Sunday, October 19, 2008

A public stand on abortion

A reader named Kamilla provided a link to an address given recently by [Roman] Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver. This is well worth reading, and below is an excerpt. Everything his address says about Catholics and a public expression on abortion applies to all Christians equally. It is right to stand up for what we believe.

And here’s the irony. None of the Catholic arguments advanced in favor of Senator Obama are new. They’ve been around, in one form or another, for more than 25 years. All of them seek to “get beyond” abortion, or economically reduce the number of abortions, or create a better society where abortion won’t be necessary. All of them involve a misuse of the seamless garment imagery in Catholic social teaching. And all of them, in practice, seek to contextualize, demote and then counterbalance the evil of abortion with other important but less foundational social issues.

This is a great sadness. As Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George said recently, too many Americans have “no recognition of the fact that children continue to be killed [by abortion], and we live therefore, in a country drenched in blood. This can’t be something you start playing off pragmatically against other issues.”

Read the whole address here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sadly, in recent Presidential elections, we have been faced with a "Pro-Choice" Democratic Nominee and a Republican Nominee that is "not Pro-Choice," which is quite different than an an affirmatively "Pro-Life" Candidate willing to take real, tangle steps within the power of the Office against Abortion on Demand. Alas, the combined terms of Reagan, Bush, and Bush made essential no real Pro-Life progress.

Fr William Bauer said...

Amen, Bishop. Voting for someone who thinks that killing babies is a good thing is not good.