year trend looks a little less awesome. I believe it can be stopped and reversed.
For the sake of our whole society, it must be reversed.
You can help out by fighting the Freedom of Choice Act, something that the pro-abortion crowd has been trying to get passed in Congress for twenty years. President Obama has promised to immediately sign it into law if it passes. With large Democratic majorities in House and Senate, it just may pass. This bill would enshrine abortion in law as a woman’s “fundamental right” and would remove all legal protection from the unborn. It would overturn the Partial-Birth Abortion ban. It would mandate tax-funded abortions, remove conscience clauses, forcing Catholic physicians and nurses to perform abortions, and more.
You can read an excellent article about FOCA here. And you can sign a petition and donate to the cause here.
Do it for unborn babies, for also for all of us and our future as a nation.
Thursday, November 6th, 2008,
by Lori,
Filed under: Life Issues, Politics| |
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I work at home, so I got to go to vote at a non-busy time, right after lunch, around 1 p.m. The polling place, a school, was only 3 blocks from my apartment.
I live in the Bronx, and my electoral district went 92% for Gore in 2000. Still, on my way, as I was passing the grocery store, I saw a little black kid running around with some flyers (or maybe sample ballots?) calling “Vote Obama, vote Obama!” The Obama campaign was definitely not taking any chances!
The polling place wasn’t crowded at all, and everyone was very friendly. My neighborhood is about 70-80% black and Hispanic, so at that time, I seemed to be the only white face around. I showed my ID, signed my name in the book, and sat at the school cafeteria table to wait for the four people ahead of me to vote, then went in the booth and for the second time in 30 years, pulled the lever for a straight Republican ticket.
The first time was in 1976, the first election when I was of voting age. My Catholic family were all lifelong Democrats and I had always expected to be the same. Then in 1973, when I was sixteen, came the shocking and numbing announcement that the Supreme Court had decreed abortion on demand legal throughout the land. In 1976, Jimmy Carter was announcing his wishy-washy stand and shutting vocal pro-lifers out of the Democratic convention. I voted for Ford in protest. I still recall how reluctantly I did so.
I have voted for Democratic presidential candidates since then — just not any that were actually running. Twice I gave my write-in vote to Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, a brave pro-life Democrat. The rest of the time I have simply not voted, also out of protest and aversion to Republican policies. This time, I wanted at all costs to defeat Obama, but I knew that in my district my vote was basically useless. But mostly I wanted to vote for a real live Feminist for Life for Vice-President. Who knows when I’ll be able to do that again?
For over 30 years I have gone through an internal struggle, longing to vote Democratic but unable to do so in good conscience. Those who are saying “it’s OK, we’ve got a proportionate reason!” all sound terribly glib to me. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe they’ve gone through as great an inner struggle as I have and are now throwing in the towel. or maybe they are just waking up to the whole question for the first time. I’d really like to know how they can do it. All I can think of is all the babies being slaughtered.
I started watching the election results at dinner. Now at 11 p.m. they’ve just called it: Obama has won. In the larger picture, a great historic moment — America’s first African-American President. I only wish I could feel happier about it. Why can’t I feel happy about it? Most of the things he stands for I agree with. If I could just stop thinking about his Messiah complex and his strange, unsavory radical associations, i could be happy. I should be happy — but I keep thinking about the slaughtered babies, and how Obama wants to remove all protection from them.
I’m now incredibly depressed. But at the same time, I’m determined to start the fight against FOCA as soon as possible. If not 30 years of pro-life work will be wasted. I will never give up! Prolifers must never give up!
And at all costs, we must pray for our country and our new President.
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008,
by Lori,
Filed under: Life Issues, Politics| |
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I’m finally getting around to posting my debunking of Cornwell’s book about John Paul I. This little project has grown considerably as I’ve worked on it, so again it will have to be divided into several parts.
Yallop’s book was the first English-language bestseller to sensationalize and distort John Paul I’s life and death. But it was not to be the last. In May 1989, a little over ten years after the Pope’s death, John Cornwell, an English journalist, published A Thief in the Night: The Death of Pope John Paul I (New York: Viking, 1989). In it, he suggested that rather than being murdered, John Paul I was an incompetent Pope who didn’t want the job, and who helped bring about his own death. His work received a better reception from the critics, who had lambasted Yallop’s work. Even today, some well-informed Catholic writers who reject Yallop’s book cite Cornwell’s as a solid investigation that really clears up the mysteries about the Pope’s death.
Cornwell’s reputation later plummeted, however. In 1999, a decade after A Thief in the Night, he went on to write Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking) only to meet with massive criticism of his book for being one-sided, sensationalistic, unscholarly, even fraudulent. He had not only repeated the frequent accusation that Pius had remained silent about the Holocaust, he openly charged him with anti-Semitism and aiding Hitler’s rise to power.
Along with many other errors, numerous critics pointed to a good solid lie right on the front cover of the book: a photo of the future Pope Eugenio Pacelli as papal nuncio to Germany leaving a government building surrounded by German soldiers. In the original edition published in England, the photo was identified inside the book jacket as one taken of Pacelli in March 1939 while Hitler was ruling Germany, suggesting that Pacelli had a close relationship with the Nazis. In fact, the photo was actually taken in 1927, during the Weimar Republic, years before Hitler came to power. On the cover of the American edition, the photo was even cropped to eliminate details that would aid in dating it. (1).
In the end Cornwell was forced to take back many of his conclusions. In 2004, he said, “I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler’s Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by the Germans.” (2).
Yet while there have been plenty of scholars who were ready and able to defend Pius XII against Cornwell’s attacks, there have been few or none writing in English to do the same for his treatment of John Paul I (3). This is what I want to accomplish here. And with any luck, I will force him to take back his conclusions about John Paul I as well, although he has largely repeated them in one of his latest books The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II (New York: Doubleday 2004).
Cornwell, who worked for the London Observer, had also published two novels. In his book he said that while he was visiting the Vatican in the fall of 1987, to get some information about the Vatican’s views on the apparitions at Medjugorie and other supernatural phenomena, Archbishop John Foley, President of the Vatican Commission for Social Communications, had urged him to his surprise to write a book about the death of John Paul I, a subject he originally not been intending to pursue. Foley, he says, wanted a book that would tell the Vatican’s side of the story and dispel the rumors of murder fueled by Yallop’s book. He promised the British author that he could “open up the Vatican” to him. After some hesitation, Cornwell says, he agreed. Though Cornwell, a former seminarian, had since left the practice of the Catholic faith, he felt that he could be objective on the matter. (4).
The Vatican tells the story differently. Archbishop Foley denied that he promised to open up the Vatican, and a journalist who knew Foley said he believed the prelate, and found the statements attributed to him in Cornwell’s book not very credible (5). Other reports indicate that the Vatican only agreed to cooperate with Cornwell on the book after it had received a letter from England’s Cardinal Basil Hume vouching for his integrity. (6). This suggests that it was Cornwell who approached the Vatican, not the other way around.
Like Yallop, Cornwell enjoyed great success and notoriety with this book. His subsequent sensationalistic works on the papacy, including Hitler’s Pope, which have sold well, demonstrate that he has clearly learned where his bread and butter lie, though his honesty and scholarship have frequently been questioned.
In spite of his reputation, A Thief in the Night has been seen by some as the definitive work on Pope John Paul I’s death. But is it?
Cornwell’s Theory
Cornwell rejects the murder theory but believes that John Paul I was faced with a job beyond his capabilities as Pope. He really had the mentality of a simple country priest. As a bishop and cardinal, he “had been sheltered from political conflict and had no time for theological dispute.” (7). Cornwell says that John Paul found himself lost when trying to cope with important Church problems. He told others in the papal apartment that he shouldn’t be Pope and that he was begging God to allow him to die. At the same time, Cornwell says, he was mortally ill, and no one in the Vatican showed a proper interest in his medical care.
Cornwell believes that John Paul was suffering from phlebitis in his legs, a dangerous condition that can lead to an embolism or blood clot in the lungs, but neglected to take necessary medication. Though he experienced severe pain in his chest on September 28, 1978, he forbade his secretaries to summon a doctor. As a result, he suffered from a massive embolism while alone in his room that night, and died within moments. In the end, the Pope, no longer wanting to live, had hastened his own end. Cornwell asks:
“What is the dividing line between ‘giving up,’ suicide by deliberate neglect, and ‘resignation’ or ‘abandonment in a religious sense? There is no evidence that Pope John Paul abandoned himself to despair, but he was ready to die, and there was not only a sense of ripeness, but a strong desire. It took only his refusal to see a doctor and the heedlessness of others to assure him the end he so devoutly wished for.” (8)
Is there any truth in all this?
Whatever criticisms I have about the book in other regards, I will say that one thing Cornwell actually did do well was to prove the sheer ridiculousness of the murder plot theory put forward by Yallop. The few clear facts he documents demolishes that theory, and Yallop’s claims of a deliberate cover-up by the Vatican. He even defends Marcinkus. Particularly helpful in this regard is his inclusion in an appendix of the 1987 article in the Wall Street Journal detailing the charges against Marcinkus and the point-by point refutation by the lawyers for the Vatican Bank.
Of course, once the murder theory was done away with, Cornwell still had to justify his work for the modern book market by coming up with something sensational. He ended up putting forward a real character assassination of the late John Paul I, who was in no way the insecure, whiny character, hopeless in despair and the near suicide that Cornwell makes him out to be.
Cornwell’s book is filled with distortions. As an investigative reporter, he perhaps can’t be faulted for not being a rigorous historian. But even as a journalist, he is unforgivably sloppy, and also suspiciously casual about the truth. As a preliminary to further discussion, I will list these major failings:
1) A lack of in-depth research. Cornwell’s actual summing up of the pre-papal career of Albino Luciani, which takes up at most 2 or 3 pages, is very superficial and at times completely inaccurate. What Cornwell needed to do, and clearly didn’t have the capacity to do, is to really investigate the Pope’s earlier life, study his writings and talk to people who knew him and who could discuss his theological and pastoral approach as a bishop and a cardinal in depth. If he had done so, he would have reached a very different conclusion about the Albino Luciani’s qualifications to be Pope.
In addition, if Cornwell really wanted to know what John Paul I did and thought as Pope, why not turn to the actual texts of his few talks and writings during his short papacy, which have been available from the beginning in English? For a former seminarian, Cornwell seems strangely uninterested in what the Pope thought theologically. Maybe he no longer has a taste for such things, but he should have done his research.
2) Depending on the wrong sources. Cornwell’s non-research is filled out with interviews with a bunch of gossipy Vatican monisignori, who clearly never met John Paul I during his papacy or at any other time. Cornwell accepted at face value their notions that he was “out of his depth” as Pope. Cornwell eagerly reproduce the words of one of these worthy informants that the Vatican “floats on a sea of brilliant bitchery,” (9) evidently relishing the poor image that this give of the Vatican. But he does himself little credit by apparently accepting without question everything told him by such “bitchy” sources. The few times Cornwell did interview someone with actual insight into Luciani’s personality and his strengths through lifelong acquaintance with him, such as his niece Lina Petri, he ignores those insights in putting together his picture of the Pope.
In addition, those who actually did speak to John Paul I frequently as Pope – Cardinal Villot, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Caprio, and Cardinal Casaroli — left accounts of their own, which were available while Cornwell was doing his research, but which he ignored. They provide a completely different picture.
3) Inaccuracy and fictionalizing. The few times I have been able to check a source that Cornwell used, suspicious things crop up. Sister Irma Dametto complained that Cornwell completely invented the circumstances of her interview with him (which did not take place at tea alone with him, but in a Vatican office in the presence of Marjorie Weeke, secretary of the Vatican’s Office for Social Communications). Weeke and the Pope’s niece, Lina Petri, have complained that Cornwell attributed to them things they never said. (10)
Some of the inaccuracy is due to Cornwell’s lack of knowledge of Italian, or his deliberate distortion in translation. For instance, in his interview with Lina Petri, he quotes her as saying that when she saw her uncle’s body in his room in the Vatican on the morning of September 29, he was dressed in a white cassock with torn sleeves. Cornwell naturally speculates feverishly about the reason for these torn sleeves. He makes it part of an imagined scenario in which the secretaries actually found the Pope shortly after his death (around midnight), and took off his cassock, tearing it in the process, in order to put on his pajamas, and arrange him in a sitting position in bed, to make it look as if he had died there (11). But Lina later pointed out that she had really only said that the sleeves were wrinkled (stropicciate), not torn (strappate). All the speculation was based on a faulty translation (12).
Certainly, there must be dozens of other such inaccuracies, in addition to the smaller mistakes, such as Cornwell’s consistent misspelling of the name of Luciani’s first diocese as bishop, Vittorio Veneto (which he calls Vittoria Veneto).
Cornwell often distorts the character of words of his interviewers in other ways. I myself interviewed Don Diego Lorenzi, the Pope’s secretary in Venice and the Vatican, some years ago, and corresponded with him for several years. I found him far from the buffoon that Cornwell makes him out to be. Cornwell has Lorenzi speaking near-perfect English in a distinct British idiom (even using words like “bloody’), where the real Lorenzi speaks and writes English well, but in a distinctly Italian way, making mistakes in grammar and usage typical of an Italian. Perhaps these changes are a kind of hangover from Cornwell’s career as a novelist.
Many details in Cornwell’s interviews with Lorenzi and his fellow papal secretary, Father (now Bishop) John Magee, are different from those they have given elsewhere, or are highly colored and exaggeratee versions of things they are on record elsewhere as saying. And in many cases, they are exaggerated in just such a way as to shore up Cornwell’s own sensational theory.
All of this raises a gigantic red flag about Cornwell’s accuracy. I will discuss these as well as other more serious inaccuracies in the next installment.
NOTES
(1) See Prof. Ron Rylchak, “The Morphing of a Book Cover,” on his website Hitler, Pope Pius XII, The Jews, the Catholics, the Truth.
(2) “The papacy.” The Economist, December 9, 2004, pp. 82-83; also in the U.S. ed., which is dated December 11.
(3) When the book first came out, I wrote an article refuting the author’s claims: Lori Pieper, “Controversial Theory about Pope’s Death Proposed.” Our Sunday Visitor, August 20, 1989, pp. 3-4. Jesus Lopez Saez’s book, Se pedira cuenta, originally written in Spanish, and his subsequent book, El dia de cuenta, do the same.
(4) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, pp. 1-3.
(5) Desmond O’Grady, “A Thief in the Night: More Vatican Bashing?” Our Sunday Visitor, August 20, 1989, pp. 3-4.
(6) “Death in Rome: Was John Paul I murdered?” Time, June 19, 1989, p. 53; no author given.
(7) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, p. 261.
(8) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, p. 265.
(9) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, p. 62.
(10) Sister Irma Dametto, letter to editor of Humilitas (August 1991), p. 11; Tornielli and Zangrande, Papa Luciani: il sorriso di santo, p. 152.
(11) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, pp. 257-58
(12) Tornielli and Zangrande, Papa Luciani: il sorriso di santo, p. 152, note; conversation of the authors with Dr. Lina Petri.
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008,
by Lori,
Filed under: Pope John Paul I| |
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The Archbishop of my diocese of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan, has just written this in his weekly column. It’s so hard-hitting I had to put it here.
Just Look
The picture on this page is an untouched photograph of a being that has been within its mother for 20 weeks. Please do me the favor of looking at it carefully.
20-week old baby in womb
Have you any doubt that it is a human being?
If you do not have any such doubt, have you any doubt that it is an innocent human being?
If you have no doubt about this either, have you any doubt that the authorities in a civilized society are duty-bound to protect this innocent human being if anyone were to wish to kill it?
If your answer to this last query is negative, that is, if you have no doubt that the authorities in a civilized society would be duty-bound to protect this innocent human being if someone were to wish to kill it, I would suggest—even insist—that there is not a lot more to be said about the issue of abortion in our society. It is wrong, and it cannot—must not—be tolerated.
Read the rest of what the Cardinal had to say here:
He is right, there’s not a lot more to be said about the issue at this point. The choice in this election seems pretty clear to me. We don’t have a choice, unfortunately, between an unequivocally pro-life and an unequivocably pro-abortion candidate. (McCain is not wholly against embryonic stem-cell research).
But we do have an unequivocably pro-death candidate (let’s call him by his right name), who would withdraw ALL protection from this baby and millions of others. I say he should be stopped.
I say this as a registered DEMOCRAT who longs to see a candidate with a “seamless garment” approach. I long to vote as a Democrat to ensure social justice and programs that would help the poor and the helpless on a variety of issues — but have been unable to do so for the past 30 years because the party supports the death of this baby and millions of others. And Obama has pledged to do away with all laws on the books supporting unborn children through the FOCA act.
My choice is clear. I hope you will think about yours.
Friday, October 24th, 2008,
by Lori,
Filed under: Life Issues| |
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