Thursday, October 6, 2005

Vatican & Pro-Abortion Politicians

Cardinal Barragan, the President of the Pontifical Council for Health Care, has stated that Catholics cannot support a politician who favors legal abortion. This ongoing debate among Catholics, particularly American Catholics, has caused somewhat of a firestorm. In my opinion, it's only a firestorm if you don't know what your Faith is all about! Cardinal Barragan, the Mexican prelate, stated "Some receive Communion while denying the teachings of the Church or publicly supporting immoral choices in life, such as abortion, without thinking that they are committing an act of grave personal dishonesty..." This is stated in the Instrumentum Laboris, the working document on which discussions are based during the Synod of Bishops. This is issue seems to be resolving itself at the Vatican. Much less can be said with our own American Bishops who are still debating an approach to this. I can only surmise that at the general pace the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is taking to make a statement of draft about this particular issue, I doubt there will be any showing some spine. On another matter concerning abortion, the Vatican has deemed the abortion pill to be against Catholic teaching. Click here for the article.

4 comments:

mojoala said...

And at the same time we as Catholics cannot support a politician who favors the death penalty.

We as Catholics are suppose to value the Sanctity of all Life.

2004 election:

Catholically we could not vote for Kerry because he favors Pro Choice.

Catholically we could not vote for Bush because he favor Capital Punishment.

So who are Catholics to vote for?

Perplexing issue at best.

Anonymous said...

You need to read more about the Catechism concerning capital punishment because it isn't as cut and dry as you think. From my understanding capital punishment is allowable depending on the crime, but I haven't been able to do much study on this. Personaly, I'm against capital punishment. The difference between capital punishment and abortion is that the child is innocent, but the person receiving capital punishment is not always innocent (at best).

I have a liberal Catholic friend who uses this same argument, he will justify voting for a pro-abortion candidate based on opposition the death penalty. We must remember a few things though, John Paul's opposition to the death penality was personal, it was Karol Wojtyla speaking, it was not an ex Cathedra decree. Also, the number of people who are executed by the death penalty pales in comparison to abortion. That said,I would feel no qualms about hypotheticaly supporting a politican who insisted on pulling the switch himself every time the electric chair was used if he was going to shut down the abortion clinics. As far as offical church teachings go, my only book on the subject is from the 1950's and in that book it says the death penalty is permited in certain circumstances (for example if the community was in danger.) However since Church teachings have only gotten losser in the past 50 years its safe to assume that the death penality is now always accepetable even for petty crimes right? Just kidding!

Titto, thanks for checking out my blog. Please email me at schauedj@uwec.edu so I may email you back, I have some things to ask about.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting your comments!

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