Subscribe
40 Days for Life will be holding teleconference next Tuesday night at 9pm Eastern. Make sure to register here.
In the last 40 Days for Life campaign (just before the election), at least 614 lives were saved and 8 abortion workers quit their jobs and got out of the abortion business. Please continue to pray, fast, and partake in pro-life activities when you can. Lives depend on us.
Catholic Bishops are emboldening over abortion following Tuesday’s election: “I cannot have a vice president-elect coming to Scranton to say he’s learned his values there when those values are utterly against the teachings of the Catholic Church,” Martino said.
I think it is time the Church stop worrying about tax-exempt status and start telling people the way they should vote (or, at the very least, lay out exactly how they should NOT vote). It is a grave, mortal sin to support any candidate who supports abortion, and souls are much more valuable than any dollar figure.
Here’s to hoping that the next four years sees a continuation of a newfound political passion by our Catholic Bishops. Clearly, by the exit polling of Catholics, the message has not been getting through.
Today we get a glimpse at some of the first Democratic priorities following their somewhat successful election night:
But Ms. Pelosi said Democrats could open the 111th Congress in January with efforts to adopt measures blocked by President Bush, including ones to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and embryonic stem cell research. She said Democrats had no choice but to chart a centrist course. “The country must be governed from the middle,” she said. But Democrats on both sides of the Capitol were just beginning to digest the new faces in their expanded caucuses.
The pro-life contingent needs to start gearing up now to fight the embryonic stem cell research agenda of the left. Last night I sat in on the teleseminar put on by Fr. Frank Pavone, from Priests for Life, and it was a good post-election start for the pro-life community. It included Senator Coburn’s Chief of Staff, Michael Schwartz, who talked about the unlikeliness of a the Freedom of Choice Act passing, even with the current makeup of Washington. He said there are too many Democrats in conservative areas that have “nothing to gain” by supporting that. Still, he said, we shouldn’t be complacent. Write to your Congressional representatives and make sure they represent you well on life issues.
Speaking of the teleseminar, you can listen to a replay of it by going here:
http://instantteleseminar.com/?eventid=4819845
Let’s regroup and prepare for a solid battle to protect all human life. This is one issue we don’t get a second chance on. In four years, at the rate we are going, we’ll have killed 6 million more of our own children.
Fr. Frank Pavone from Priests for Life will be on the call and you can submit questions via the seminar page. Sign up here: http://www.40daysforlife.com/electionresults.cfm
I get the following in email from my mother-in-law this morning. She has my daughter a couple days every week:
Shelly & Judd….Just had to write and tell you what Ella said just now while we were looking at Spiritdaily.com on the internet!!! There was a picture of a fetus in the womb, and she right away said “BABY!”…isn’t that something when a 18 month old can recognize her/him as a baby, but the rest of America(or part) hesitates to call it what it is!!!!!! Amen for babies and all, especially the young and innocent who calls it as it is!!! Praise the Lord for the little ones!!! Have a good day!!! Love ya, Gepa K.
When all of the campaigning is said and done, we are left with a clear choice: a true, American hero who brings a lifetime of experience and clearly patriotic intentions to the White House, or one who has has said one thing, done another, and that is all we seem to know about him.
If you are a liberal, your clear choice is to vote for Barack Obama. He’s a dream come true for liberals. I concede that.
If you are a conservative, your clear choice is to vote for John McCain. Even those of you whose principles don’t make it easy — I’m among them — the risk is far too great to actually fill in another circle or push another button when you enter the voting booth. Please maintain your principles, keep your vote for McCain to yourself, and keep working for the party to return to it’s conservative agenda. Your vote is too important to throw away on a third party candidate. The risk is too great to do one little thing to give an edge to Obama. Take a step for moderation when you enter the polls (none of us will be any the wiser) and maintain your conservative agenda (I’m with you).
Moderates, there is only one choice for you here: John McCain. Obama is the most liberal candidate of many of our lifetimes and, to make matters worse, he has Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid drooling over what to do with your money, drooling over cutting our defense budget and weakening us worldwide, and drooling over greater regulations that will hurt jobs and cause higher prices for consumers (worse than any tax increase — we can’t help but buy gas and milk). McCain *is* a moderate, as evidenced by ultra-conservatives problem with him.
Most of all, though, if you are holding a six shooter with one bullet in it, you’d be a fool to pull the trigger. You simply don’t know the ramifications of what Obama brings to our nation. He’s still a mystery, and one that at the very least needs four more years of vetting. Give the country four more years to make up their mind on Obama, and keep our country safe from terrorists, from a weaker economy, from a smaller job force, and from a country of no moral standing. Vote for John McCain.
Mary, mother of God and Queen of Victory, watch over our nation as we head to the polls tomorrow. Lord, keep all of us safe in our travels, and may the Holy Spirit inspire us to do Your holy will. Help us all to accept the results as part of your perfect plan. Most of all, convert all of us to do more to help the unborn, the sick, and the elderly. Let us keep the first commandment in mind and worship you as our God, and to treat politics as a means of doing Your will, not as another religion. Help us to keep Your second commandment, and make our vote in the interests of those who cannot vote for themselves. Amen.
Solemn Novena to Our Lady of Victory Lord, have mercy on us, Christ, have mercy on us, Christ, hear us, Christ, graciously hear us. God, the Father of Heaven, Have mercy on us. God, the Son, Redeemer of the world, Have mercy on us.
God, the Holy Spirit, Have mercy on us. Holy Trinity, One God, Have mercy on us. The response for the following greetings is Pray for us. Our Lady of Victory, Victorious daughter of the Father, Victorious Mother of the Son, Victorious Spouse of the Holy Spirit, Victorious servant of the Holy Trinity Victorious in your Immaculate Conception, Victorious in crushing the serpent’s head, Victorious over all the children of Adam, Victorious over all enemies, Victorious in your response to the Angel Gabriel, Victorious in your wedding to St. Joseph, Victorious in the birth of Christ, Victorious in the flight to Egypt, Victorious in your exile, Victorious in your home at Nazareth, Victorious in finding Christ in the temple, Victorious in the mission of your Son, Victorious in His passion and death, Victorious in His Resurrection and Ascension, Victorious in the Coming of the Holy Spirit, Victorious in your sorrows and joys, Victorious in your glorious Assumption, Victorious in the angels who remained faithful, Victorious in the happiness of the saints, Victorious in the message of the prophets, Victorious in the testimony of the patriarchs, Victorious in the zeal of the apostles, Victorious in the witness of the evangelists, Victorious in the wisdom of the doctors, Victorious in the deeds of the confessors, Victorious in the triumph of all holy women, Victorious in the faithfulness of the martyrs, Victorious in your powerful intercession, Victorious under your many titles, Victorious at the moment of death, Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, Spare us, Lord. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, Hear us, Lord. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, Have mercy, Lord. Pray for us, blessed Lady of Victory. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
Let us pray: Our Lady of Victory, we have unshaken confidence in your influence with your Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ. Humbly we ask your intercession for all of us associated under your title, Our Lady of Victory. We beg your powerful assistance also for our own personal needs. (Please mention here your special intention in you own words.) In your maternal kindness please ask Jesus to forgive all our sins and failings, and to secure His blessings for us and for all the works of charity dedicated to your name. We implore you to obtain for us the grace of sharing Christ’s victory and yours forever in the life that knows no ending. May we join you there to praise forever the Father, His Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, on God, for all the ages to come. Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, You told us to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God. Enlighten the minds of our people [in] America. May we choose a President of the United States, and other government officials, according to Your Divine Will. Give our citizens the courage to choose leaders of our nation who respect the sanctity of unborn human life, the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of marital relations, the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the aging. Grant us the wisdom to give You, what belongs to You, our God. If we do this, as a nation, we are confident You will give us an abundance of Your blessings through our elected leaders. Amen.
Today would be the great day to begin a novena, which would end on election day, to pray for all pro-life candidates up for election on November 4th. Consider praying a rosary each day, if you do not already, or a divine mercy chaplet, attend adoration for 15 minutes, attend daily mass, or make your novena to do at least one of these each day through the end of the nine days. Or, for those of you who would like something different — something geared toward the election — consider this:
http://www.faithfulcitizenship.org/docs/FC_Novena.pdf
Ask God for his mercy on our unborn; for good pro-life government leaders. Then, leave it to God and His perfect will.
A couple days ago I bemoaned the Douglas Kmiec article insinuating that Obama wasn’t, in fact, pro-choice and that he created an opening for pro-life Catholics to vote for him by throwing out the cliche about promoting adoption and sex ed as a remedy for all of the unplanned abortions (nevermind the 30-somethings that are having them at an alarming rate). In any case, I should have just held on for a couple days: I should have known George Weigel would quickly come out with something far superior.
In short, there is very little, if anything, in Senator Obama’s public record to suggest that he agrees with Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec that abortion is a “tragic moral choice.” On the contrary, the 2008 Democratic platform removed language that described abortion as “regrettable” from the relevant plank. Do Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec imagine that they have a better grasp of Senator Obama’s views on the life issues than, say, the National Reproductive Rights Action League [NARAL], or other pro-choice Obama supporters?
Weigel goes on to concede that McCain, while not perfect, is clearly the preferable of the two choices.
Is John McCain—for whom, I might add, I have never served as an adviser, formally or informally—a perfect pro-life candidate? Of course not. But Barack Obama is a perfect pro-life nightmare. President McCain would not work to repeal the pro-life legislative advances of the past 35 years; knowledgeable and sober-minded Catholic legal and political observers who have worked on these issues for decades are convinced that an Obama administration and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress would eviscerate those modest advances within a year. As for the Supreme Court, the hard facts of our national history teach us that, while the country can survive the court’s getting it wrong on some things, we are in very deep trouble when the court gets it wrong on the big human rights questions.
[Emphasis mine.]
Quite simply, I couldn’t have stated it any better. If you are pro-life and have even dreamt of voting for Obama, prayerfully consider George Weigel’s words.
Douglas Kmiec tries, today in the L.A. Post, to fleece pro-life voters by saying that because Obama hinted in the last debate that abortion should be used as a last resort that all of a sudden, because of that, he is no longer “pro-choice” and that Christian (he says Catholic) can vote for him in good conscience.
So can Catholics vote for a pro-choice candidate? The answer is yes, but as I found when I publicly endorsed Obama, you’ve then got “some ’splain’n’ to do.” It’s a matter of conscience, but had Obama proclaimed himself to be pro-choice and said nothing more, it would have been problematic. But there are those additional words about appropriate education as well as adoption and assistance for mothers who choose to keep their baby.
Um, excuse me, but we aren’t stupid. Obama never, either, denounced abortion as something that is evil and is always wrong. He even said “we are going to disagree” when McCain had already spoken to the fact that abortion is wrong, and surely he didn’t expect that McCain disagreed with the assertion that we should do all we morally can to eliminate unwanted pregnancies (as in education, adoption, etc.). Clearly his point about disagreeing had to do with the fact that he thinks it is a mother’s choice to kill her child while McCain does not.
Some might ask, isn’t John McCain, the self-proclaimed “pro-lifer,” still a morally superior choice for Catholics? Not necessarily. McCain’s commitment, as he stressed in the debate, is to try to reverse Roe vs. Wade. But Republicans have been after this for decades, and the effort has not saved a single child. Even if Roe were reversed — unlikely, in my judgment — it merely transfers the question to the states, most of which are not expected to ban abortion. A Catholic serious about preserving life could reasonably find Obama’s educational and material assistance to mothers the practical, stronger alternative.
The fact of the matter is that regardless of what money is spent on anyone, and as it turns out McCain is much more charitable when it comes to these issues, the act of killing an innocent life is what is wrong. We can debate until our faces are blue about how best to support those who are going to carry out unwanted pregnancies as well as how we should go about preventing them, but that is totally immaterial in the argument of whether abortion is right or wrong and who you can vote on if you are rightly aimed and that is your strongest conviction. That part of the debate is not a moral issue on the same playing field as life and death. And, in case you didn’t notice, sir, the voter is completely at the mercy of the Supreme Court on this issue, one that should be decided by legislation from *elected* officials. Yes, we would have many more battles to come, us pro-lifers, after the decision was overturned. Many states would be legislating to legalize abortion immediately. However, at least our elected officials are accountable to us. Our SCOTUS justices are not. That should scare pro-lifers as well as the pro-death contingent (because how do you know what issue will be held hostage next?).
Catholics know how to pick presidents. In the last nine presidential contests, Catholics have been with the popular vote-getter every time. Where are the Catholics lining up in 2008? A recent Zogby poll has the national Catholic vote as a dead heat within the margin of error. If Catholic past is prologue, this election will be far closer than general polling suggests, and Obama’s few additional words in the final debate may prove to be his political salvation.
Obama’s words did nothing for any of us pro-lifers, and Mr. Kmiec’s words are even more outrageous. We aren’t stupid, and we will be turning out on November 4th to vote for John McCain.
