Archive for Politics
Looking back over the posts I’ve done this year, I think I made some hits and misses in reporting on the biggest stories of the 2009 in regard to events in the Catholic Church. But I think I got the top six. In order:
1. Benedict XV’s Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus welcomes Anglican dioceses and communities home by establishing a special Ordinariate for them as they move into full communion with the Church. This move to help end a almost 500-year old division is the event in the Church in 2009 that will probably have the greatest historical impact.
2. The honorary doctorate given to President Obama at Notre Dame creates controversy — and galvanizes the pro-life movement in the United States. L’Osservatore Romano becomes strangely pro-Obama at precisely the wrong moment.
3. U. S. Catholic bishops take up arms in the health-care debate. Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, as head of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-life Concerns, writes passionate appeals to Congress on abortion and stem cell research.
4. Pope Benedict XVI declares both John Paul II and Pope Pius XII Venerable. Controversy ensues.
5. Pope Benedict’s new social encyclical Caritas in Veritate creates discussion about world events to secure social justice — and more ludicrous misunderstanding than you can imagine.
Other stories I covered: Pope Benedict’s trip to the Holy Land and the controversy over the film of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. And this may be “hometown” news for me, but it does have a great impact on the Church in the U.S. as a whole: New York got a New Archbishop, Timothy Dolan.
Others - controversy over the death of Ted Kennedy and this pro-abortion Catholic’s highly public funeral Mass, the new priestly sex abuse crisis in Ireland — I sort of missed. I certainly followed them while they were happening, but didn’t have time to blog about them.
I only sort-of blogged on one truly unexpected and welcome development. A Catholic Democrat in Congress, Bart Stupak of Michigan, becomes a hero the the pro-life movement by galvanizing his colleagues from both parties to vote against federal funding of abortion. Who would have thought tha a Catholic Democrat would lead the fight against abortion? His countepart in the Senate, Ben Nelson, could have made history on this blog too, but caved in to the pro-death forces.
Let’s have more of this same kind of story in the coming year.
Filed under: Abortion, Angels and Demons, Dan Brown, Life Issues, Politics, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope John Paul II, Pope Pius XII, stem cell research | |No Comments
From a June 5 (unsigned) notice in L’Osservatore Romano, posted June 6, by John Thavis of the Catholic News Service (CNS blog):
Obviously the Holy See and L’Osservatore Romano have been, are and will be fully at the side of the U.S. bishops in their commitment in favor of the inviolability of human life in whatever stage of its existence.
Other interpretations have no foundation, especially those that have wanted to use the newspaper’s articles to make it appear that the teachings of the U.S. episcopate on the inherent evil of abortion were an exercise in partisan politics, supposedly in contrast with a different strategy of the Holy See.
This is welcome, but rather belated news. I’ll let the American Papist do the talking as he issues a challenge to certain Catholics who were claiming that the Vatican disagreed with the policy of the U.S. bishops of abortion.
The Catholic News Service has also noted that, although it was widely believed that Obama would meed with Benedict XVI this July, while the President is visiting Rome, no meeting with the Pope has yet been scheduled.
Hmmm.
Filed under: Abortion, Life Issues, Politics, Pope Benedict XVI | |No Comments
This article came out several days ago, and hasn’t received much attention in all the furor. Father Jenkins has a lot of explaining to do, but he’s not the only one.
No Likely Support From Notre Dame’s Board of Trustees For Rescinding Obama Invite
By Frank Walker
May 10, 2009 - A great deal of criticism has been leveled at Notre Dame President, Rev John I. Jenkins, for his choice to honor President Obama at this year’s commencement. But Fr. Jenkins, like all university presidents, must consider the will of the school’s governing board. The Notre Dame Board of Trustees is a powerful organization, comprised of top international business owners, chairs of rich endowments, academic leaders, judges, attorneys, faculty, and prominent clergy. These individuals are typically very wealthy, well-connected and highly accomplished; many with broad interests outside the university. A closer look at the board and its affiliations might shed light on just how Notre Dame came to this decision.
Many of the influential alumni on the Notre Dame board are from the nearby Chicago area, and are part of the same Chicago power structure that President Obama ascended. Richard and Peggy Notebaert are leading members of the ND community, and Notebaert is chair of the Notre Dame trustees. While Obama served in the senate, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, received federal funding earmarked by Obama.. Key Obama campaign fundraiser, Frank Clark served on the board of the Notebaert Museum at the time. The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, where ND trustee Arthur Velasquez is on the board, also received millions in earmarks. Velasquez contributed to Obama’s campaigns in ’04 and ’08.
Chicago power at Notre Dame extends to political posts as well. Justice Ann Claire Williams was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1999 to the U.S. Court of Appeals 7th District. In 2004, she ruled that the Department of Justice could not subpoena hospital abortion records to enforce the ban on partial birth abortions. Left-leaning Chicago politics has a place on the Notre Dame governing board. Currently Ann Claire Williams is receiving serious attention among the top three possible Obama replacements for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter.
Some Notre Dame board members have made ethical misjudgments in the past. Chicago trustee Philip B. Rooney, Chairman of Claddagh Investments, is former CEO of Waste Management Inc., the world’s largest waste services company. In 2002, Rooney and Waste Management, along with Arthur Andersen, Enron and others, were indicted by the SEC in a massive fraud case. WMI management eventually settled for 30.8 million in penalties. The SEC barred Rooney permanently from being an officer in a public company. He divested most of his own stock before the investigations caused shareholder assets to plummet. Despite this history Rooney retains his board position at Notre Dame today.
ND Trustee Douglas Tong Hsu is chairman of Far Eastern Group, a $32 billion dollar Chinese conglomerate. Hsu’s strong political connections in Taiwan lean toward unification with mainland China. He recently stated that democratic governance is a hindrance to investment, and praised communist China’s system for being more favorable to business with its staunch system of rule. In 2006, Hsu was indicted for breach of trust and forgery in connection with a major department store takeover. These charges also involved the Taiwanese first lady, Wu Shu-chen. With Douglas Tong Hsu, the political and business interests of the PRC have influence at Notre Dame. In 2006, ND President Jenkins led a small delegation to East Asia, where they met with Hsu, and travelled to communist Beijing to develop partner programs for the university.
There are Notre Dame trustees who directly support [sic] Obama administration goals. Dr. Mary Anne Fox is chancellor at U[niversity of] C[alifornia] San Diego and Vice-Chair of the National Science Board. Recently Fox announced the opening of a new research facility where the school will cultivate and experiment on human embryonic stem cells. The laboratory will partner with Scripps Research and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA where Fox also sits on the leadership council. In 2007 the Institute hosted a stem cell ethics conference. R. Alta Charo, bioethicist and advisor to the Obama transition team was a key speaker. At UCSD the bio-engineering department has just established a partnership with Tsinghua University in China, to further their research.
Raymond G. Chambers, co-founder of anti-poverty organization Millenium Promise, serves on the ServiceNation leadership council. ServiceNation is a political group that supports the enormous multiplication of federal national service programs in the Obama agenda, including the just-passed Kennedy Serve America Act. The Kennedy act was touted as the “largest expansion of community and national service since the launch of the Civilian Conservation Corps.” In September, Chambers was a panelist at the ServiceNation Summit as special envoy for malaria, United Nations.
Several Notre Dame board members lead American banks and major investment houses, where the federal government has sunk billions in bailout funds and stock purchases. Robert Conway was head of Goldman Sachs (AIG). Philip J. Purcell was formerly CEO of Morgan Stanley and COO of Dean Witter. Enrique Hernandez, Jr. is on the board of Wells Fargo Bank. Business leaders in this sector are under increasing pressure to appeal to the Obama administration, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Congress for their survival and direction.
In conclusion, a review of the Board of Trustees at Notre Dame does NOT reveal a particularly strong Catholic identity. There are board members whose actions and associations put them in a position directly at odds with Church teaching and in line with the Obama administration. At the Notre Dame board, we see a group of well-connected well-heeled individuals from all sectors of society, and at the most prominent levels. Taking a stand against inviting the President of the United States would likely jeopardize membership in the elite club where they travel. Therefore it is highly unlikely that there will be any movement from within the board to rescind invitation to President Obama.
The whole story is here:
Filed under: Abortion, Life Issues, Peace and Justice, Politics | |No Comments
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.
Filed under: Life Issues, Politics | |3 Comments
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.
Filed under: Life Issues, Politics | |No Comments
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