Thank you so much!! I have read some of it and I’ll be reading more.
Where in Phoenix? I live in the outskirts in Maricopa.Great link!! Thank you!!
My sister asked me to speak to a monk she knew, as a birthday present for her. I did go see him; as far as I know he did not belong to any parish. He was in a monastery. It’s because of my sister and the monk that I came back home to the Church.
Right now I live in a little town on the coast of Oregon. Although its geographical location limits resources, the parish I belong to is wonderful. Our last priest had the same two parishes that our current priest has but he applied for (and received) two extensions to allow him to stay here, even with all the work and lack of time.
I’m going to be moving to the Phoenix area. I’m sure there will be more resources there.
I hadn’t thought about checking for a spiritual director online. I always thought I needed to be face-to-face with whoever became my spiritual director. Obviously there are more resources than I thought there were.
Thanks!!
Now that I think about it, I think your statements are based on your Catholic faith thoughts, and not based on on local issues.
The Bishop of Arlington, VA responded thusly:
catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=2572&CFID=27448577&CFTOKEN=46377528
vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20030731_homosexual-unions_en.html
Abortion is NEVER justified. At times War is. It is an issue of prudential judgement. You can be for War and not commit a mortal sin. While supporting abortion at any time can be a serious sin of scandal. Abortion is an intrinsic evil. An evil that can never, never, never be justified or supported as per church teaching. In my opinion voting for a candidate who made his pro death platform very clear should cause a very serious examination of conscience even if the reasoning for such a vote is indirect. ie. because of the economy, environment etc. There is such a thing as a hierarchy of evil and of Absolute Good.
In war, especially modern warfare, non-combatants will be killed in large numbers. The military tries to keep it secret, but the secret sometimes outs. Sometimes they are killed unintentionally, other times intentionally. Most of the time the intentional killing does stay secret.
One of the reasons the police action / war is so expensive is because we go out of our way to avoid casulties. In the old days we would call in an air strike and saturate bomb where the enemy could be. Now we send in one extremely expensive smart munition that is focused on the target. However, when the enemy uses sympathetic/complacent civilians as shields we don’t have much choice in the matter. I’d rather see their civilians die than our civilians. We as civilians have a responsibility to keep our military forces in line and those civilians have a responsibility to keep their military type forces in line. If they choose not to they will get caught in the cross fire. Keep in mind that overall less people are dying because of our involvement than what we would have if we allowed terrorist hate groups to go unchecked.
Per supporting the baby after birth there are two ways of looking at it one is paying a potential murderer not to committ murder which is obviously not right. The other way is to ensure the child gets a loving, stable, and supportive home. There are organizations such as birth right that help mothers to support their children and adoption gives many children a chance when their birth parrents are not able to raise a child.
The Catholic Church does what it is able to do to provide care for women with unplanned pregnancies, or no support when becoming pregnant. The Church is one of the largest charitable organizations in existence. Now if we could only get our “social justice” believers in the government to do an about face and support life instead of paying Planned Parenthood to destruct both mother and child, we would be on the right track. The Catholic Church can’t do it alone.
You have written an enlightened post. Sadly, there are many in the pro-life movement who are unable to see beyond the single issue.
This has not been my experience with those involved in the Pro-Life movement. Every one I’ve ever spoken to would agree that doing all we can for the postnatal care of the child is vitally important. More often, I’ve seen this line of thinking used as a (very weak) excuse by Catholics to vote for a Pro-Choice politician.
A lot of what you just mentioned, adoption services, maternal support, is best done by the Church. Christ Himself recognized that when He told Peter (not Cesear) to “Feed my sheep” and “Tend my flock”.
Most of the blame for the effectiveness of this particular rationalization for supporting pro-abortion politicians lies with the bishops, as they too are unwilling to sacrifice all of their political objectives for the sake of opposing abortion. None of them has ever made this case specifically but they regularly make it indirectly through - most especially - saying we should not be single issue voters. No one has any illusions as to what “single issue” they are referring to. There is little possibility that Catholics will overwhelmingly oppose pro-abortion politicians until it is obvious that the bishops do. The “Faithful Citizenship” document that came out in 2007 shows that we have a long way to go in that regard.
I don’t think this was the choice. I’ll re-state it. One party favors an unjust war (Iraq) and favors starting another unjust war (Iran). That same party claims opposition to abortion but won’t lift a finger to stop the killings when they have control of the presidency, the senate, and the house. They pretend their hands are tied by a Supreme Court decision (how politically convenient). But under Article III, Section 2 of the US Constitution, Congress can regulate the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. They could pass a law removing Supreme Court jurisdiction over abortion cases. Such a law would allow the states to pass restrictions that couldn’t be challenged in federal court. But they squandered a historic opportunity. Amazingly, the partial birth abortion ban act explicitly reaffirmed Roe’s jurisprudence that unborn children are not constitutionally protected persons under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. And Scalia has stated publicly that only “walking around persons” have this protection. All he’d do, is vote to send the issue back to the states…this would have the same affect as Congress removing jurisdiction but we’d have to wait until the Court has enough votes to do that. (That’ll never happen folks. We’ve been waiting 37 years). And don’t look to Roberts or Alito to overturn Roe either. They view Roe as “settled law”. Settled for them means that Roe is established precedent and they have no intention of changing it. The other party you nailed. So the real choice was endless abortion and more unjust war versus endless abortion and less unjust war (at least they haven’t invaded Iran yet).
Surely you are familiar with the concept of the filibuster and what it means to have a filibuster proof senate majority. Since the Republicans never had such a majority, getting such a law passed was quite simply impossible. There was no opportunity missed as there was no opportunity available.
This is another statement that is a good bit south of the truth. Even a cursory reading of Ginsburg’s dissenting statement shows that Carhart was a major loss for the abortion crowd. As to the specific charge above this comment is probably relevant:
It is not for Scalia or any other justice to rule for the outcome he prefers; he can rule only on what the law says. If his position is all that is allowed by the Constitution then that is how we should hope he would rule. It really is preferable to have justices interpret the laws as they are written rather than as they would like them to be.
My my, another statement with no basis in fact. How surprising. Fortunately we have Ginsburg to provide us with a more accurate view: