Sunday 11 August 2013

Consistent Ethic

John Gehring writes:

Catholic progressives are used to feeling the heat from some bishops who give the impression that abortion is the only life issue. It’s not every day that you hear a Catholic bishop directly challenge self-identified “pro-life” groups for their selective moralizing and crass tactics.

Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg – a moderate who has also questioned religious leaders’ apocalyptic denunciations of the Obama administration’s contraception coverage requirements as part of the Affordable Care Act – jumps into the fray on his blog:

I am convinced that many so called pro-life groups are not really pro-life but merely anti-abortion…We heard nothing from the heavy hitters in the prolife movement in the last week when Florida last night executed a man on death row for 34 years having been diagnosed as a severe schizophrenic.

And this:

Many priests grow weary of continual calls to action for legislative support for abortion and contraception related issues but nothing for immigration reform, food aid, and capital punishment. 

And, this is a big one, priests don’t like unfair attacks on things they highly value and esteem, like the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services.

Bishop Lynch is responding to trends I wrote about recently in a new report that uncovers how pro-life groups like the American Life League are waging a relentless campaign to undermine the church’s most respected social justice ministries. He doesn’t beat around the bush:

From time to time, I suspect when these organizations need money, they try to stir up a hornet’s nest or storm by attacking a Catholic organization, usually falsely accusing them of being anti-life, pro-contraception, either pro or soft on abortion, etc.

The storms start small enough and then occasionally grow in size. It’s simply a money raising scheme with little regard for the human lives which they allege they seek to protect – well maybe it is only pre-born human life in which they are interested.

It’s refreshing to hear a bishop stand up for the church’s consistent ethic of life tradition in a way that puts public pressure on conservatives who usually receive a free pass from the hierarchy.

19 comments:

  1. Bishop Lynch says... ""We heard nothing from the heavy hitters in the prolife movement in the last week when Florida last night executed a man on death row for 34 years having been diagnosed as a severe schizophrenic.""

    If Mr Lynch cannot see the difference between the murder of an innocent child and the lawful execution of a guilty adult murderer, (in a free country with jury trial and presumption of innocence) then he's too thick to be a Bishop.

    Bishop Lynch also perhaps doesn't realise that no Catholic Pope (before John Paul 11) ever saw any contradiction between opposing abortion and supporting capital punishment.

    Because there isn't one.

    Bishop Lynch no doubt thinks it much more "pro-life" to abolish execution after trial and instead transform the police into armed executioners.

    People like Lynch just never think.

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  2. Point proved.

    It is always good to hear from the Cafeteria Catholics.

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  3. "Cafeteria Catholics"

    Call us the real Catholics-defending the position of the Church for 2,000 years until the last two Popes.

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  4. As Peter Hitchens wrote last week, these pathetic liberals are directly responsible for the shocking rate of prison suicides (750 in the last ten years).

    People like Lynch should have that statistic shoved under their noses until it sinks in.

    "Pro-lifers" are happy to let murderers rot in jail and die by their own hand, because they don't have the guts to execute them.

    These people have the temerity to call themselves humane?

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  5. No, you are Cafeteria Catholics, and generally adherents of the Americanist heresy condemned by Leo XIII.

    Why else do you think that it almost always American Catholics who believe that the Church permits - nay, even requires - "free" market economics, or wars of American liberal intervention (although they wouldn't like the term these days)?

    And why else do you think that it is even more nearly always American Catholics who believe that the Church permits capital punishment, which is now almost an American cultural peculiarity? There's your answer.

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  6. The real Catholics are the ones who hold to established Church moral teachings-not its latest whims and fashions.

    Why do you think the Catholic Church, and every Pope, consistently supported execution for 2,000 years until after the 1960's revolution?

    We are obviously the real Catholic traditionalists-you are the revolutionary liberals.

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  7. And there are no prison suicides in America? There are these rates of them in every other Western country? Oh, I forgot. You didn't know that there were any other Western countries.

    Unless I am very, very much mistaken, capital punishment no longer exists in any historically or predominantly Catholic country. Thank God.

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  8. Why do you think the Catholic Church, and every Pope, consistently supported execution for 2,000 years until after the 1960's revolution?

    They didn't.

    By no means only on this issue, you people are exactly like those who point to "inconsistencies in the Gospels" or what have you, as if they were the first people ever to notice, and then scream with rage whenever anyone tries to tell them what the (extremely ancient) answers are.

    You are also obviously one of those "I can tell 57 varieties of lace cotta, so that makes me a theologian" types. Like being back in the Church of England.

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  9. "an American cultural peculiarity"

    I agree that, on this, (as on gun control) America is the only place that has just about held out against the liberal rot that has destroyed the liberty of the West.

    They know their state was founded on a revolt against state taxation, and they value liberty far more highly than most of us.

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  10. The prison suicides in America happen precisely because America so rarely employs capital punishment...and because they're made to wait so long on Death Row while liberals drag out the appeals process!

    As you'd know, if you had a clue.

    How can murderers commit suicide if they're executed?

    Do try thinking, once in a while.

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  11. They were founded on Masonic Deism, yes.

    The Founding Fathers were dazzlingly anti-Catholic, even by the standards of the time. Well, of course they were.

    Capital punishment, routine guns in homes, heavily armed police who shoot first and ask questions later, and a mind-bogglingly violent society. Not by coincidence.

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  12. You are getting desperate. Well, I say "getting", but you always were.

    That's the Americanist heresy (among others) for you: what you were taught in school is absolute, and your head explodes when it is challenged by the Magisterium.

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  13. "Capital punishment, routine guns in homes, heavily armed police who shoot first and ask questions later, and a mind-bogglingly violent society. Not by coincidence."

    All those things exist solely because capital punishment is so rarely employed.

    When Britain had it, we had no armed police, virtually no armed crime or prison suicides.

    All of those things came to pass since we abolished it.

    And not by coincidence, as you might say yourself.

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  14. All those things exist solely because capital punishment is so rarely employed.

    You are quite beyond desperation now. And revealing rather a twisted little mind.

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  15. The facts demonstrably prove the abolition of capital punishment in Britain caused the rise of armed crime, and the creation of our first ever armed police.

    "Offences in which guns were actually used stood at 552 a year in 1961."

    "By 1971, they had reached 1,734, by 1981, 8,067, by 1991, 12,129 (Home Office figures for England and Wales).

    The police use of guns rose more than sevenfold, from 1,072 times in 1970 to 7,952 in 1982"

    You know your going to lose this debate.

    You'd lost it before you started the "cafeteria Catholics" stuff (was Pius a "cafeteria Catholic? and every Pope before him?).

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  16. I have already answered that one about Popes.

    And the figures that you cite do not prove a thing beyond themselves.

    You are just not used to being disagreed with.

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  17. The statistics prove it-Britain had none of those things when we had execution.

    Which tells us who the desperate one is here.

    You yourself say America hardly uses capital punishment-so you've answered your own question about why they have so much armed crime.

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  18. That is not remotely how statistics work, and you should not be up this late, or on the Internet at all, if you think that it is.

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    ReplyDelete