Life and Its Beginnings

I usually don't rant about political issues but this one strikes a cord in my heart. I wasn't always pro-life. Before I never took the time to think about what "the right to choose" meant and when I did it changed my life. So you get to read what I have been thinking.

Here are quotations from an article I found on Catholic Online.

Bishops Correct Speaker Nancy Pelosi: 'On the Separation of Sense and State'

"...Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a gifted public servant of strong convictions and many professional skills. Regrettably, knowledge of Catholic history and teaching does not seem to be one of them.

Interviewed on Meet the Press August 24, Speaker Pelosi was asked when human life begins. She said the following:

"I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time.And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition . . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don't know. The point is, is that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose." "

Ok if these quotations are correct. Nancy Pelosi is telling me that it doesn't matter if the unborn are human babies - we should give women the right to commit murder. "We" don't know so instead of erring on the side of caution let's just throw caution to the wind and err on the side of murder. How ridiculous does that sound to you? I mean, come on we are talking about life and death. Nancy Pelosi how can you be pro-abortion and Catholic? Isn't that just contradictory?

The article goes on to quote Jesuit John Connery's Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977).

"The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it.

"Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion."

This is not or at least should not be an "issue" for Catholics. This is black and white. Catholics are pro-life.


A great article by Denver's Archbishop Charles J. Chaput: On Separation of Sense and State. (Great Title!)