To Defend the Preborn We Must Defend Catholic Truth in Its Entirety

Do you remember where you were (if you were alive, that is!) on Monday, January 22, 1973, the Feast of Saints Vincent and Anastasius?

I remember where I was when I learned of the horrendous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of American in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.

I was at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana, where I had started my graduate studies in political science in the Department of Government and International Relations. My intention at the time was to pursue a joint M.A/J.D. program, entering the Notre Dame Law School, to which I had been accepted, in September of 1973 (I would up completing the master's in a year and then went to the State University of New York at Albany to pursue my doctorate). I heard the news of the Supreme Court decision in the case of Roe v. Wade while listening to Chicago's WBBM Newsradio 780, making a bee line for the offices of the late Dr. Charles E. Rice, a Professor of Law at the Notre Dame Law School and the author of The Vanishing Right to Live, a book published by Doubleday in 1968 that had been used by a Dominican priest at Saint John's University in Jamaica, Queens, New York, during a moral philosophy course I took with him in the Spring Semester of 1972. Dr. Rice agreed with my assessment at the time concerning the necessity of working for a no-exceptions amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America to overturn Roe v. Wade and restore full legal protection to the innocent preborn. (My view of things has been deepened a bit, shall we say, in the past forty-nine years.)

Abortion-on-demand did not start with the case of Roe v. Wade, which overturned the laws of thirty-three states that forbade, to one degree or another, the direct, intentional taking of innocent human life in a mother's womb.

It Didn't All Start With Roe v. Wade: From Contraception to Abortion

Contraception, which itself was the result of the Protestant Revolution's overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and its rejection of the indissolubility of a ratified and consummated marriage, established a mentality that the conception of a child could be "planned" and/or "prevented" so that married couples could live their own lives without the "burden" of children at all or of additional children if they had one or two and wanted to "stop" there. Although contraception was pushed by the anti-family likes of eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger as early as the second decade of the Twentieth Century, it received a "theological" foundation from the schismatic and heretical Anglican sect at the 1930 Lambeth Conference:

Resolution 15

The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage and Sex

Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles. The Conference records its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience. (Resolution 15 - The Life and Witness of the Christian Community - Marriage.)

This decision opened the floodgates of Protestant acceptance of contraception, which, of course, had been promoted for the previous fifteen years in the United States of America by the nymphomaniac revolutionary anti-Theist named Margaret Sanger. An organization known as the Federal Council of Churches in America (which merged in 1950 with other such organizations to form the “National Council of Churches”) endorsed contraception in 1931, prompting the following editorial to appear, amazingly enough, in The Washington Post:

The Federal Council of Churches in America some time ago appointed a committee on "marriage and the home," which has now submitted a report favoring a "careful and restrained" use of contraceptive devices to regulate the size of families. The committee seems to have a serious struggle with itself in adhering to Christian doctrine while at the same time indulging in amateurish excursions in the field of economics, legislation, medicine, and sociology. The resulting report is a mixture of religious obscurantism and modernistic materialism which departs from the ancient standards of religion and yet fails to blaze a path toward something better.   

The mischief that would result from an attempt to place the stamp of church approval upon any scheme for "regulating the size of families" is evidently quite beyond the comprehension of this pseudo-scientific committee. It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would lead to the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous. If the churches are to become organizations for political and 'scientific' propaganda they should be honest and reject the Bible, scoff at Christ as an obsolete and unscientific teacher, and strike out boldly as champions of politics and science as substitutes for the old-time religion. ("Forgetting Religion," Editorial, The Washington Post, March 22, 1932.)

The Lambeth Conference’s Resolution 15, which prompted Pope Pius XI to issue Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, in opposition to contraception, provided Protestants and Modernist Catholics with a false "justification" for the suppression of the procreation and education of children as the first end of marriage. 

The anti-family movement, which started with efforts on the part of Masonically-controlled state legislatures to liberalize existing divorce laws in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, gained great impetus with Margaret Sanger's Birth Control League in 1919 and numerous organizations devoted to "eugenics" in the 1920s, some of which were successful in convincing state legislatures ton enact mandatory sterilization laws for criminals and the retarded (once again, thank you states' rights). That anti-family movement, which comes from the devil and is designed to lead souls to Hell for all eternity as social order is disrupted as a result of the breakup of the family, had been given its "wedge" issue as a result of the Thalidomide babies, giving its leaders a "cause" to try to open the legal floodgates to surgical abortion-on-demand to complement the chemical abortions being produced by the "pill" and other abortifacient contraceptives. Indeed, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists issued a statement in 1965, shortly after the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7,1965, that declared in a most positivistic manner that drugs that stopped the life of a child after fertilization but before implantation in a mother's womb were to be called "contraceptives" instead of "abortifacients."

The decision of the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut established the false principle that a so-called right to "marital privacy" could be found in "penumbras" that were claimed to emanate from the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America, thus establishing the "legal" framework," such as it was, for the reasoning in the case of Roe v. Wade, seven years, seven months, fifteen days later. Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg used his concurring opinion ot summarize the reasoning of Associate Justice William O. Douglas, who had delivered the opinion of the Court in the case:

I agree with the Court that Connecticut's birth-control law unconstitutionally intrudes upon the right of marital privacy, and I join in its opinion and judgment. Although I have not accepted the view that 'due process' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment includes all of the first eight Amendments (see my concurring opinion in Pointer v. Texas, 380 U.S. 400, 410, 85 S.Ct. 1065, 1071, 13 L.Ed.2d 923, and the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Brennan in Cohen v. Hurley, 366 U.S. 117, 154, 81 S.Ct. 954, 974, 6 L.Ed.2d 156), I do agree that the concept of liberty protects those personal rights that are fundamental, and is not confined to the specific terms of the Bill of Rights. My conclusion that the concept of liberty is not so restricted and that it embraces the right of marital privacy though that right is not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution is supported both by numerous decisions of this Court, referred to in the Court's opinion, and by the language and history of the Ninth Amendment. In reaching the conclusion that the right of marital privacy is protected, as being within the protected penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights, the Court refers to the Ninth Amendment, ante, at 484. I add these words to emphasize the relevance of that Amendment to the Court's holding. (Justice Arthur Goldberg, Griswold v. Connecticut, June 7, 1965.)

This false reasoning was the foundation of the holding in Roe v. Wade:

The principal thrust of appellant's attack on the Texas statutes is that they improperly invade a right, said to be possessed by the pregnant woman, to choose to terminate her pregnancy. Appellant would discover this right in the concept of personal "liberty" embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause; or in personal, marital, familial, and sexual privacy said to be protected by the Bill of Rights or its penumbras, see Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972); id., at 460 (WHITE, J., concurring in result); or among those rights reserved to the people by the Ninth Amendment, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S., at 486 (Goldberg, J., concurring). Before addressing this claim, we feel it desirable briefly to survey, in several aspects, the history of abortion, for such insight as that history may afford us, and then to examine the state purposes and interests behind the criminal abortion laws. . . .

The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969); in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 8-9 (1968), Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 350 (1967), Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886), see Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S., at 484-485; in the Ninth Amendment, id., at 486 (Goldberg, J., concurring); or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923). These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed "fundamental" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325 (1937), are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967); procreation, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541-542 (1942); contraception, Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S., at 453-454; id., at 460, 463-465 (WHITE, J., concurring in result); family relationships, Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166 (1944); and child rearing and education, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, supra.

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

On the basis of elements such as these, appellant and some amici argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree. Appellant's arguments that Texas either has no valid interest at all in regulating the abortion decision, or no interest strong enough to support any limitation upon the woman's sole determination, are unpersuasive. The Court's decisions recognizing a right of privacy also acknowledge that some state regulation in areas protected by that right is appropriate. As noted above, a State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life. At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision. The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) (vaccination); Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) (sterilization).

We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation. (Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973.)

Contraception led to abortion socially, and its protection legally led directly to the constitutional "justification" for the killing of the innocent preborn up to and including the day of birth. There is a straight line from Martin Luther's attack on the sanctity and fecundity of marriage, to the Lambeth Conference's endorsement of contraception in 1930, to Griswold v. Connecticut to to Roe v. Wade.

Indeed, the widespread acceptance and general institutionalization of contraceptives as a "legitimate" part of life for married couples as well as for those engaged in natural sins in violation of Holy Purity was noted by none other than the now-retired Associate Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy in his concurring opinion in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeaster Pennsylvania, et al. v. William Casey, Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, et al., June 27, 1992:

Although Roe has engendered opposition, it has in no sense proven unworkable, representing as it does a simple limitation beyond which a state law is unenforceable. P. 835.

(e) The Roe rule's limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives. The Constitution serves human values, and while the effect of reliance on Roe cannot be exactly measured, neither can the certain costs of overruling Roe for people who have ordered their thinking and living around that case be dismissed. Pp. 855-856.

(f) No evolution of legal principle has left Roe's central rule a doctrinal anachronism discounted by society. If Roe is placed among the cases exemplified by Griswold, supra, it is clearly in no jeopardy, since subsequent constitutional developments have neither disturbed, nor do they threaten to diminish, the liberty recognized in such cases. Similarly, if Roe is seen as stating a rule of personal autonomy and bodily integrity, akin to cases recognizing limits on governmental power to mandate medical treatment or to bar its rejection, this Court's post-Roe decisions accord with Roe's view that a State's interest in the protection of life falls short of justifying any plenary override of individual liberty claims. See, e.g., Cruzan v. Director, M. Dept. of Health, 497 U.S. 261, 278 . Finally, if Roe is classified as sui generis, there clearly has been no erosion of its central determination. It was expressly reaffirmed in Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Inc., 462 U.S. 416 (Akron I), and Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747; and, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490, a majority either voted to reaffirm or declined to address the constitutional validity of Roe's central holding. Pp. 857-859. (Text of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.)

It is impossible to fight surgical baby-killing under cover of the civil law without opposing contraception at the same time.

With contraception having created a mentality that separated the conception of children from the very nature of the gift God has given to human beings for the continuation of the species having become firmly established the move for decriminalization of surgical baby-killing started in earnest in the early-1960s as a result of the "Thalidomide babies," that is, those babies born with birth defects as a result of their mothers having taken the drug Thalidomide to help them with their morning sickness during pregnancy. It was, as Dr. Doris Graber pointed out in a very matter-of-fact way in her Mass Media and American Politics text, in 1963 that the phenomenon of the "Thalidomide babies" produced calls for "therapeutic" surgical abortions to be made "legal."

As I have noted in many other articles on this site, Roe v. Wade did not "start" the genocide of the preborn in this country that has taken over fifty million innocent human lives since 1965. The move for the decriminalization of surgical baby-killing began at the state level (so much for demigod of states' rights) as pro-abortion leaders such as Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder of the National Repeal of Abortion Laws (now called NARAL-Pro Choice), and Lawrence Lader and William Baird, among others used the existence of various "exceptions" in abortion legislation then on the books as the means of "liberalizing" "access" to baby-killing for all women in all circumstances. This campaign to decriminalize baby-killing in the 1960s was based on a pack of lies and appeals of an emotional and/or utilitarian nature (baby-killing was a “medical” issue, not a moral one; inflating the numbers of women killed by “illegal abortions;” painted the Catholic Church as the “enemy” of women) that a reformed baby-killer, the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, exposed in the 1980s:

In the mid-1960s, with the sexual revolution roaring after Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent but influential “scientific” studies of sex and sexuality in America, Hugh Hefner’s aggressive campaign to legitimize pornography and, perhaps above all, the wide distribution of the anovulant birth control pill, [Bernard] Nathanson became a leader in the movement to overturn laws prohibiting abortion. He co-founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), which later became the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and is now NARAL Pro-Choice America. Its goal was to remove the cultural stigma on abortion, eliminate all meaningful legal restraints on it, and make it as widely available as possible across the nation and, indeed, the globe.

To achieve these goals, Nathanson would later reveal, he and fellow abortion crusaders pursued dubious and in some cases straightforwardly dishonest strategies.

First, they promoted the idea that abortion is a medical issue, not a moral one. This required persuading people of the rather obvious falsehood that a normal pregnancy is a natural and healthy condition if the mother wants her baby, and a disease if she does not. The point of medicine, to maintain and restore health, had to be recast as giving health care consumers what they happen to want; and the Hippocratic Oath’s explicit prohibition of abortion had to be removed. In the end, Nathanson and his collaborators succeeded in selling this propaganda to a small but extraordinarily powerful group of men: in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, seven Supreme Court justices led by Harry Blackmun, former counsel to the American Medical Association, invalidated virtually all state laws providing meaningful protection for unborn children on the ground that abortion is a “private choice” to be made by women and their doctors.

Second, Nathanson and his friends lied—relentlessly and spectacularly—about the number of women who died each year from illegal abortions. Their pitch to voters, lawmakers, and judges was that women are going to seek abortion in roughly equal numbers whether it is lawful or not. The only effect of outlawing it, they claimed, is to limit pregnant women to unqualified and often uncaring practitioners, “back alley butchers.” So, Nathanson and others insisted, laws against abortion are worse than futile: they do not save fetal lives; they only cost women’s lives.

Now some women did die from unlawful abortions, though factors other than legalization, especially the development of antibiotics such as penicillin, are mainly responsible for reducing the rate and number of maternal deaths. And of course, the number of unborn babies whose lives were taken shot up dramatically after Nathanson and his colleagues achieved their goals; and they achieved them, in part, by claiming that the number of illegal abortions was more than ten times higher than it actually was.

Third, the early advocates of abortion deliberately exploited anti-Catholic animus among liberal elites and (in those days) many ordinary Protestants to depict opposition to abortion as a “religious dogma” that the Catholic hierarchy sought to impose on others in violation of their freedom and the separation of church and state. Nathanson and his friends recognized that their movement needed an enemy—a widely suspected institution that they could make the public face of their opposition; a minority, but one large and potent enough for its detractors to fear.

Despite the undeniable historical fact that prohibitions of abortion were rooted in English common law and reinforced and expanded by statutes enacted across the United States by overwhelmingly Protestant majorities in the 19^th century, Nathanson and other abortion movement leaders decided that the Catholic Church was perfect for the role of freedom-smothering oppressor. Its male priesthood and authority structure would make it easy for them to depict the Church’s opposition to abortion as misogyny, for which concern to protect unborn babies was a mere pretext. The Church’s real motive, they insisted, was to restrict women’s freedom in order to hold them in positions of subservience.

Fourth, the abortion movement sought to appeal to conservatives and liberals alike by promoting feticide as a way of fighting poverty. Why are so many people poor? It’s because they have more children than they can afford to care for. What’s the solution? Abortion. Why do we have to spend so much money on welfare? It’s because poor, mainly minority, women are burdening the taxpayer with too many babies. The solution? Abortion. Initially, Nathanson himself believed that legal abortion and its public funding would reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing and poverty, though (as he later admitted) he continued to promote this falsehood after the sheer weight of evidence forced him to disbelieve it.

Within a year after Roe v. Wade, however, Nathanson began to have moral doubts about the cause to which he had been so single-mindedly devoted. In a widely noticed 1974 essay in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, he revealed his growing doubts about the “pro-choice” dogma that abortion was merely the removal of an “undifferentiated mass of cells,” and not the killing of a developing human being. Referring to abortions that he had supervised or performed, he confessed to an “increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.”

Still, he was not ready to abandon support for legal abortion. It was, he continued to insist, necessary to prevent the bad consequences of illegal abortions. But he was moving from viewing abortion itself as a legitimate solution to a woman’s personal problem, to seeing it as an evil that should be discouraged, even if for practical reasons it had to be tolerated. Over the next several years, while continuing to perform abortions for what he regarded as legitimate “health” reasons, Nathanson would be moved still further toward the pro-life position by the emergence of new technologies, especially fetoscopy and ultrasound, that made it increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, to deny that abortion is the deliberate killing of a unique human being—a child in the womb.

By 1980, the weight of evidence in favor of the pro-life position had overwhelmed Nathanson and driven him out of the practice of abortion. He had come to regard the procedure as unjustified homicide and refused to perform it. Soon he was dedicating himself to the fight against abortion and revealing to the world the lies he and his abortion movement colleagues had told to break down public opposition. (The Public Discourse.)

The American Life League had published its own summary of how Nathanson  and Lader helped to form the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the lies they told to “reform” existing legislation that criminalized the surgical execution of the innocent preborn:

Historically, every revolution has to have its villain ... Now, in our case, it makes little sense to lead a campaign only against unjust laws, even though that's what we really are doing. We have to narrow the focus, identify those unjust laws with a person or a group of people ... There's always been one group of people in this country associated with reactionary politics, behind-the-scenes manipulations, socially backward ideas. You know who I mean, Bernie ... the Catholic hierarchy. That's a small enough group to come down on, and anonymous enough so that no names ever have to be mentioned ...National Abortion Rights Action League co-founder Larry Lader.[1]

Anti-Life Philosophy.

We have been nice, pleasant too long. We can be restrained no longer — Right to Lifers have a total lack of respect for human life. We can no longer move restrainedly, sit on our apathy and hope Rome will burn.                                                                         

Early History of the NARAL.

Above all, society must grasp the grim relationship between unwanted children and the violent rebellion of minority groups.

Introduction.

The most powerful philosophical push for abortion was generated by an elite cadre during the heady 1960s, when authority was being challenged or ignored everywhere, and when the Neoliberal agenda seemed to be advancing almost everywhere against, at best, scattered and disorganized opposition.

One of the most effective organizations pushing for abortion law reform or repeal was the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), which is now known as the National Abortion Rights Action League.

NARAL: Bigoted to the Core.

Whatever else may be said about them, the leaders of NARAL had their priorities right when the group was first organized. Bernard Nathanson, Bill Baird, Larry Lader, and other pro-abortion activists defined their mission, identified their enemy, and set up a strategic framework within which to operate, Nathanson summarized the beginnings of NARAL in a 1980 speech:

I want to take you back some twelve years to 1968 at which time I, and later Betty Friedan and Carol Grietzer, organized a political action group known as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. We organized it as a tight, well-structured, and dynamic little cadre. It was the right time. Feminism was on the move, the Vietnam War was raging, authority was being destroyed everywhere and, very important to all of us here, there was no organization of those opposed to abortion.

There was only silence from the opposition. We fed a line of deceit, of dishonesty, of fabrication of statistics and figures; we coddled, caressed, and stroked the press. We cadged money from various sources and we, in one short year, succeeded in striking down the abortion laws of New York State and in one fell swoop established the city of New York as the abortion capital of the world. We were calling ourselves pro-abortionists and pro-choice. In fact what we were were abortifiers; those who like abortion.[4]

The most critical action taken by the early leaders of NARAL was their correct identification of their natural enemies the Catholic and Fundamentalist churches. The utter contempt that the NARAL leaders held for any view other than their own is graphically displayed in Figure 62-1. The members of the NARAL committee agreed that the Pope was "running our country" and that Catholics would "stop at no ends to reach their goals," even if such actions included outright terrorism.

ANTI-CATHOLIC QUOTES BY LEADERS OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE REPEAL OF ABORTION LAWS AT THE 1972 NARAL NATIONAL STRATEGY MEETING

NOTE: These summaries are exact quotes transcribed by a secretary for the minutes of the May 12, 1972 meeting of the executive board of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, later the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). All quotes below are copied verbatim from the Minutes.

"Lawrence Lader, Chairman, NARAL Executive Committee

(1) Stated Billy Graham and the Pope running our country.
(4) Catholics trying to overthrow the most humanitarian legislation of our time.
(7) [Catholic] Priests went into assembly and terrorized [Texas] legislators.
(10) Stressed that he [Lader] uses every opportunity — Television appearances, radio interviews, newspapers to criticize the way the Catholic Church uses its tax free monies, etc.

Hon. Lorraine Beebe, former State Senator, Michigan
(1) Stressed financial strength of the Catholic Church.
(2) We have been nice, pleasant too long. We can be restrained no longer — Right to Lifers have a total lack of respect for human life. "We can no longer move restrainedly, sit on our apathy and hope Rome will burn."
(3) Catholics waged a smear campaign against me when they learned I had had a therapeutic abortion. They made threatening calls, threw eggs at my house. Had signs — 'A vote for Beebe is a vote against the Pope.'
(4) The catholics will stop at no ends to reach their goals.

Lawrence Lader— I share Mrs. Beebe's attitude, "I don't care if we have a Belfast and Dublin here in the U.S. we must have a direct conflict with the Catholic Church."

Reverend Robert T. Cobb— Associate Executive Director, N.Y. Council of Churches.
Rev. Cobb made a very dramatic entrance — ripping off his collar and asking "who are you afraid of" — when you thought I was a Catholic Priest you looked stunned. You should not be afraid of a church that condemns but does not forgive. "Protestants have been bought by the Roman Catholic Church." He proceeded to knock ecumenism and state[d] that if the Churches go to Rome he will go walking on his hands.
(5) A good Roman Catholic Liberal can be valuable.

William Baird, Director, Parent's Aid Society
(1) Single Greatest Threat to Women — Roman Catholic Church
(3) In attacking Catholic Church — concentrate on separation of church and state.

Summary —
(3) Their [NARAL] attack will be concentrated — even to court cases — against then [sic] Catholic Church and trying to make people believe that Pope is trying to run the country, and that the Catholic Church is trying to take over Protestant Churches.

"At this point we had to leave — It was after 5 ... I was getting a bit nervous — the anti-catholic, anti-Right to Life feeling in that room was close to violent."

The two people who contributed most to the framework of early NARAL strategy were Bernard Nathanson and Larry Lader. In his book Aborting America, Dr. Nathanson describes part of a 1969 conversation he had with fellow abortophile Larry Lader; "Historically, every revolution has to have its villain ... Now, in our case, it makes little sense to lead a campaign only against unjust laws, even though that's what we really are doing. We have to narrow the focus, identify those unjust laws with a person or a group of people ... There's always been one group of people in this country associated with reactionary politics, behind-the-scenes manipulations, socially backward ideas. You know who I mean, Bernie ... the Catholic hierarchy. That's a small enough group to come down on, and anonymous enough so that no names ever have to be mentioned ... "[1]  (The Formation of the National Abortion Rights Action League.)

The adversary hates human life because he hates the Author of Life Himself, God and, having raised up various Modernists to make what was thought to be the Catholic Church's "official reconciliation" with the "new principles" of the "era inauguated in 1789," he used anti-Catholics to push for the decriminalized baby-killing under cover of law started at the state level, moving into the Federal court system only when pro-death advocates believed that it was propitious for them to challenge the laws of those states which prohibited or restricted "access" to baby-killing.

It is useful to review some of the history of decriminalizing surgical baby-killing under cover of civil law prior to Roe v. Wade. Those who contend that the "people" in the various states have the "right" to determine whether to permit or prohibit surgical baby-killing would have no problem with the pre-Roe legislation, nor would they be bothered by the fact that many states have "trigger laws" in effect to "protect" baby-killing in the event that Roe v. Wade is reversed at some point by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

The State of Colorado was the first to "liberalize" its existing legislation, doing so in 1967:

The pre-Roe abortion statute was based upon § 230.3 of the Model Penal Code.  Under the statute, an abortion could be performed at any stage of pregnancy (defined as “the implantation of an embryo in the uterus”) when continuation of the pregnancy was likely to result in the death of the woman, “serious permanent impairment” of her physical or mental health, or the birth of a child with “grave and permanent physical deformity or mental retardation. An abortion could be performed within the first sixteen weeks of pregnancy (gestational age) when the pregnancy resulted from rape (statutory or forcible) or incest, and the local district attorney confirmed in writing that there was probable cause to believe that the alleged offense had occurred Pursuant to Roe v. Wade, the limitations on circumstances under which abortions could be performed and the requirement that all abortions be performed in hospitals were declared unconstitutional by the Colorado Supreme Court in People v. Norton. Enforcement of the statute was not enjoined.

The pre-Roe statute has not been repealed, and would be enforceable if Roe v. Wade were overruled.  The broad exceptions in the statute, however, in particular the exception for mental health, would allow almost all abortions to be performed. Colorado, Life Legal Defense Fund.

The State of California, then headed by Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan, followed suit in 1967, passing the Therapeutic Abortion Act, has long been a haven for baby-killing:

The pre-Roe abortion statutes were based upon § 230.3 of the Model Penal Code. The California Penal Code prohibited abortions not performed in compliance with the “Therapeutic Abortion Act” of 1967, and made a woman’s participation in her own abortion a criminal offense (subject to the same exception).  The Therapeutic Abortion Act authorized the performance of an abortion on a pregnant woman if the procedure was performed by a licensed physician and surgeon in an accredited hospital, and was unanimously approved in advance by a medical staff committee.  An abortion could not be approved unless the committee found that there was a “substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother,” or that “[t]he pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.”  An abortion could not be performed on grounds of rape or incest unless there was probable cause to believe that the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.  No abortion could be approved after the twentieth week of pregnancy for any reason.

In a pre-Roe decision, the California Supreme Court declared substantial provisions of the Therapeutic Abortion Act unconstitutional on state and federal due process grounds (vagueness).  Sections 274 and 275 of the Penal Code were repealed in 2000, the Therapeutic Abortion Act was repealed in 2002.  None of these statutes would be revived by a decision overruling Roe v. Wade. Abortions could be performed for any reason before viability, and for virtually any reason after viability.

Finally, regardless of Roe, any attempt to enact meaningful restrictions on abortion in California would be precluded by the California Supreme Court’s 1981 decision in Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights v Myers.  In Myers, the state supreme court struck down restrictions on public funding of abortion on state constitutional grounds (privacy).  In the course of its decision, the court stated that under the privacy guarantee of the state constitution,  “all women in this state–rich and poor alike–possess a fundamental constitutional right to choose whether or not to bear a child." California, Life Legal Defense Fund

The State of Oregon, whose Masonically-controlled state legislature once compelled the attendance of all children of school age in state-run schools, effectively prohibiting parochial and other privately-run schools from operating (a law that was struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925), passed its own pro-death legislation in 1969:

The pre-Roe statutes were based on § 230.3 of the Model Penal Code.  The statutes allowed an abortion to be performed before the one hundred fiftieth day of pregnancy when (1) there was “substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy [would] greatly impair the physical or mental health of the mother,” (2) “the child would be born with serious physical or mental defect,” or (3) the pregnancy resulted from felonious intercourse.  After the one hundred fiftieth day, abortion was permitted only if “the life of the pregnant woman [was] in imminent danger.”

Pursuant to Roe, most of these statutes were declared unconstitutional in an unreported decision of a three-judge federal court, and were later repealed.  The pre-Roe statutes would not be revived by a decision overruling Roe v. Wade.  Abortions could be performed for any reason at any stage of pregnancy. Oregon, Life Legal Defense Fund.

The State of New York passed legislation in 1970, albeit by one vote in the State Senate (cast by a Catholic, State Senator Edward Speno of East Meadow, Long Island, New York), to permit baby-killing through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy:

The pre-Roe statutes allowed abortion on demand through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.  After the twenty-fourth week, an abortion could be performed on a pregnant woman only if there was “a reasonable belief that such is necessary to preserve her life.  In a pre-Roe decision, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the law brought by a guardian ad litem for unborn children  The legality of abortion would not be affected by the overruling of Roe v. Wade.  The pre-Roe statutes, which have not been repealed, allow abortion on demand through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.  After the twenty-fourth week, however, abortions could be performed only to preserve the woman’s life.

Regardless of Roe, any attempt to prohibit abortion (at least before viability) in New York probably would be barred by language in the New York Court of Appeals’ decision in Hope v. Perales, a challenge to the New York Prenatal Care Assistance Program.  In Hope, the court of appeals noted in passing that “it is undisputed by defendants that the fundamental right of reproductive choice, inherent in the due process liberty right guaranteed by our State Constitution, is at least as extensive as the Federal constitutional right [recognized in Roe v. Wade].” New York, Life Legal Defense Fund. 

It is instructive at this point to note that, despite his rhetorical opposition to abortion from the pulpit, the conciliar archbishop of New York, Terence "Cardinal" Cooke, did not believe that it was his business to personally lobby Catholic members of the New York State Legislature to remind them to oppose then Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller's dreadful bill in 1970:

During the year after Terence Cooke was named cardinal, a tremendous battle raged in the New York State legislature over abortion. This battle placed Cardinal Cooke in a dilemma, because he was opposed to any action that even looked like an attempt to directly influence a legislator. He believed that an informed electorate should influence the legislature. He was not the slightest bit bashful, however, in trying to inform that electorate about pertinent issues concerning morality. But the cardinal was not at all comfortable with the idea of politicians being controlled by religious leaders. He felt that that was a style that belonged to an earlier day, when anti-Catholic prejudice was strong and as a result there were semi-official, pro-Catholic political leaders. (Father Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R., Thy Will Be Done: A Spiritual Portrait of Terence Cardinal Cooke, 1990, Alba House, p. 216.)

Such is the difference between conciliarism and Catholicism that Terence Cooke did not believe that it was his solemn duty as a bishop (he was a true bishop) to remind Catholic legislators of the fact that their own immortal souls would be imperiled by voting for Rockefeller's baby-killing bill fifty-two years ago whereas Pope Pius XI had not hesitated to remind magistrates who supported the killing of the innocent preborn that they would have to face the Avenger of innocent blood at the moment of their Particular Judgment for doing so:

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

The abdication of duty by "Cardinal" Cooke set the tone for the conciliar "bishops" from that time to the present day, noting a few exceptions here and there. A false church that endorses the falsehood called "separation of Church and State" cannot have its prelates (true or false) "imposing" their "views" upon elected officials.

Moreover, not one Catholic pro-abort in public life has ever faced any sanction whatsoever for having done so, and the late New York State Edward Speno, though denied a so-called "Mass of Christian Burial" in his home parish of the Church of Saint Raphael in East Meadow, New York, was permitted by the founding bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre to have such a service at Sacred Heart Church in North Merrick, New York:

Although the Senator, a Catholic, was identified with his church on school aid, he broke with the hierarchy last year and voted for abortion liberealization. He explained his stand by saying that he did not want to impose his personal beliefs on others. (The New York Times, "Senator Edward Speno Dies; Favored Parochial School Aid, February 17, 1971. This is one of those articles that I had to purchase to get the exact quote that I wanted before typing in the text manually. I may not be--and have never claimed to be an intellectual., great or otherwise. I am, however, a pretty decent researcher.)

Edward Speno did not "want to impose his personal beliefs on others." He was reminded at the moment of his own Particular Judgment that morality exists in the very nature of things. The tenets of the Natural Law are knowable by reason. The Catholic Church is merely the eternal guardian and infallible explicator of those tenets so as to remove confusion from the minds of men so clouded by, at least in some instances, Original Sin (and its vestigial after-effects in the souls of the baptized) and Actual Sins to aid them in understanding the Natural Law more clearly and to strengthen their wills by means of Holy Mother Church's sanctifying offices to speak up in their defense. There also happens to be Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill.

As Pope Leo XIII explained in Sapientiae Christianae, January 11, 1890:

Now, if the natural law enjoins us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we had birth, and in which we were brought up, so that every good citizen hesitates not to face death for his native land, very much more is it the urgent duty of Christians to be ever quickened by like feelings toward the Church. For the Church is the holy City of the living God, born of God Himself, and by Him built up and established. Upon this earth, indeed, she accomplishes her pilgrimage, but by instructing and guiding men she summons them to eternal happiness. We are bound, then, to love dearly the country whence we have received the means of enjoyment this mortal life affords, but we have a much more urgent obligation to love, with ardent love, the Church to which we owe the life of the soul, a life that will endure forever. For fitting it is to prefer the good of the soul to the well-being of the body, inasmuch as duties toward God are of a far more hallowed character than those toward men.

Moreover, if we would judge aright, the supernatural love for the Church and the natural love of our own country proceed from the same eternal principle, since God Himself is their Author and originating Cause. Consequently, it follows that between the duties they respectively enjoin, neither can come into collision with the other. We can, certainly, and should love ourselves, bear ourselves kindly toward our fellow men, nourish affection for the State and the governing powers; but at the same time we can and must cherish toward the Church a feeling of filial piety, and love God with the deepest love of which we are capable. The order of precedence of these duties is, however, at times, either under stress of public calamities, or through the perverse will of men, inverted. For, instances occur where the State seems to require from men as subjects one thing, and religion, from men as Christians, quite another; and this in reality without any other ground, than that the rulers of the State either hold the sacred power of the Church of no account, or endeavor to subject it to their own will. Hence arises a conflict, and an occasion, through such conflict, of virtue being put to the proof. The two powers are confronted and urge their behests in a contrary sense; to obey both is wholly impossible. No man can serve two masters, for to please the one amounts to contemning the other.

As to which should be preferred no one ought to balance for an instant. It is a high crime indeed to withdraw allegiance from God in order to please men, an act of consummate wickedness to break the laws of Jesus Christ, in order to yield obedience to earthly rulers, or, under pretext of keeping the civil law, to ignore the rights of the Church; "we ought to obey God rather than men." This answer, which of old Peter and the other Apostles were used to give the civil authorities who enjoined unrighteous things, we must, in like circumstances, give always and without hesitation. No better citizen is there, whether in time of peace or war, than the Christian who is mindful of his duty; but such a one should be ready to suffer all things, even death itself, rather than abandon the cause of God or of the Church. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.) 

Did Edward Speno know this?

Well, perhaps he was taught this at Niagara University, which is under the control of the Congregation of the Mission (the Vincentian Fathers of Saint Vincent de Paul) when he studied there from 1938 to 1944. Perhaps. He sure did not learn it from his own bishop, Walter P. Kellenberg (who was the bishop who confirmed me at Saint Aloysius Church on March 21, 1961).

Why not?

Well, the bishop who consecrated Father Walter P. Kellenberg, a native of the Borough of the Bronx in the City of New York, as a auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of New York on October 5, 1953, was none other than Francis Cardinal Spellman, who, as noted just bellow in this commentary, enabled the Sangerite forces on Puerto Rico fifty-seven years ago to make it more possible for United States Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) to become the first Catholic to be elected to the American presidency later that year, 1960.

Although Bishop Walter Kellenberg did not insist that the pastor, Father Francis Bain, of Saint Raphael's Church in East Meadow, New York, who refused Speno a "Mass of Christian" Burial reverse himself, he did permit such a "service" to be staged at Sacred Heart Church in North Merrick, New York. This was the first known instance, at least to me, of a Catholic who cooperated formally in making surgical baby-killing "available" under cover of the civil law receiving what purported to be a Catholic funeral service. Many have been the occasions since this that this has been done, scandalizing "pro-life" Catholics and "pro-life" non-Catholics alike.

Thus began the conciliar indemnification, partly out of fear of losing the tax-exempt status of various parishes and diocese and partly out of a desire to placate Catholics in public life who, though pro-abortion, were committed to "social justice" (statism, collectivism, feminism, globalism, opposition to the death penalty, etc.) that has continued to this very day. The names may have changed from the likes of Edward Speno, William Brennan, Peter Rodino, Charles Rangel, Edward Moore Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Hugh Leo Carey, Thomas Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, Mario Matthew Cuomo, and Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr., to the likes of Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi, Christopher Newsom, Michelle Lujan Grisham, Kathleen Hochul, Andrew Mark Cuomo, Kirsten Gillebrand, Susan Collins, Patricia Murray, Lawrence Hogan, Edward Markey, Philip Murphy, Robert Edward ("Beto") O'Rourke, and, among so many others, Christopher Murray, although one name has remained rather consistent, that of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. No one has been excommunicated. No one has been threatened with excommunication. The babies continue to be slaughtered while the conciliar "bishops" and their chancery factotums praise "dialogue" over punishment. 

It is clear, therefore, that The movement to decriminalize baby-killing in the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen, started in the states, and it would remain perfectly legal in most of those states if Roe v. Wade, decided forty-nine years ago now, was reversed today. Only one state, Arkansas, has legislation in place that would ban all surgical baby-killing with no exceptions whatsoever.

Not including the so-called "pro-life" law in Texas and the Mississippi that is under review by the Supreme Court of the United States of America at this time (see The Supreme Masters of Sophistry: Unable to Admit the Fifth Commandment Exists), there are another seven states (Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) that would prohibit surgical baby-killing with the so-called "life of the mother exception." Those eight states represent a total of ten percent of the population of the United States of America. Surgical baby-killing would remain legal, both as a result of existing state laws and/or provisions or the decisions of various state courts, in forty-two states and the District of Columbia, meaning that the American slaughter of the innocent preborn via surgical means would be fully accessible to ninety percent of the American population. Those who think that entire generations of children who have been raised in the culture of ready access to contraception and abortion are going to have an "epiphany" during adulthood about the errors of their past training are not thinking clearly about the state in which we find ourselves at present.

Conciliarism's Refusal to Exhort Catholics to Defend the Truth

Although many of the Americanist bishops of the Catholic Church had made their "peace" with the "social justice" wing of the Democratic Party during the administrations of Presidents Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, there were still enough bishops before the "Second" Vatican Council who spoke out on moral issues and who were not afraid to run risk of criticism from the press for doing so. This was especially so of the bishops associated with the Legion of Decency. 

Archbishop John T. McNicholas, who was the archbishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, from August 12, 1925, to the time of his death on April 22, 1950, led the formation of the Legion of Decency to combat the promotion of immorality in motion pictures. Catholics took their pledges to the Legion of Decency seriously, which is why Hollywood producers, many of them Jews who were concerned about losing money from Catholic moviegoers, had to agree to have produce films that conformed to moral standards.

The Legion of Decency was started in 1934 at a time when Catholics were, by and large, obedient to their bishops and cared about the sanctification and salvation of their immortal souls. Believe it or not, Catholics at that time were capable of being scandalized, and they recognized sin when they saw it.

Unlike the conciliar officials, who permit indecently attired women and men to serve as “lectors” and “Eucharistic ministers” and who celebrate “rock” music and men such as Archbishop John T. McNicholas were concerned about the sanctification of souls and desired to keep Catholics from that which was injurious to their salvation.

Fathers Gerald Kelly, S.J., and John C. Ford provided a history of the Legion of Decency that included both the long and short versions of the Legion’s Pledge:

I wish to join the Legion of Decency, which condemns vile and unwholesome moving pictures. I unite with all who protest against them as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and to religion.

I condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land.

I shall do all that I can to arouse public opinion against the portrayal of vice as a normal condition of affairs, and against depicting criminals of any class as heroes and heroines, presenting their filthy philosophy of life as something acceptable to decent men and women.

I unite with all who condemn the display of suggestive advertisements on billboards, at theatre entrances, and the favorable notices given to immoral motion pictures.

Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality. I promise further to secure as many members as possible for the Legion of Decency.

I make this protest in a spirit of self-respect and with the cdfiviction that the American public does not demand filthy pictures, but clean entertainment and educational features.

A shorter formula, which is in general use even at the present time, was adopted at the bishops' meeting in November, 1934. The text is as follows:

I condemn indecent and immoral pictures, and those which glorify crime and criminals.

I promise to do all that I can to strengthen public opinion against the production of indecent and immoral films, and to unite with all who protest them. I acknowledge my obligation to form a right conscience about pictures that are dangerous to my moral life.

As a member of the Legion of Decency, I pledge myself to remain away from them. I promise, further, to stay away altogether from places of amusement which show them as a matter of policy.

There are are, as we shall see later, obligations deriving from natural law itself concerning attendance at indecent motion pictures. But it seems appropriate even at this point to ask whether the taking of the pledge of the Legion adds any new obligation. We have seen private explanations to the effect that the pledge itself is a promise binding in conscience—in fact that it is a promise made to God and, in effect, a vow. This can hardly be squared with interpretations given by bishops when the Legion was inaugurated. For instance, Archbishop John Gregory Murray stated: "Everything contained in the pledge is a duty of conscience independently of the pledge and independently of membership in the Legion of Decency., ' And Archbishop Francis J. L. Beckman was even more explicit. "In the matter of the obligatory force of the pledge," he said, "it may be stated in the instruction and to those who make inquiries, that it.. . does not itself bind in conscience."

It seems, therefore, that the pledge does not per se add any new obligation on those who take it. We say "per se" because, obviously, an individual who wishes to bind himself under pain of sin may do so. But this added obligation is not to be presumed.  (Kelly-Ford Study on The Legion of Decency.)

Bishops have an obligation to correct error and to call to correction, and they have an obligation to warn Catholics to avoid all near occasions of sin and to shun anything that is itself an incentive to sin. A Catholic bishop can never be indifferent to the horror of sin as the very thought of coming into contact with its effects caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to sweat droplets of blood during His Agony on the Garden of Gethsemane and imposed unspeakable sufferings upon Him in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday.

Pope Pius XI, making the cause of the Legion of Decency his own, warned Catholics very specifically about the dangerous nature of many motion pictures when he issued Vigilanti Cura, June 29, 1936:

There is no need to point out the fact that millions of people go to the motion pictures every day; that motion picture theatres are being opened in ever increasing number in civilized and semi-civilized countries; that the motion picture has become the most popular form of diversion which is offered for the leisure hours not only of the rich but of all classes of society.

At the same time, there does not exist today a means of influencing the masses more potent than the cinema. The reason for this is to be sought for in the very nature of the pictures projected upon the screen, in the popularity of motion picture plays, and in the circumstances which accompany them.

The power of the motion picture consists in this, that it speaks by means of vivid and concrete imagery which the mind takes in with enjoyment and without fatigue. Even the crudest and most primitive minds which have neither the capacity nor the desire to make the efforts necessary for abstraction or deductive reasoning are captivated by the cinema. In place of the effort which reading or listening demands, there is the continued pleasure of a succession of concrete and, so to speak, living pictures.

This power is still greater in the talking picture for the reason that interpretation becomes even easier and the charm of music is added to the action of the drama. Dances and variety acts which are sometimes introduced between the films serve to increase the stimulation of the passions.

It must be Elevated

Since then the cinema is in reality a sort of object lesson which, for good or for evil, teaches the majority of men more effectively than abstract reasoning, it must be elevated to conformity with the aims of a Christian conscience and saved from depraving and demoralizing effects.

Everyone knows what damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. They are occasions of sin; they seduce young people along the ways of evil by glorifying the passions; they show life under a false light; they cloud ideals; they destroy pure love, respect for marriage, affection for the family. They are capable also of creating prejudices among individuals and misunderstandings among nations, among social classes, among entire races.

On the other hand, good motion pictures are capable of exercising a profoundly moral influence upon those who see them. In addition to affording recreation, they are able to arouse noble ideals of life, to communicate valuable conceptions, to impart a better knowledge of the history and the beauties of the Fatherland and of other countries, to present truth and virtue under attractive forms, to create, or at least to favour understanding among nations, social classes, and races, to champion the cause of justice, to give new life to the claims of virtue, and to contribute positively to the genesis of a just social order in the world.  (Pope Pius XI, Vigilanti Cura, June 29, 1936.)

By the time of the middle-1960s, however, the spirit of accommodation and non-confrontation had entered into the hearts of the men who were true bishops but part of the revolutionary vanguard of conciliarism's embrace of the world. 

Ah, but it was the infamous Americanist enabler of the Kennedy clan, the notorious Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was appointed as the Archbishop of Boston by Pope Pius XII in 1944, was the first American prelate to encourage Catholics to attend a “Billy Graham Crusade,” doing so in 1950 (Pope Saint Pius X would have removed Cushing once he had gotten word of this outrage, but Pope Pius XII left him in place). It was during the “Second” Vatican Council that Cushing gave Graham an even more public elegy of praise:

By 1961, Mr. Graham and President Kennedy prayed side by side at a Washington prayer breakfast. A few years later, in 1964, Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston (who, as archbishop, had even endorsed a Graham crusade in Boston in 1950) met with Mr. Graham upon returning from Rome and the Second Vatican Council, declaring before a national television audience that Mr. Graham’s message was good for Catholics.

Cardinal Cushing said, “God will bless [Graham’s] preaching and crusade.” Mr. Graham responded with gratitude, stating that he felt much closer to Catholics and Catholic tradition than he did to what was more alien to his message: liberal Protestantism. (How Billy Graham Shaped American Catholicism. For a review of some of Cushing’s other outrageous comments, please see Determined Not To Accept the Truth of Truth Himself, Christ the King, part two.)

Cushing had no problem with Billy Graham's support of contraception, which is, after all, what led the gradual acceptance of baby-killing in the 1960s in the event that contraceptives "failed," and, along with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's errand boy in a miter, Francis Cardinal Spellman, worked to defeat an bill supported by the Puerto Rican bishops to oppose the anti-family policies of Puerto Rico Governor Luis Munoz Marin:

In 1960, the Puerto Rico hierarchy decided to make one last concerted effort to drive the Sangerite forces from the island. The Catholic resistance was led by two American Bishops--James F. Davis of San Juan and James E. McManus of Ponce. The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico helped to organize a national political party--the Christian Action Party (CAP). The new political front was composed primarily of Catholic laymen and its platform included opposition to existing permissive legislation on birth control and sterilization.

When increasing numbers of CAP flags began to fly from the rooftops of Puerto Rico's Catholic homes, the leaders of the opposition parties, who favored turning Puerto Rico into an international Sangerite playground for massive U.S.-based contraceptive/abortifacient/sterilization experimental programs, became increasingly concerned for their own political futures. Then unexpected help arrived in the unlikely person of His Eminence Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York.

One month before the hotly contested national election, Spellman arrived in Puerto Rico ostensibly to preside over two formal Church functions. While on the island, Spellman agreed to meet with CAP's major political rival, Governor Luis Munoz Marin, leader of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) and a supporter of federal population control programs for Puerto Rico.

In an interview that followed his meeting with Munoz, Spellman, known for years as FDR's errand boy with a miter, claimed that politics were outside his purview. The cardinal's statement was interpreted by the press as an indictment of the partisan politics of Bishops Davis and McManus. To underscore his message, as soon as Spellman returned to the States he made a public statement in opposition to the latest directives of the Puerto Rico bishops prohibiting Catholics from voting for Munoz and his anti-life PDP cohorts. Catholic voters in Puerto Rico should vote their conscience without the threat of Church penalties, Spellman said.

Boston's Cardinal Cushing, John F. Kennedy's "political godfather," joined Spellman in expressed "feigned horror" at the thought of ecclesiastical authority attempting to dictate political voting. "This has never been a part of our history, and I pray God that it will never be!" said Cushing. Cushing's main concern was not the Puerto Rican people. His main worry was that the flack caused by the Puerto Rican birth control affair might overflow into the upcoming presidential campaign and hurt John Kennedy's bid for the White House.

The national election turned out to be a political disaster for CAP. Munoz and the PDP won by a landslide. Bishop Davis was forced to end the tragic state of confusion among the Catholic laity by declaring just before the election that no penalties would be imposed on those who voted for PDP.  

Two years later, with the knowledge and approval of the American hierarchy and the Holy See, the Puerto Rican hierarchy was pressured into singing a secret concordat of "non-interference" in government-sponsored birth control programs--a sop being that the programs would now include instruction in the "rhythm method." While insisting on their right to hold and express legitimate opposition to such programs, the Puerto Rican bishops promised they would "never impose their own moral doctrines upon individuals who do not accept the Catholic teaching."

When the Sangerite storm hit the mainland in the late 1960s, AmChurch would echo this same theme song, opening the floodgates to a multi-billion dollar federal-life-prevention (and destruction) program. (Randy Engel, The Rite of Sodomy, pp. 647-649)

It was five years after this travesty that “Cardinal” Cushing told a Boston radio station that he could not interfere with the “consciences” of state legislators as they considered whether to support or to oppose a bill in the Massachusetts General Court (the state legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts). This made it far easier for the Kennedys and the Careys and Cuomos and the Bidens and the O’Neills, among others, to support the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn in the 1970s with the full support of the ultra-progressives in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, one of whose leaders, Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, another true bishop, invented the “consistent ethic of life” (“the seamless garment) slogan to provide pro-abortion Catholics with the cover of “respectability” as long as they opposed the death penalty and supported one statist measure after another to confiscate wealth and then to redistribute it to the poor while “empowering” illegal immigrants at the same time:

Early in the summer of 1965, the Massachusetts legislature took up a proposal to repeal the state's Birth Control law, which barred the use of contraceptives. (As a matter of historical interest, the repeal effort was sponsored by a young state representative named Michael Dukakis, who would be the Democratic Party's candidate for the US presidency 23 years later.) In a state where Catholics constituted a voting majority, and dominated the legislature, the prospects for repeal appeared remote. Then on June 22, Cardinal Cushing appeared on a local radio program, "An Afternoon with Haywood Vincent,” and effectively scuttled the opposition.

Cardinal Cushing announced:

“My position in this matter is that birth control in accordance with artificial means is immoral, and not permissible. But this is Catholic teaching. I am also convinced that I should not impose my position—moral beliefs or religious beliefs—upon those of other faiths.”

Warming to the subject, the cardinal told his radio audience that "I could not in conscience approve the legislation" that had been proposed. However, he quickly added, "I will make no effort to impose my opinion upon others."

So there it was: the "personally opposed" argument, in fully developed form, enunciated by a Prince of the Church nearly 40 years ago! Notice how the unvarying teaching of the Catholic Church, which condemned artificial contraception as an offense against natural law, is reduced here to a matter of the cardinal's personal belief. And notice how he makes no effort to persuade legislators with the force of his arguments; any such effort is condemned in advance as a bid to "impose" his opinion.

Cardinal Cushing conceded that in the past, Catholic leaders had opposed any effort to alter the Birth Control law. "But my thinking has changed on that matter," he reported, "for the simple reason that I do not see where I have an obligation to impose my religious beliefs on people who just do not accept the same faith as I do."

(Notice that the Catholic position is reduced still further here, to a matter of purely sectarian belief—as if it would be impossible for a non-Catholic to support the purpose of the Birth Control law. The cardinal did not explain why that law was enacted in 1899 by the heirs of the Puritans in Massachusetts, long before Catholics came to power in the legislature.)

Before the end of his fateful radio broadcast, Cardinal Cushing gave his advice to the Catholic members of the Massachusetts legislature: "If your constituents want this legislation, vote for it. You represent them. You don't represent the Catholic Church."

Dozens of Catholic legislators did vote for the bill, and the Birth Control law was abolished. Perhaps more important in the long run, the "personally opposed" politician had his rationale. (Cushing's Use of The "Personally Opposed" Argument.)

Today’s Pontius Pilates had lots and lots of help from true bishops and true priests in the 1960s abd 1970s as their consciences were massaged to make it possible for them to support each of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

It is no accident that the “peace and justice” crowd at the now-named United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, whose work had been “divided,” so they say, in 1966 between the so-called National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United States Catholic Conference, associated with one pro-abortion and pro-sodomite group after another, many of which received funding from both Catholic Charities and the “Catholic Campaign for Human Development (see the following two news stories of the past decade, although like examples abound today all around the world: Signs of Apostasy Abound and Randy Engel on Catholic Relief Services.)

Indifference Even on January 22, 1973

Indifference is what has characterized the past forty-nine years since state legislatures began to "liberalize" existing statutes concerning abortion and the past thirty-seven years since the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade. Indifference.

There was even indifference on the actual day of Roe as two other events overshadowed the Supreme Court's decision: the death of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the announcement made by President Richard Milhous Nixon that a "peace accord" had been reached at the Paris Peace Talks between National Security Adviser Dr. Henry Alfred Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the representative of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Communist North Vietnam) to bring American involvement in Vietnam to a close while permitting North Vietnamese army regulars and Viet Cong guerillas (whose interests were represented Madame Nguyen Thi Binh) to remain in "enclaves" in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam,). These two events overshadowed the decision in Roe, which would lead to a period in American history with a casualty figure eclipsing that of the American dead in the Vietnam War by well over a thousand times.

The "Strategy" of the Conciliar "Bishops" in the Aftermath of Roe v. Wade

"Ya gotta do something. Nothing else will work."

It is upon that false premise that the conciliar "bishops" have embraced a ready acceptance of the "right to life mother exception" in legislative proposals without even attempting to pressure supposedly pro-life members of various legislatures, including those in both houses of the Congress of the United States of America, believing that doing so will help to convince "reasonable" people that they and the politicians they support are not "radicals" or "extremists," that such concessions are "necessary" to make in the realm prudence.

This is, of course, the exact same moral casuistry that gave us "natural family planning" and explicit classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments that has corrupted what passes for Catholic moral theology in so many places that high level officials in the Vatican itself can speak of "therapeutic" abortions as being within the moral law (see So Long to the Fifth Commandment and Rotten To The Very Roots).

Some tried very hard to warn the "bishops" as early as the first years after the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 2, 1973, that the acceptance of "exceptions" would lead to the further institutionalization of baby-killing under the cover of the civil law in the mistaken belief that some killings would be prevented.

One of those who did so was Mrs. Randy Engel, the Director of the U.S. Coalition for Life, who testified in 1974. before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the United States Senate Committee for the Judiciary. Mrs. Engel saw things with prophetic clarity: there could never be any compromise with the binding precepts of the Fifth Commandment, and for this, of course, she has been hated by the "pro-life establishment" ever since:

I am Randy Engel, National Director of the United States Coalition for Life, an international research center and clearing- house specializing in domestic federal anti-life programs within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Agency for International Development. Thank you for your invitation to appear before the sub-committee today in order that I may express the views of the Coalition, its distinguished national and international board of advisors, some of whom have already testified at earlier Senate hearings on the Human Life Amendment, and that of thousands of grassroots people whom we have had the honor of serving on a day to day basis since the Coalition opened its offices almost two years ago.

Mr. Chairman, about four months ago, the Coalition filed with your office, the transcript of a speech made by Louise Tyrer , M.D., Family Planning Division of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, before the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians' 12th Annual Meeting, Memphis, Tennessee on Tuesday, April 16, 1974, on the status of the various Human Life Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. (Attachment A) According to Dr. Tyrer' s assessment of the Congressional scene there are two basic approaches. One - a "state's rights" approach which would return the power of lawmaking in the area of abortion to the individual States. The second - which would guarantee the full protection of the law to the unborn child from the moment of fertilization. The "State's rights" approach she states, and correctly so, is unacceptable to the majority of Pro-Life people yet very attractive to the legislators because " it sought of takes the ones off their backs from making any decisions."

The remainder of her talk stresses the necessity of stalling the hearings of this sub-committee by having Planned Parenthood physicians flood the sub-committee with requests to testify. This, Dr. Tyrer suggests would be politically expedient and politically NECESSARY for you Mr. Chairman, in order to keep the amendments bottled up in sub-committee until you had gone through the election process in the Fall. Now, Mr. Chairman, I have no desire to embarrass you in any manner. Not because I fell Dr. Tyrer was incorrect in her judgment of the political realities of the Senate and House Committees dealing with the abortion issue or her assessment that stalling these subcommittee hearings by dragging them out month by month would be politically expedient for you and others who might prefer not to have a roll call vote on a Human Life Amendment before election time. But rather, because with few exceptions, almost every Senator and Representative in Congress would like nothing better than to get rid of the abortion issue tomorrow, if not before, or at least dump the matter back into the lap of the State legislatures.

This is not our affair - they say.

The massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent unborn children is not a federal matter - they say.

We are not responsible for the Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1972 which is now the law of the land - they say.

Well, I am here Mr. Chairman to tell you and every other Senator and Congressman that like it or not - Abortion IS your affair. That the massive slaughter of unborn children in this country IS a proper matter of federal concern. Moreover that this Congress IS directly responsible for the almost inevitable Supreme Court decision which stripped unborn children of their inalienable right to life. Congress IS responsible because over the last ten years it has permitted an anti-life philosophy and anti-life programs and policies to become matters of NATIONAL POLICY , promoted and supported by tax dollars.

It is the Federal Government - at all levels - Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches - which has posed the greatest threat to unborn children in recent years. The Executive Branch because it has failed to correct the anti-life abuses primarily within the bureaucracies of HEW and AID and has permitted key anti-life leaders such as Dr. Louis Hellman the Office of Population Affairs and Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, Director Population Bureau for Population and Humanitarian Affairs [and the man who coined the phrase "Natural Family Planning"] to remain in office. The Legislative Branch, because it has authorized legislation and appropriated funds year after year to initiate, promote and sustain anti-life programs in virtually every conceivable federal bureaucracy including the Office of Economic Opportunity, Office of Environmental Education, Office of Education, Department of Defense Office of Population Affairs (HEW), National Institutes of Health, Agriculture Department, Food and Drug Administration, Public Health Service Social Security, MedicAID, Aid to Dependent Children, U.S. Information Agency Population Office(AID). Contraceptive Research Branch (NIH) Federal Communication Commission).

As I said the Supreme Court abortion decision was an inevitable one. All the cliches of that decision - terms like "unwanted children", "a woman's right to control her own body.", the population explosion stem from the Sangerite ethic. It represented the culmination of more than half a century of dedication and tireless efforts by the Sangerites and the Malthusians to convince the American public of the righteousness of the CAUSE and to elevate the SANGERITE-MALTHUSIAN philosophy to that of Public Policy .

This final achievement is portrayed quite candidly in this book Breeding Ourselves to Death - the Story of the Hugh Moore Fund by abortion leader Lawrence Lader. In the section on gaining Congressional Support, former N.Y. Senator Kenneth Keating, then newly appointed National Director of the Population Crisis Committee tells about eating in the Senate Dining Room where he could spread the gospel of family planning among old friends, particularly among the Republican leadership. This fight to influence by other population control leaders in Congress goes on today.

But what does all this have to do with this subcommittee hearing on the Human Life Amendment? Simply this:

For more than a year the Hogan-Helms Human Life Amendment and similar bills have been buried in the House, where Representative Don Edwards has refused to hold hearings, and in the Senate - hearings are dragged out month after month to get Senators and Representatives through the November watershed without a floor vote on such as the HLA.

Obviously there is no sense of urgency about the matter, with the exception of a handful of dedicated men, the Congress doesn't appear to be the least concerned that its inaction will result in the death of hundreds of thousands of unborn children. The fact that millions of federal tax dollars are used to promote a myriad of anti-life schemes- from direct abortion payments (Medicaid-ADC; to the research development and promoting of new abortion techniques to the indoctrination of young children of an anti-life ethic appears to raise no particular concern at family planning authorization or appropriation hearings.

Equally obvious is the fact that under these conditions we will have a difficult time getting a Human Life Amendment passed by both Houses. of Congress and on its way to the states for ratification. My purpose here today is to point out the current commitment of the Federal Government including this Congress to the anti-life establishment, and briefly how such a commitment was obtained and at what price.

Mr. Chairman, this Congress OWES its vigorous support for a Human Life Amendment which would protect Human Life from conception until natural death to the American people. The Coalition would agree that the Hogan-Helms Amendment or the newer Roncallo Amendment would provide such protection.

Apart from the merit of these amendments themselves, we feel that Congress should recognize the fact that through its indifference, ignorance and its inability to withstand the pressures of the anti-life movement, it must bear its share of guilt for the 1972 Abortion decision, and its share of responsibility in seeing a Human Life Amendment is passed to protect the unborn child.

Your responsibility, Mr. Chairman, in this matter is very plain. As for our part, I believe the Coalition and the Pro-Life Movement in the U. S. will continue to fight at all levels - including the Halls of Congress and yes, even in Senate dining rooms - to educate and to promote an ideal that is as revolutionary in our day as the Sangerite ideal was fifty years ago. That ideal is based on the sanctity and innate goodness of all human life. (Full text of "Abortion : hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments.)

Even though the efforts made by Mrs. Engel and others were valiant, we can see now with perfect hindsight that which was not understood by very many at the time: that these noble efforts were doomed to failure precisely because the "pro-life establishment," headed by the National Not-So-Right to Life Committee, rallied around the constitutional amendment that had been proposed by United States Senator James Buckley (C-New York; the "c" reflects Buckley's election in a three-way race in 1970 as the candidate of the Conservative Party of the State of New York) that permitted the "life of the mother" exception.

Only four American bishops, Timothy Cardinal Manning of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, John Cardinal Krol of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Humberto Medeiros of the Archdiocese of Boston and John Cardinal Cody of the Archdiocese of Chicago testified against the Buckley Amendment on the grounds that the civil law could never permit the direct taking of a single, solitary innocent human life from the first moment of conception through all subsequent stages until natural death. These cardinals, however, although part of the conciliar church by that time, were opposed by the entire "pro-life" establishment whose machinations were being orchestrated, at least to a very large extent, by the then Monsignor James Timothy McHugh of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. McHugh did not have a qualm of conscience whatsoever about the "life of the mother exception" as a matter of legislative expedience or as a core moral principle of the National Right to Life Committee his work at the then named Family Life Bureau of the United States Catholic Conference helped to launch.

No, the well-intentioned efforts of Mrs. Engel and her associates were doomed from the start as, unbeknownst to them, a false church had arisen filled with men who had lost the Catholic Faith, men who had surrendered to the prevailing ethos of Judeo-Masonry, a surrender that has devastated the world in which we live and that must be considered nothing other than one of the worst chastisements of our time for neither Popes Pius XI or XII consecrating Russia collegially to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world's bishops. Treasonous priests and their leftist apparatchiks and toadies worked against efforts to provide full constitutional protection. And this is what must happen when men who claim to be Catholic make their "reconciliations" with the anti-Incarnational principles of Modernity.

It is no wonder that "conservatives" and even tradtionally-minded priests and presbyters praise the late "Bishop" James Timothy McHugh for his "pro-life" work as they have become so accustomed to the moral casuistry of conciliarism and of its embrace of the ethos of naturalism that they are incapable of seeing Catholic truth clearly, less yet of embracing it openly as the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Where the Moral Casuistry of Family Planning, Including "Natural" Family Planning, and "Exceptions" Must Lead: to Death, Temporal and Eternal

The ethos of conciliarism's "reconciliation" with false premises of the Protestant Revolution's overturning of the Social Reign of Christ the King that gave the scions of Judeo-Masonry a chance to exploit the "wars of religious conflict" to call for a putting aside of "useless debates about religious dogma" in the name "toleration" as men of "good will" attempt to pursue the common good leads to the embrace of one "mental reservation" after another to "achieve" some kind of mythical goal, thereby resulting in the redefining of what constitutes "pro-life" politicians and "pro-life" legislation. And it is what has resulted in such an almost complete and utter corruption of what is called the Catholic healthcare system that moral theologians today, who are but the ideological descendants of those who tried to deconstruct Pope Pius XII's October 29, 1951, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, can justify outright baby killing in "Catholic" hospitals without too many "bishops" giving them a word of rebuke.

Consider this example from the year 2011:

FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, July 29, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - When a child is delivered stillborn, a small flower or other token often marks the door of the mother’s recovery room to help staff recognize the loss.

According to one Catholic doctor, the same symbol was used in at least one Catholic hospital where doctors routinely induced labor to hasten the death of a child diagnosed with a genetic defect - a practice she says occurs in “a handful” of Catholic hospitals across the United States.

Dr. Lorna Cvetkovich told a bioethics conference at Christendom College in Virginia this month about her experience at one Catholic hospital she declined to name, where she says abortions had been routinely performed on disabled children for twenty years. Cvetkovich currently works at the pro-life Tepeyac Family Center and is medical director of Sanctity of Life Ministries in Fairfax, Virginia.

“They would place a little flower on the door of a woman to her room to indicate the baby had died - except they also placed a flower on the door of a woman who was being induced with a live baby,” Cvetkovich told the audience. “Most of these were hydrocephalics, or genetic anomalies, that kind of thing.”

Cvetkovich said the hospital’s policies and procedures allowed for the procedure, but were written such that “you really had to read it with a fine-toothed comb to figure out that this was allowable.”

Soberingly, Cvetkovich said the hospital claimed the protocol had even been approved by the local ordinary. “One of the hardest situations I’d ever went through was sitting in the MD’s office and having him tell me, ‘I only did what your bishop told me I could do,’” she recalled.

“It’s hard to have a response to that.”

The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, a document promulgated by the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, defines abortion as “the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus,” something that is “never permitted.” http://www.usccb.org/bishops/directives.shtml The document also prohibits contraception and sterilization.

According to Cvetkovich, faithful doctors must be a “sign of contradiction” even within an ostensibly Catholic system, which have been taken over by modern sexual values and even disregard for unborn human life.

“Most Catholic hospitals, their networks, their clinics, even on the labor delivery floor, do allow prescription of contraceptives. Some also allow sterilization ... sometimes even elective sterilizations,” she said, adding that “a very few, I think a handful” perform abortions.

“On our labor delivery floor, you could go after delivery and punch in an order for depo-provera, and that is not too unusual,” she said.

After the lecture, Cvetkovich told LifeSiteNews.com that the moral theologian at her facility had justified elective sterilizations as a means of keeping patients’ business for the sake of helping other low-income patients. “He was trying to tell me that amount of money is what’s going to be their commitment to serve the poor,” said Cvetkovitch. “It’s just hogwash.”

The doctor also lamented that the problem of abortions and other immoral practices at Catholic hospitals is “very intractable” because bishops have been erroneously led to believe they lack power to reform such facilities.

“The bishops have been convinced that they have no control over the Catholic hospitals because they are usually owned by a religious group whose authority line goes to the Vatican, not the diocese,” she said. “But that’s not really true, because there’s a canon law that says they really are responsible for every catholic entity in their diocese.”

Cvetkovich pointed to the example of Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, who took severe national criticism last year for cutting an abortion-performing hospital out of the diocese, as proof that such action is rare.

“They [U.S. bishops] will not move against Catholic hospitals,” she said.

In a world where even Catholic hospitals push abortion on their staff - Cvetkovitch recalled watching a head nurse “roll her eyes” when a lower nurse asked to be excused from a procured abortion - the medical doctor had dire predictions for the future of conscience rights.

“We will have the choice to either practice anti-Hippocratic, pro-choice type medicine and keep our jobs - or practice Hippocratic, Catholic, pro-life medicine and lose our jobs,” she said.

LifeSiteNews.com in 2008 uncovered that the chief ethicist for the diocese of London, Ontario admitted that its St. Joseph Catholic Hospital had performed early-induction abortions on disabled children for twenty years, and that the procedure had been approved by the bishop. (‘Flower on the door’ used to mark abortions at Catholic hospitals: doctor.)

As noted earlier in this commentary, men who participate in a liturgical sacrilege and who blaspheme God by perverting and misrepresenting the immutable truths contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith will, at least in some instances, come to lose all understanding of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as to justify even the hideous actions described in the news story above from Lifesite.com. There is a direct connection between defects from Catholic Faith and Worship and open support for crimes that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.

This just didn't "happen," something that I tried to explain in an article published on August 1, 2011, the Feast of Saint Peter’s Chains and the Commemoration of the Holy Maccabees,  in Planting Seeds of Revolutionary Change. What is happening in Catholic hospitals today is the result of all of that rationalization and moral casuistry found in those old 1940s and 1950s ethics textbooks whose authors were trying to "find a way" to accommodate the desire of Catholic married couples to "limit" the size of their families without restoring to contraception. Compromise begets compromise to such an extent that one might as well be an open disciple of the devil.

Indifference to the Proximate Root Causes of Abortion: The Overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King

More than the indifference over the daily slaughter of the preborn, however, is the indifference that even those who call themselves pro-life have about the root causes of how we have come to such a state of affairs as that most people in a nation that professes itself to be "civilized"--and deems itself to be judge of whether other nations in the world are "worthy" of being considered as "civilized" as itself--can go about their business each day without giving a single thought (and I mean not a single, solitary thought) to the outrages being committed against God and man by means of the slicing and dicing of innocent preborn children under cover of law.

Most pro-life Americans are so busy finding "political" and "legal" and "constitutional" "strategies" that they are totally disinterested in even learning about how we have arrived at this point in history. Most people prefer to believe in partial-truths about "activist" judges and "loose" constitutional construction, reacting with outrage when they are told that the real proximate cause for each of our social problems, including abortion, is the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt in the Sixteenth Century and the rise of anthropocentricity (a man-centered view of the world) associated with Judeo-Masonry and with the variety of naturalistic "philosophies" and ideologies that were spawned from the time of the so-called Age of the Enlightenment to our present day.

By Reason Alone One Can Come to Understand That Abortion is Forbidden by the Natural Law

It is therefore necessary on this day after the forty-eighth anniversary of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Roe v. Wade to examine some rather basic facts about the taking of innocent human life in the womb, which is one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance and can never be justified as belong to the province of the "people" to "permit" no matter what form of government under which they live.

One can come to a principled opposition to the taking of innocent human life on the basis of reason alone unaided by the light of the Divine Revelation that has been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ exclusively to the Catholic Church He Himself founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. Some of the pagan physicians and philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were able to conclude that the taking of innocent human life in the womb was prohibited by the precepts of the Natural Law. Hippocrates did so in his Hippocratic Oath, which was changed many medical colleges and universities in the 1970s and thereafter:

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

The Roman playwright Juvenal, who lived in the early Second Century A.D. and was fierce hater of Christians, had this to say about the crime of the murder of innocent preborn children:

So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist, paid to murder mankind within the womb. Ancient History Sourcebook: Juvenal: Satire VI 

Even a proto-feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the first "women's rights" conference in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, referred to abortion as "disgusting and degrading crime," going on to write:

When you consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Letter to Julia Ward Howe, October 16, 1873, recorded in Howe's diary at Harvard University Library.)

Yes, it is possible by reason alone to come to recognize that a child, an innocent preborn human being, is the natural fruit of human conjugal relations. It is an accident if one falls down a flight of stairs. It is an accident if the motor vehicle one is driving goes out of control on an icy road. It is not an "accident" if a child is conceived as the result of human conjugal relations. To invade the sanctuary of the womb, therefore, in order to suck out, burn, slice or otherwise destroy a living human being is opposed to the very laws of nature itself. And if the child inside a mother's womb is not alive, why is it necessary to kill it? As to the child's humanity, you see, even secular science has proved that every fertilized embryonic human being has a distinctive DNA of his very own that does not change over the course of his life. All that is added, physically and temporally speaking, is time and nutrition.

As I said to an abortion advocate in a debate at Hofstra University, Hempstead, Long Island, New York, on the Feast of Saint Joseph, March 19, 1985:

"I will quit this debate right now if you can demonstrate to me which one of the cells in your body has a DNA structure different from the moment that you were conceived."

No true, objective biologist can deny the fact that a living, growing human being is created at the moment of fertilization. Ideologues can deny all arguments that can be advanced by means of reason and science, however, which is why arguing against abortion on the grounds of reason alone only takes one so far. Indeed, it is precisely because of naturalism that we have abortion-on-demand and in most other countries in the "developed" world today. Naturalistic arguments are not going to end abortion-on-demand, although the use of scientific facts and basic Natural Law reasoning can be useful as tools to help people to see through some of the illogic of the pro-death arguments. Such arguments are merely "building blocks," if you will, to lead people to accept the simple fact that it is God Himself Who has ordained these immutable facts of nature that do not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force or for their validity.

Reason Only Takes Us So Far; We Need Divine Revelation as Taught by the Catholic Church

Yes, it is from Divine Revelation that we must oppose the evils of our day, including the evil of abortion, as we try to plant the seeds as the totally consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother for the conversion of men and their nations to an acceptance of the Catholic Faith as the one and only basis of personal and social order. All other "solutions" are really no "solutions" at all. They are illusions from the devil designed to distract people from the simple truth that it is a complete and humble subordination of all that we do, both individually in our own lives and collectively with others in society, to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as He has revealed Himself through His Catholic Church that we can root out sin and vice from our own lives and thus to ameliorate its effects in every aspect of the life of our nations.

The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity--the Logos, the Word--through Whom all things were made could have become Man in any way of His choosing. He chose to become Man by being conceived as a helpless embryo in His Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. Our Lord thereby placed Himself in solidarity with every child in every mother's womb no matter the condition of the conception and no matter the condition of the child conceived, whether "healthy" or suffering from some physical "deformity."

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is God. He is the Lord of history, knowing all things. He knew what would be happening in the world in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries as hundreds of millions of babies worldwide would be killed by means of chemical and surgical abortions. He was teaching while He spent nine months in the tabernacle of His Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb that an attack upon an innocent preborn human being is a mystical attack upon Himself:

And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me. (Mt. 25: 40.)

No one can say that he "loves" Our Lord but nevertheless supports His mystical destruction in the persons of preborn babies in their mothers' wombs under cover of law, whether by surgical or chemical means. Those Catholics who say that they are "good Catholics" who "love" Our Lord while supporting the destruction of the least of His brethren in the womb are supporting an indirect attack on the Incarnation itself. Our Lord chose to be the prisoner of Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate Womb. He teaches us that each preborn human life is inviolable from any direct, intentional attack upon it. No human being, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance, has any authority found in the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law or the Natural Law to permit one single abortion, whether by chemical or surgical means.

Opposing abortion is as simple as saying: "God has given us His Fifth Commandment: 'Thou shalt not kill.' This is the end of the argument. Period."

Although various theologians over the centuries argued about when "ensoulment" takes place, such arguments are extraneous to the simple fact that an innocent human life never may be targeted deliberately as the first object of an attack upon it. Moreover, although Holy Mother Church has never defined "ensoulment" as such in a de fide manner as it relates to abortion, she has taught us that Our Lord had a true human nature hypostatically united to His Sacred Divinity at the moment of His Incarnation, that is, at the moment of His conception by the power of God the Holy Ghost. He had to have His Theandric soul at that moment, just as His Most Blessed Mother was preserved from all stain of Original and Actual Sin from the first moment of her Immaculate Conception in the womb of her mother, Good Saint Ann.

Pope Pius XI and Abortion

Noting the push of the anti-family movement in the 1920s that had resulted in laws in the United States and the Weimar Republic of Germany favorable to contraception and eugenic sterilization, as well as laws in the the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic that permitted surgical abortion-on-demand and in Germany that permitted surgical abortion in cases where a mother's life was said to be endangered, Pope Pius XI wrote the following in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930:

But another very grave crime is to be noted, Venerable Brethren, which regards the taking of the life of the offspring hidden in the mother's womb. Some wish it to be allowed and left to the will of the father or the mother; others say it is unlawful unless there are weighty reasons which they call by the name of medical, social, or eugenic "indication." Because this matter falls under the penal laws of the state by which the destruction of the offspring begotten but unborn is forbidden, these people demand that the "indication," which in one form or another they defend, be recognized as such by the public law and in no way penalized. There are those, moreover, who ask that the public authorities provide aid for these death-dealing operations, a thing, which, sad to say, everyone knows is of very frequent occurrence in some places.

As to the "medical and therapeutic indication" to which, using their own words, we have made reference, Venerable Brethren, however much we may pity the mother whose health and even life is gravely imperiled in the performance of the duty allotted to her by nature, nevertheless what could ever be a sufficient reason for excusing in any way the direct murder of the innocent? This is precisely what we are dealing with here. Whether inflicted upon the mother or upon the child, it is against the precept of God and the law of nature: "Thou shalt not kill:" The life of each is equally sacred, and no one has the power, not even the public authority, to destroy it. It is of no use to appeal to the right of taking away life for here it is a question of the innocent, whereas that right has regard only to the guilty; nor is there here question of defense by bloodshed against an unjust aggressor (for who would call an innocent child an unjust aggressor?); again there is not question here of what is called the "law of extreme necessity" which could even extend to the direct killing of the innocent. Upright and skillful doctors strive most praiseworthily to guard and preserve the lives of both mother and child; on the contrary, those show themselves most unworthy of the noble medical profession who encompass the death of one or the other, through a pretense at practicing medicine or through motives of misguided pity.

All of which agrees with the stern words of the Bishop of Hippo in denouncing those wicked parents who seek to remain childless, and failing in this, are not ashamed to put their offspring to death: "Sometimes this lustful cruelty or cruel lust goes so far as to seek to procure a baneful sterility, and if this fails the fetus conceived in the womb is in one way or another smothered or evacuated, in the desire to destroy the offspring before it has life, or if it already lives in the womb, to kill it before it is born. If both man and woman are party to such practices they are not spouses at all; and if from the first they have carried on thus they have come together not for honest wedlock, but for impure gratification; if both are not party to these deeds, I make bold to say that either the one makes herself a mistress of the husband, or the other simply the paramour of his wife."

What is asserted in favor of the social and eugenic "indication" may and must be accepted, provided lawful and upright methods are employed within the proper limits; but to wish to put forward reasons based upon them for the killing of the innocent is unthinkable and contrary to the divine precept promulgated in the words of the Apostle: Evil is not to be done that good may come of it.

Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

"States' righters" should take particular note of the last paragraph above: "Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven." In other words, it is not up to the "people" or to their "state governments" to do anything except to determine what kind of penalties will be imposed upon those who participate in the killing of the innocent preborn. This is, as noted about five weeks ago now, a matter of God's rights, not states' rights.

Indeed, the rise of the naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, semi-Pelagian civil state of Modernity has made mere mortals--contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave prior to the General Resurrection of the Dead on the Last Day--the arbiters of moral right and moral wrong. Men no longer subordinate themselves and their nations to the magisterial authority of the Catholic Church in matters that pertain to the good of souls. They no longer recognize her Divinely-instituted right to interpose herself as a last resort--following the exhausting of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation--with the leaders of civil governments when the good of souls demands her maternal intervention. There is no longer a "brake" or a "check" upon the arbitrary misuse of civil power by men, making either individuals (as in the case of Protestant potentates in the immediate aftermath of the Protestant Revolt) or collectivities (various forms of "representative" government) the arbiters of moral right and moral wrong.

As I have noted before, a government organized rightly would recognize that civil laws and ordinances and judicial decisions and executive decrees contrary to the good of souls could be nullified by the plenary veto power of the Papal Nuncio--or some other representative agreed to in a Concordat between the Church and the state, thus ending the matter once and for all. Due warning would be given. All care would be taken to utilize such a plenary power judiciously and only when an action undertaken by the civil government is injurious in a most grievous manner to the good of souls. However, the recognition by the officials of a civil government of such a plenary power on the part of Holy Mother Church is an absolute precondition to the pursuit of justice in the temporal realm in light of the last end of man, which is the possession of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven.

A constitution, whether written or unwritten (as is the case in the United Kingdom), that admits of no higher authority above the text of its own words is as defenseless against the efforts of legal positivists to render its words into meaninglessness as the words of Sacred Scripture are in the hands of Protestants and Modernist Catholics. It is relatively easy to render a human document into meaninglessness if one can do so with the very written Word of God Himself once one rejects the absolute and totally binding authority of the Catholic Church to guide men in all that pertains to the salvation of their immortal souls. Men must be enslaved to this or that false philosophy or ideology if they do not bind themselves to the liberating truths entrusted by the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, solely to His Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. It is that simple.

Not a Single Abortion, No Exceptions, No Compromise of Catholic Truth, Not Once, Ever

No Catholic can support even a single, direct, intentional abortion in a single circumstance whatsoever. No Catholic can lend credence to anyone who believes that it is morally licit as a matter of moral principle and/or legal right under any circumstances whatsoever, including any or all of the so-called "hard case exceptions," to kill an preborn human being in his mother's womb. No Catholic can lend credence to anyone who believes that it is morally licit to prescribe any form of contraception, no less those that do indeed cause the death of an embryonic human being. To lend credence to those who believe that abortion is a matter of "states' rights" or that there is even one exception to the absolute inviolability of innocent human life in the womb or to those who support, if not prescribe, contraceptives of any type is to give voice to the devil himself, who wants nothing more than to convince Catholics that the perverted concept of "civil liberty" that has come into vogue in the past few centuries is higher than the law of God as He has entrusted it to His Catholic Church for its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping.

Pope Pius XII explained the necessity of opposing all "exceptions" to the inviolability of innocent human life, noting that each direct, intentional attack on an innocent human is proscribed by the moral law:

If there is another danger that threatens the family, not since yesterday, but long ago, which, however, at present, is growing visibly, it can become fatal [to societies], that is, the attack and the disruption of the fruit of conjugal morality.

We have, in recent years, taken every opportunity to expose the one or the other essential point of the moral law, and more recently to indicate it as a whole, not only by refuting the errors that corrupt it, but also showing in a positive sense, the office the importance, the value for the happiness of the spouses, children and all family, for stability and the greater social good from their homes up to the State and the Church itself.

At the heart of this doctrine is that marriage is an institution at the service of life. In close connection with this principle, we, according to the constant teaching of the Church, have illustrated a argument that it is not only one of the essential foundations of conjugal morality, but also of social morality in general: namely, that the direct attack innocent human life, as a means to an end - in this case the order to save another life - is illegal.

Innocent human life, whatever his condition, is always inviolate from the first instance of its existence and it can never be attacked voluntarily. This is a fundamental right of human beings. A fundamental value is the Christian conception of life must be respected as valid for the life still hidden in the womb against direct abortion and against all innocent human life thereafter. There can be no direct murders of a child before, during and after childbirth. As established may be the legal distinction between these different stages of development life born or unborn, according to the moral law, all direct attacks on inviolable human life are serious and illegal.

This principle applies to the child's life, like that of mother's. Never, under any circumstances, has the Church has taught that the life of child must be preferred to that of the mother. It would be wrong to set the issue with this alternative: either the child's life or that of mother. No, nor the mother's life, nor that of her child, can be subjected to an act of direct suppression. For the one side and the other the need can be only one: to make every effort to save the life of both, mother and child (see Pious XI Encycl. Casti Connubii, 31 dec. 1930, Acta Ap. Sedis vol. 22, p.. 562-563).

It is one of the most beautiful and noble aspirations of medicine trying ever new ways to ensure both their lives. What if, despite all the advances of science, still remain, and will remain in the future, a doctor says that the mother is going to die unless here child is killed in violation of God's commandment: Thou shalt not kill!  We must strive until the last moment to help save the child and the mother without attacking either as we bow before the laws of nature and the dispositions of Divine Providence.

But - one may object - the mother's life, especially of a mother of a numerous family, is incomparably greater than a value that of an unborn child. The application of the theory of balance of values to the matter which now occupies us has already found acceptance in legal discussions. The answer to this nagging objection is not difficult. The inviolability of the life of an innocent person does not depend by its greater or lesser value. For over ten years, the Church has formally condemned the killing of the estimated life as "worthless', and who knows the antecedents that provoked such a sad condemnation, those who can ponder the dire consequences that would be reached, if you want to measure the inviolability of innocent life at its value, you must well appreciate the reasons that led to this arrangement.

Besides, who can judge with certainty which of the two lives is actually more valuable? Who knows which path will follow that child and at what heights it can achieve and arrive at during his life? We compare Here are two sizes, one of whom nothing is known. We would like to cite an example in this regard, which may already known to some of you, but that does not lose some of its evocative value.

It dates back to 1905. There lived a young woman of noble family and even more noble senses, but slender and delicate health. As a teenager, she had been sick with a small apical pleurisy, which appeared healed; when, however, after contracting a happy marriage, she felt a new life blossoming within her, she felt ill and soon there was a special physical pain that dismayed that the two skilled health professionals, who watched  her with loving care. That old scar of the pleurisy had been awakened and, in the view of the doctors, there was no time to lose to save this gentle lady from death. The concluded that it was necessary to proceed without delay to an abortion.

Even the groom agreed. The seriousness of the case was very painful. But when the obstetrician attending to the mother announced their resolution to proceed with an abortion, the mother, with firm emphasis, "Thank you for your pitiful tips, but I can not truncate the life of my child! I can not, I can not! I feel already throbbing in my breast, it has the right to live, it comes from God must know God and to love and enjoy it." The husband asked, begged, pleaded, and she remained inflexible, and calmly awaited the event.

The child was born regularly, but immediately after the health of the mother went downhill. The outbreak spread to the lungs and the decay became progressive. Two months later she went to extremes, and she saw her little girl growing very well one who had grown very healthy. The mother looked at her robust baby and saw his sweet smile, and then she quietly died.

Several years later there was in a religious institute a very young sister, totally dedicated to the care and education of children abandoned, and with eyes bent on charges with a tender motherly love. She loved the tiny sick children and as if she had given them life. She was the daughter of the sacrifice, which now with her big heart has spread much love among the children of the destitute. The heroism of the intrepid mother was not in vain! (See Andrea Majocchi. " Between burning scissors," 1940, p.. 21 et seq.). But we ask: Is Perhaps the Christian sense, indeed even purely human, vanished in this point of no longer being able to understand the sublime sacrifice of the mother and the visible action of divine Providence, which made quell'olocausto born such a great result? (Pope Pius XII, Address to Association of Large Families, November 26, 1951; I used Google Translate to translate this address from the Italian as it is found at AAS Documents, p. 855; you will have to scroll down to page 855, which takes some time, to find the address.)

The story of the mother who gave up her life one hundred sixteen years ago now rather than to kill the innocent child in he womb stands as a stark contrast to the naturalism displayed over two years ago now by Jorge Mario Bergoglio (see "Rabbits" to Jorge, God's Blessings to Pope Pius XII). The prayers of the mother who sacrificed her life rather than to authorize the killing of her child made possible her daughter's entry into the religious life. Bergoglio thinks not of such realities. Sadly, neither do many "pro-life" Catholics no matter where they fall across the vast expanse of the ecclesiastical divide in this time of apostasy and betrayal.

Alas, even those Catholics who are pro-life, no matter where they fall across the ecclesiastical divide, do not understand or accept these facts. They are willing to accept "crumb" from phony pro-life politicians in the false belief that we will "get somewhere" by means of the political process. We will not. Many of these truly good people, a lot of whom have worked their entire lives to defend the inviolability of preborn human life by volunteering at crisis pregnancy centers and by praying Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary in front of abortuaries and by speaking out against this crime that cries out to Heaven for vengeance, are looking for naturalistic solutions to the abortion genocide precisely because they have never been taught by the scions of the counterfeit church of conciliarism that the proximate cause for social problems in our world today is the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King and that we must try to plant the seeds for the restoration of this Social Kingship, starting with the enthronement of our homes to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

The March for Life As It Stands Today

Taking nothing away from those who travel long distances to attend the March for Life annually, it is nevertheless important to note that the current leadership of the march have come to accept the propaganda that laws such as the one under review by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Director, v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization represent “pro-life” efforts even though they are premised upon “robust” “exceptions” to the Fifth Commandment’s prohibition against the direct, intentional killing of any innocent human being. This acceptance of “exceptions” as a “step in the right direction” is tragic both in moral and political terms as it concedes that which no one, whether acting individually or collectively with others in the institutions of civil governance, has any authority to do, namely, to “permit” the direct, intentional killing of innocent human beings in some circumstances and thus makes it politically impossible to push for legislation containing no exceptions.

The march’s founding president, the late Miss Nellie Gray, despite her tragic silence on contraception as a concession to her efforts to include Protestant leaders of one sort or another, kept insisting on the principle of “no exceptions” to the inviolability of innocent human life until the day she died on August 13, 2012, at the age of eighty-eight. Miss Gray always insisted upon the Paramount Human Life Amendment.

It was in 2020 that the new leadership of the March for Life joined with the Knights  of Columbus to try to seek “common ground” on abortion, something that prompted me to write the following at the time:

Yet it is, of course, that the conciliar “bishops” and the Knights of Columbus, who, following the lead of their “bishops,” have never expelled a single pro-abortion member from their ranks, have  co-opted the March for Life by making it a vessel of the sort of a “consensus” with the devil that is of the essence of the entire false spirit of conciliarism in its entirety. This is a statement that was issued by the March of Life’s affiliate, “March for Life Action” prior to the March for Life earlier this year:

8 in 10 Americans believe that abortion should have real, legal limits. Even 6 out of 10 pro-choice Americans agree that abortion should happen only during the first three months of pregnancy, at most. Furthermore, almost 2/3rds of Americans oppose tax dollars paying for abortion.

Yet most pro-choice politicians support the extreme position that abortion should be legal right up until birth. And, they want Americans to pay for abortion with our tax dollars.

It’s time for this extremism to end. It’s time for politicians to stop listening to the pro-abortion lobby, and join the national consensus. (March for Life Action.)

This is what passes for “pro-life” leadership?

We can no more settle for a “consensus” about one of the four crimes that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, willful murder, than we can for a “consensus” about just accepting the existence of false religions without believing that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has given us a mission to convert all men everywhere to the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

Always eager to find “common ground” between truth and error, the aforementioned Joseph Louis Bernardin even started what he called the “Common Ground Initiative” to produce “dialogue” between those who support unrestricted baby-killing on demand in all circumstances as a matter of “human rights” and a woman’s supposed “right to choose” (to kill a baby, of course!) and those who oppose such killing in all circumstances without exception.

There is no “common ground” between truth and error.

None. Truth must be proclaimed.

Those in error must be corrected.

Civil law that defies the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law has no binding force over men and must be opposed and defied, not accepted as “settled law” or made subject to “discussions.”

The truths of the moral law are non-negotiable.

Then again, the conciliar revolutionaries believe that everything contained in the Sacred Deposit of Faith is subject to “discussion,” “reflection” and “adaptation” according to alleged “pastoral needs” that, to recall the words uttered by Pope Pius XII to the Jesuits sixty-three years ago, “would draw norms for action for eternal salvation from what is actually done, rather than from what should be done.”

“Consensus”?

Never!

At this late hour?

To make it appear that that there some kind of moral distinction between a baby in the final three months of his development in his mother’s womb and those who are in the first phase of their development?

A consensus on this?

From where?

From where is such an immoral “consensus” to come and what would it accomplish in a Congress where at least one house will be controlled by the members of the organized crime family of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” come January 3, 2021, and with the far from remote possibility that the party of abortion, sodomy, statism and deceit will oust the party of careerism, cowardice, compromise and passivity as the majority in the other house, the United States Senate?

Consensus?

From where?

From the fifty-six percent of Catholics in the United States of America who support the surgical execution of children in nearly all cases? (See October 2020: Key Findings about Catholics and Abortion in Pew Poll.)

Consensus?

Consensus?

Even a recent poll, taken before the March for Life on January 21, 2022, the Feast of Saint Agnes, indicated that only eleven percent of those polled opposed the surgical killing of all innocent babies without exceptions, a result that speaks volumes about the bankruptcy of the counterfeit church of conciliarism:

Support for toppling Roe v. Wade is at a new high, according to a Fox News poll of registered voters released Friday, yet twice as many voters still want it to stand.

On the eve of the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, 31 percent want to see the Supreme Court overturn the landmark abortion case, up slightly from 28 percent in September. 

This comes as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December on a Mississippi abortion law mostly prohibiting the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a challenge to the decades-old Roe case. A ruling is expected later this year.

Sixty-three percent prefer to let the landmark case stand, down slightly from 65 percent four months ago.  Almost half of Republicans want the case to stand (48 percent) along with about seven in ten Democrats (72 percent) and independents (73 percent).

Asked about abortion overall, 52 percent of voters think abortion should be legal in all (29 percent) or most cases (23 percent), while 47 percent think it should only be legal in some cases such as rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother (36 percent) -- or not at all (11 percent).  In September, it split 49-49 percent.

There is an expected partisan divide with majorities of Democrats saying abortion should be legal and majorities of Republicans saying illegal.  Independents split.

When it comes to making changes to the high court itself, a record 46 percent of voters support expanding the number of justices -- up from 35 percent last April. (Fox News Poll: While majority still supports Roe, opposition ticks up to new high.)

Let me repeat myself: the mere overturning of Roe v. Wade will mean very little as the chemical execution of the innocent preborn will continue unabated, and the surgical execution of the innocent preborn will continue in most states under one or more “exceptions” and, in many states, will continue through the first fifteen weeks or so of a child’s development in his mother’s womb. It is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the merely “good” to point out that it is never “good” that the civil law concedes the deliberate execution of any innocent human being (and this includes under the false pretexts of “brain death” or the starvation and dehydration of brain-damaged human beings or “palliative care/hospice”).

The Faith, The Faith, The Faith

Most Catholics have never even heard of, no less read, this beautiful and moving summary of Catholic truth found in Pope Leo XIII's Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, that has been oft-quoted on this site:

We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.  (Pope Leo XIII, Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900.)

Having made war against the Social Reign of Christ King by its embrace of "religious liberty" and "healthy secularity--and blasphemed Him by means of the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo worship service, the counterfeit church of conciliarism has actually fed into the social evils it seeks to oppose as it robs Catholics yet attached to its structures of the means by which they can see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and thus come to a recognition that we must be uncompromisingly Catholic in thought, word and speech at a times and in all circumstances without any exception whatsoever. The conciliarists have robbed Catholics of the ability to look that the following statement of Pope Saint Pius X and to recognize the truth contained therein:

By separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, Democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization. If, as We desire with all Our heart, the highest possible peak of well being for society and its members is to be attained through fraternity or, as it is also called, universal solidarity, all minds must be united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ. But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal civilization.. . .

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

It is essential that Catholics come to recognize that the remote cause of all problems, whether personal or social, is Original Sin and that the proximate cause for our social problems today is Modernity's warfare against the Incarnation and thus against the Social Reign of Christ the King, a warfare that has been aided and abetted by conciliarism's warfare against the necessity of restoring Christendom as the foundation, although never an absolute guarantor, of course, of personal and social order.

Each family should, however, find some time this month to pray an extra set of mysteries of the Rosary if possible to pray in reparation for abortion, both chemical and surgical, and for the conversion of those of who have had, performed, participated in or been supportive of abortion in any way, shape or form, remembering also to pray for the day that the United States of America will become the Catholic States of America. God will never "bless" a land that is responsible for the shedding of so much innocent blood under cover of law, a land that has spread, in the name of "civil and religious liberty," mind you, Protestant "churches" and Masonic "lodges" in formerly Catholic countries, taking many souls out of the true Church in the process, a country that has spread fashions and "entertainment" fare that have been responsible for the poisoning of so many souls

While it is important to continue to be a peaceful, prayerful presence in front of the abortuaries as we pray our Rosaries alongside our fellow traditional Catholics (we cannot participate in Catholic "ecumenical" events where the false "luminous mysteries" are prayed) and to do the work of sidewalk counseling for those who are so called, it is necessary first and foremost to build up the Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in our own souls, seeking to making reparation for our own many sins, especially those, if any, against the virtues of Chastity and Modesty, as the precondition for helping to plant a few seeds for the restoration for His Social Reign over us and our nations.

In addition to our daily Rosaries and the acts of reparation we make to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, who better to turn do in our efforts to restore the Faith in this time of barbarism in the world and apostasy and betrayal on the part of the Modernists than to our beloved Saint Joseph, the Patron of the Universal Church and the Protector of the Faithful:

O Blessed Saint Joseph, tenderhearted father, faithful guardian of Jesus, chaste spouse of the Mother of God, we pray and beseech thee to offer to God the Father, His divine Son, bathed in blood on the cross for sinners, and through the thrice-holy Name of Jesus, obtain for us from the eternal Father the favor we implore (mention your petitions):

Appease the Divine anger so justly inflamed by our crimes, beg of Jesus mercy for thy children. Amid the splendors of eternity, forget not the sorrows of those who suffer, those who pray, those who weep; stay the Almighty arm which smites us, that by thy prayers and those of thy most holy Spouse, the Heart of Jesus may be moved to pity and to pardon. Amen.

NoChrist the King must reign in our minds, not naturalism of the "left" or naturalism of the "right" or the naturalism of "populism," whether inchoate or fully developed. The "people" are not sovereign. Christ the King is sovereign. Everything else is a lie and an illusion

The Rome of the pagan emperors was not converted at the ballot box. It was converted by the missionary activity of the Apostles and those who followed them, over thirteen million of whom shed their blood in defense of the Holy Faith. Why do we think the conversion of the modern civil state will take any less than that? Why do we think that we are exempt from suffering for the Faith? Why do we even think that we deserve some respite from the inexorable growth of the size and power of the modern civil state that is has arisen in the wake of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King?

This is why we must fulfill that part of Our Lady's Fatima Message that we are able to fulfill, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world, being willing to suffer gladly anything and everything that we are asked to suffer for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and for the restoration of Christendom in the world. Our Lady wants to protect us in the folds of her mantle in these troubling times. Will we let her? Will we run to her as we renew daily our total consecration to her Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart?

The following words of Pope Leo XIII, contained in Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890, should give us cause before we continue to rush into the insanity of listening the naturalist babblers babble on and on about "issues" that they do not understand clearly or fully because they believe in one naturalist falsehood after another:

Nor can such misgivings be removed by any mere human effort, especially as a vast number of men, having rejected the Christian faith, are on that account justly incurring the penalty of their pride, since blinded by their passions they search in vain for truth, laying hold on the false for the true, and thinking themselves wise when they call "evil good, and good evil," and "put darkness in the place of light, and light in the place of darkness." It is therefore necessary that God come to the rescue, and that, mindful of His mercy, He turn an eye of compassion on human society. (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, January 10, 1890.)

What can be a better description of the Judeo-Masonic electoral system in the United States of America?