This is why the consent part is not good to emphasize. People who wpuld protest the death penalty applied to a rapist think nothing of killing the other innocent victim of the crime, the child conceived.
I think that’s because we are sensory creatures. Pedophilia offends our senses. Abortion often goes unobserved.
Recently our church had 50+ white crosses on our parish lawn with each cross representing a million babies surgically aborted. This started a forum thread about popular opinion of the use of the public display. Needless to say, this encouraged a lot of diatribe with much of it devolving to the catholic clerical sex abuse problem. With this door opened by pro-abortion posters, it seems an appropriate time to both acknowledge the seriousness of Catholic internal problems as well as showing how it relates to the seriousness of the abortion issue with its parallels to paedophilia. That is, it may not be appropriate to initiate the paedophilia analogy as a Catholic, but in response to charges of child molestation within the Church, it may be effective to acknowledge the seriousness and heinousness of our failings within the Church as it relates to failings of American society in protecting all children from those who have been given a sacred trust to protect and nurture.
I understand the Church’s position on this.We would be unable to use Catholic moral theology or canon law to sustain the analogy between abortion and pedophilia. In moral theology there is a hierarchy of evil. Both of these are grave evils. However, abortion is more evil than pedophilia. That’s why we excommunicate for abortion and not for pedophilia.
In abortion you are taking an innocent life. In pedophilia you are doing grave harm to an innocent child, but you are not taking his life.
Pedophilia is an act against justice (the right of the child to be safe and treated with respect) and act against purity.
Abortion is an act against life.
That’s why it’s compared to the Shoah. In the Shoah, innocent lives were taken.
The highest moral crime that you can commit against man is to take the life of an innocent who is unable to defend himself.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
I understand the intensity of the feelings around the issue of pedophilia and so does the Magisterium. But the Magisterium has to look at moral law objectively. Objectively, as long as there is life, there is hope for healing for the victim and contrition on the part of the sinner. When a life is taken, the victim cannot heal from that. The other issue is that when one takes a life, one is elevating one’s rights to those of a god. One assumes to have the authority on who lives and dies.
That’s a matter of perspective, I imagine. To play the part of the child in the womb, it would be like a contented innocent child in a room when all of a sudden giant King Kong forceps come in through the windows to tear the child apart. Bernard Nathanson, a pre-eminent abortionist and founding member of N.A.R.A.L., changed his insensitive clinical point of view about abortion when he saw a child in the womb fight for his life in the Silent Scream.
What you just said hurt my soul. The silent scream part… I just laid my 6mo. old down for a nap and she always wiggles her little arms when I pull her off my chest and plop her down in her crib because she feels the draft.
Each year for Lent, I watch a film that hurts my soul. It is the Passion of the Christ. The first time I watched it, I thought it was so-o-o graphic that I wondered if it was just sensationalism for box office appeal. The scourging scene is particularly gruesome. But as the nightmare of what I had witnessed replayed in my reflections, it had the effect of grounding me to earth about the reality of Our Lord’s human condition, what He was willing to suffer as a man, and what it meant about the value He placed on the salvation of souls. I’ve seen other non-graphic depictions of Our Lord’s life and death - also very moving - and they appeal to me in a peaceful, intellectual way. But the Passion of Our Lord is the movie that scares me straight and gets me real about why I must DO SOMETHING about my faith.
Not really. You must be born before you can be a child. Unborn are not children.
I disagree with your analogy, one is being done to a child, and one is being done to a non-person. Its like comparing apples and oranges, which you can do if you want to I guess. Some are red, and green, and others are well, orange.
I love the bigotry of this statement, that often appears all over this site. It says that the opposition is less than us and their opinions are less valid because they want the right to murder people. Which of course is not the case here at all, it’s called pro-choice for a reason, and not all of us who favor pro-choice, are all about the medical procedure, I myself think personal liberty is a just cause and the right to choose life, rather than no choice at all.
Nice, a voice of reason. Thumbs up for saying something truthful.
And what IS it?
How so? Love the quotations.
LOL, because now all abortions are late term abortions. Pul-leeze stop being so dishonest, most abortions occur early in the pregnancy (late term abortions make up maybe 2% at the most of all abortions), as most people who do not want to be pregnant won’t carry a fetus for months and months and go through all of those physiological changes just to have a medical procedure near the end of the term to relieve the effects of the pregnancy. The majority of abortions are performed between 1st trimester and the 2nd.
You laugh out loud about the torturous death of one million babies ( 2% of 50 million surgical abortions ). As a Catholic, that should make you squirm a bit.
Then how do you justify in your mind the huge difference in moral standing between a fetus about to be born and a baby that has just been born? How does merely moving from one place to another turn a “non-person” with no human rights to a human with all the rights we normally associate with that identification?
**Just to let others know…This person’s positions are not those of a Catholic. ** One can call oneself anything when joining this forum. But Catholics believe in life, from conception to natural death. A “Liberal Catholic” might believe in helping the poor through welfare or other programs, but NO Catholic can believe in abortion in any way.
I’m not one to believe every conspiracy theory to come along, especially when more plausible explanations are blatantly obvious.
This is picking numbers to support one’s POV. If one looks at those numbers in the context of economics (poverty), cultural values, and family issues, a pattern will arise.
This is really getting ridiculous. It has little to do with race, and everything to do with supply/demand.
Slightly off-topic, but interesting in my opinion. Killing is considered worse than the torture, yet the latter is the punishment in Hell.I understand the intensity of the feelings around the issue of pedophilia and so does the Magisterium. But the Magisterium has to look at moral law objectively. Objectively, as long as there is life, there is hope for healing for the victim and contrition on the part of the sinner. When a life is taken, the victim cannot heal from that. The other issue is that when one takes a life, one is elevating one’s rights to those of a god. One assumes to have the authority on who lives and dies.
That’s why, even though both are very grave sins, they are on the same rung on the moral hierarchy.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
This is far from a conspiracy theory, it is very well-documented as Margaret Sanger did not hide her goals to eliminate “human weeds.” Has EVERYTHING to do with race. Even Jesse Jackson recognized what birth control and legal abortion were meant for…he wrote about it prior to his run for the Presidency. I don’t have to pick the numbers to support my POV. They are the truth.
So what? Is everybody that has an idea part of a conspiracy? I’ll bet 99.99% of white teens that have an abortion wouldn’t know her name.
Jesse Jackson has an extremely polarized view of the world, plus he’s political. The truth is secondary to supporting his cause.
Nor do I. Your numbers are consistent when viewed in the context of poverty, cultural values, and family. The problem is, those factors have to be tossed out the window in order to arrive at your conclusion.
Actually, I like Einstein’s definition of hell. “The absence of life.”
The topic of the thread is not about the morality of abortion. The topic is about one area in which people who agree with biology and Church teaching discuss abortion with those who disagree with Church teaching.