Jeffrey Miller

His Awesomness (not a formal ecclesiastical title) Cardinal Pell in reference to politicians voting for ESCR.

“Some seemed to suggest that while a football club, a political party or a business certainly could in some circumstances sack or exclude a member or employee, it was totally out of order to suggest a Christian Church might even consider a similar possibility,” said the cardinal.

“A few intolerant politicians want to ban religious argument in public life, so that the only permissible reasoning will be irreligious or anti-religious,” he observed.

The cardinal said the debate also raised questions about what it means to be a Catholic.

“A Catholic is someone who believes Christ is Son of God, accepts His teachings and lives a life of worship, service and duty in the Catholic community,” he explained. “Catholics are not created by the accident of birth to remain only because their tribe has an interesting history.”

“All Catholics who continue to reject important Catholic teachings, even in areas such as sexuality, family, marriage, abortion, euthanasia, cloning where “liberals” claim the primacy of conscience rules, should expect to be confronted, gently and consistently, rather than comforted and encouraged in their wrongdoing,” he continued.

The cardinal concluded by saying that every Catholic politician who voted recently in favor of the cloning bill “should think twice and examine his or her conscience before next receiving Communion.”

I love the reference to Tribal Catholicism, as Mark Shea calls it, by the Cardinal and his mentioning that those using primacy as a conscience as a dodge should expect to be "confronted, gently and consistently."

Not a good idea to try to use conscience with Cardinal Pell who has written extensively on the subject such as this First Things article: The Inconvenient Conscience.

The key is that if your examination of conscience is shorter that the transition between two energy levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom you are only echoing your will and not evaluating the message from an informed conscience.

Amnesty’s new position wants to give women access to abortion when their health or human rights are in danger.

"The Catholic Church, through a misrepresented account of our position on selective aspects of abortion, is placing in peril work on human rights," Kate Gilmore, Amnesty’s deputy secretary-general, said.

She was responding to comments by Cardinal Renato Martino, the Vatican’s justice minister, who accused Amnesty of "betraying its mission" and said "individuals and Catholic organisations must withdraw their support" from the group.

Ms Gilmore said Amnesty was not promoting abortion as a universal right but stressing that women have a right to choose abortion when their human rights have been violated, particularly in cases of rape and incest.

A distinction without a difference.

"We are saying broadly that to criminalise women’s management of their sexual reproductive rights is the wrong answer," she said, speaking by telephone from London.

Of course they never mention that where they criminalize abortions it is the doctors performing the abortions that are liable to criminal prosecution and not the women themselves.

"We live alongside people’s life experiences. We don’t run a theocracy. We have to deal with the rape survivor in Darfur who, because she is left with a pregnancy as a result of the enemy, is further ostracised by her community," Ms Gilmore said.

When you don’t have any good arguments use the word theocracy and then fall back to emotionalism by referencing hard cases. They also don’t mention that the pro-life position is not just a religious view, but is held also by a groups of atheists. When I was an atheist I was mostly a pro-life atheist. I accepted the rape/incest exemptions since that seemed like common sense on the outside. But when you start to evaluate why there is such an exception in these cases you start to find how weak the argument is. Those who rape and commit incest don’t get the death penalty, but somehow the death penalty for a innocent person conceived during an objectively evil act do. We can easily feel much sympathy for women in these circumstance, but difficult circumstances don’t give you a moral blank check. Fr. Pravone has said that rape is a violent act upon an innocent person and that abortion is also a violent act on an innocent person. These exemptions have become so commonplace that otherwise pro-life politicians that hold to them are rarely criticized in the pro-life community for them.

This is another thing I love about the Catholic faith. I use to think I was pro-life before I became Catholic and actually found out what it really meant to be pro-life.

I find the argument about abortion because somebody will be "ostracised" especially evil. What about people who have handicapped children that are sometime ostracised? Should they be allowed to kill their children because of a community feeling? What Amnesty International should be doing is helping to provide education to destroy such attitudes, instead of providing cover for them.

It reminds me about the "Every child a wanted child" slogan used to justify abortion/contraception. That instead of working to reduce such a selfish attitude and calling for an openness to children, we use the selfish attitude to justify evil.