Posts tagged Abortion
+Hepworth on Witholding Communion from Pro-Abortion Politicians
Mar 9th
In Part II of the LifeSiteNews.com interview with Archbishop Hepworth, the TAC Primate addresses the issue of barring pro-abortion politicians from Holy Communion.
“Anybody publicly espousing an anti-life stand against the clear teaching of the Church and the commandments would be immediately removed from any office, and certainly would be told they can’t receive Communion,” he explained.
Archbishop Hepworth further notes the challenges faced by Catholic bishops in maintaining the Church’s discipline in the public sphere.
“Since Vatican II, the Church has been squeamish about its ability to discipline its laity,” he continued. “This has been a moment at which the Church has tried to rediscover collegiality, the role of the laity, the ministry of the laity, and it causes some mental conflict to then have to say to somebody, quite publicly, ‘you’ve abandoned the teaching of the Church and you are now being disciplined.’”
The Archbishop opined that it was the fear of a public rupture, where priests may side with the layperson being admonished, that has caused many Catholic bishops to hesitate in applying discipline to notorious dissenters from the Church’s teaching. Interestingly, he suggests that the greater historic role for laity found the Anglican tradition may make it easier for Anglican bishops to admonish the erring faithful.
But Anglicans are more accustomed to “disciplining their laity,” he opined, “because we’re more used to lay roles.”
Archbishop Hepworth Interviewed on Life Issues
Mar 9th
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, March 8, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Life issues are “at the heart” of Christianity, said Archbishop John Hepworth, Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), in an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) on Friday.
“If we get the life issues right, then we get the Incarnation right, the nature of God right, the nature of Christian worship right,” he explained. “This is actually an entrance issue, not a side moral issue. It’s the issue on which Christianity actually defines itself against the others.”
LSN spoke with Archbishop Hepworth in Halifax, the capital of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, where he made an overnight stop to address the local TAC parish, St. Aidan’s. The Australian native came to Halifax as part of a worldwide tour that he began four weeks ago to encourage TAC communities to accept the Vatican’s offer to Anglicans, issued in October, to reunite with the Roman Catholic Church.
Hepworth told LSN that the TAC’s commitment to life is “total.” “It’s one of our founding premises,” he said.
He continued by explaining that the TAC is “absolutely stark and clear on where we stand” on life issues because of the environment they have left in the worldwide Anglican Communion. The Communion, he says, has come “to an extremely liberal position where many provinces are totally shaky on abortion, if not regarding it as compulsory. It is shocking the extent to which they’ve slipped – contraception, marriage, all the life issues are denied.”
But he also explained that the TAC has needed to be clear on life issues as part of its efforts for unity with the Catholic Church. “Our position is not to fight the Catholic Church, it’s to fully absorb its teachings,” he said.
In both his interview with LSN and his homily to the parishioners of St. Aidan’s, Hepworth spoke out against the practice of embryonic stem cell research, comparing it with cannibalism. “Killing embryos in order to harvest stem cells to make drugs is simply our form of cannibalism, and it’s just as wrong as cannibalism,” he told LSN.
He described the experience of a tribe in New Guinea, which can still remember when war canoes would come down the river and take a young person to eat for strength before a battle, a practice which only ended in the 1960s.
Using stem cell drugs derived from killed human beings in order to wave off disease is no different in the human attitude,” he said. “Same temptations everywhere, we just think our temptations are more civilized.”
* * *
There’s more. And this is only part one! The joys.
A Dangerous and Deleterious State
Feb 16th
On Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Pontifical Academy for Life whose members gathered in Rome for a general assembly on the topic of bioethics and natural law.
History has shown us how dangerous and deleterious a state can be that proceeds to legislate on questions that touch the person and society while pretending itself to be the source and principle of ethics. Without universal principles that permit a common denominator for the whole of humanity the danger of a relativistic drift at the legislative level is not at all something should be underestimated (cf. “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” no. 1959). The natural moral law, strong in its universal character, allows us to avert such a danger and above all offers to the legislator the guarantee for an authentic respect of both the person and the entire created order. It is the catalyzing source of consensus among persons of different cultures and religions and allows them to transcend their differences since it affirms the existence of an order impressed in nature by the Creator and recognized as an instance of true rational ethical judgment to pursue good and avoid evil. The natural moral law “belongs to the great heritage of human wisdom. Revelation, with its light, has contributed to further purifying and developing it” (John Paul II, Address to the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, February 6, 2004).
Here is the relevant citation from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
1959 The natural law, the Creator’s very good work, provides the solid foundation on which man can build the structure of moral rules to guide his choices. It also provides the indispensable moral foundation for building the human community. Finally, it provides the necessary basis for the civil law with which it is connected, whether by a reflection that draws conclusions from its principles, or by additions of a positive and juridical nature.
January 22, 1973
Jan 22nd
Today is the anniversary of the infamous US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
Omnes sancti Innocentes, orate pro nobis!
(Frescoes of the parish church of Lanciano in the Abruzzi from John Sonnen at Orbis Catholicus Secundus)
A Façade Cloaking Our Own Selfishness
Jan 13th
At the invitation of Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, Arizona, Archbishop Raymond Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, celebrated Tuesday’s Red Mass for legal professionals in St. Mary’s Cathedral. He also preached the homily.
In our culture, “the law more and more dares to force those with the sacred trust of caring for the health of their brothers and sisters to violate the most sacred tenets of their consciences, and to force individuals and institutions to cooperate in egregious violations of the natural moral law,” he said. “In such a society, the administration of justice is no longer a participation in the justice of God, an obedient response to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, but a façade cloaking our own selfishness and refusal to give our lives for the sake of the good of all our brothers and sisters.”
“It is a society which is abandoning its Judeo-Christian foundations, the fundamental obedience to God’s law which safeguards the common good, and is embracing a totalitarianism which masks itself as the ‘hope,’ the ‘future,’ of our nation. Reason and faith teaches us that such a society can only produce violence and death and in the end destroy itself,” Archbishop Burke warned.
Read the full story here.
Bishop Tobin on O’Reilly and Hardball
Nov 25th
On Tuesday evening, Bishop Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on The Fox News Channel to defend his decision to prohibit U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy from receiving Holy Communion because of the lawmaker’s outspoken support for abortion.
Bishop Tobin conducted himself admirably, noting that Catholics have certain obligations to conform themselves to the teachings of the Church.
Every Catholic has certain obligations. It means something to say you’re a Catholic. No one is forced to be a Catholic. If you choose freely to be a Catholic, it means that you do certain things and you believe certain things, and I think that all I am trying to say to Congressman Kennedy, and others who might be involved, is to say, if you’re a Catholic, live up to your Faith. Understand what the Church teaches. Accept those teachings and live that Faith.
Bishop Tobin also drew a clear distinction about the Church’s teaching on abortion — that it is always a gravely sinful sinful act and “intrinsically evil” — and teaching on the death penalty, which, at least in theory, is permissible under some circumstances.
On Monday evening, Chris Matthews of MSNBC used his interview with Bishop Tobin as a soapbox for “an extended and quite insulting lecture” on how the bishop had “transgressed” into the realm of public policy and lawmaking. According to Matthews (who himself claims to be a Catholic):
And I would urge you to consider the possibility of error here, because in getting into telling public officials how to set public policy, you’re stepping beyond moral teaching, and you’re basically assuming a moral authority which I don’t think is yours.
Matthews pressed the bishop repeatedly on the question of whether women who procured abortions should be thrown in jail. As the CNS observes:
The question of criminal penalties for women who seek abortions is a common talking point among supporters of permissive abortion laws. The issue was considered in an August, 2007 symposium titled “One Untrue Thing” on the conservative web site National Review Online.
In that symposium, Villanova University law professor Joseph Dellapenna said “none of the anti-abortion laws overturned by Roe v. Wade… treated the woman as a criminal.”
Rather, he explained, the laws treated the woman as a victim in part because of the dangers of abortion and in part because of the need for her testimony to convict the abortionist.
In the same symposium Clarke D. Forsythe of Americans United for Life pointed out that before Roe the abortionist, not the prosecutor, tried to argue that an abortion-seeking woman should be treated as an accomplice. This was done “for the obvious purpose of undermining the state’s criminal case against the abortionist,” he wrote.
This criminal penalties talking point is a favorite of Matthews. No doubt Mr. Matthews would assert that it is his journalistic duty to “ask the tough questions” of Bishop Tobin, but his treatment of the courageous prelate was absolutely shameful. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League claimed that a non-Catholic would never treat a bishop in this manner, only liberal Catholics being so bold. I think that Mr. Donohue is sorely mistaken, but this in no way excuses Matthew’s disrespectful interview with the good bishop.
The Anglo-Catholic kudos to Bishop Tobin for his uncompromising defense of Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life.
No commitment is more important than your commitment to your faith because it involves your relationship with God. And if your faith somehow interferes with, or your job gets in the way of your faith, as I’ve said on other occasions, you need to quit your job and save your soul. Nothing can become more important than your relationship with God.
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Kennedy Says Bishop Banned Him from Communion
Nov 22nd
Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island has forbidden U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy from receiving Holy Communion in the Diocese.
“The bishop instructed me not to take Communion and said that he has instructed the diocesan priests not to give me Communion,” Kennedy told the Providence Journal in an interview conducted Friday. Kennedy said the bishop had explained the penalty by telling him “that I am not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that I’ve taken as a public official,” particularly on abortion.
The paper said the bishop’s spokesman declined to address the question of whether he had told Kennedy not to receive Communion. But the bishop’s office cast doubt on Kennedy’s related assertion about instructions to state priests.
“Bishop Tobin has never addressed matters relative to public officials receiving Holy Communion with pastors of the diocese,” spokesman Michael K. Guilfoyle told the paper in an e-mailed statement.
The Anglo-Catholic kudos to Bishop Tobin! I am proud that the bishops of the ACA have established a policy forbidding the administration of Holy Communion to notorious proponents of abortion. Pray that all Catholic bishops have the courage to do what Bishop Tobin has done.
Read the full story here.
St. Moloch’s Episcopal Church
Nov 19th
You may recall the story of the director of the Bryan/College Station Planned Parenthood who resigned her job on October 6th after witnessing an ultrasound of an abortion. She and her husband, who grew up Lutheran, dropped out of church until two years ago, when they began attending St. Francis Episcopal Church in College Station, TX.
Shopping around for a church home, they met with opposition:
“I was raised Southern Baptist but didn’t find the Southern Baptist community was very accepting of my work at Planned Parenthood,” she said. “It felt there was a spiritual conflict in what I was doing, but you just begin to rationalize it. I didn’t want to leave these women without options, so you begin to think you are doing the right thing, although it doesn’t feel right.”
As a result, she and her husband, Doug, “had been told by a couple of churches,” one being Baptist and the other nondenominational, “that because I worked at Planned Parenthood, we could not be members.”
Then they found St. Francis Episcopal Church (the motto of which is “Embracing, Encouraging, Empowering” by the way):
One of the things I’ve been told is that as Episcopalians, we embrace our differences and disagreements.
Indeed the Episcopal organization (I can not bring myself to call its national organization a ‘church’) has become an advocate for abortion and is a member of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) (a board member of which, Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, the dean of Episcopal Divinity School, preached a sermon hailing abortion as a “blessing”!).
After deciding to quit her job and begin praying outside of the abortuary where she once worked, she was suddenly no longer welcome at St. Francis.
“Now that I have taken this stand, some of the people there are not accepting of that,” she told The Washington Times. “People have told me they disagree with my choice. One of the things I’ve been told is that as Episcopalians, we embrace our differences and disagreements. While I agree with that, I am not sure I can go to a place where I don’t feel I am welcome.”
But the most reprehensible quote in the story is this: “A lot of people would consider the Anglican faith a pro-choice faith.” May God have mercy on the wicked usurpers who have hijacked the Episcopal Church in the service of Moloch! For this reason, I am embarrassed to call myself “Anglican” when talking to strangers; I am forced to qualify the term. My earnest prayer is that, with the rise of the new ordinariates, the association of the term “Anglican” with the Catholic Church will reclaim the once glorious name for the orthodox. Given the current trajectory of TEC of course, they will abort, contracept, and homosex themselves out of existence in 25 years anyway!
The full article is at the Washington Times. Hat tip to Fr. James O’Driscoll on the Anglican Use Group.
