Breaking: Obama admin widens abortifacient birth control mandate to college students

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 16, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a move that is likely to reignite the ire of religious leaders, late Friday afternoon the Obama administration announced a proposal that would require universities, including religious universities, to provide contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs to their students, as well as their employees, without a co-pay. This appears to significantly widen the originally-announced HHS mandate, which had only applied to employees.

The White House released the 32-page proposal late Friday afternoon. It outlines three different options to ensure that the health plans for employees and students of religious organizations cover birth control, including abortifacient drugs, and sterilizations, without co-pay.

The proposal, particularly the widening of the mandate to cover students, was met with simultaneous statements of support from members of the abortion lobby.

“Women who buy health insurance from their college or university will have access to affordable birth control, just like women who receive health insurance from their employer,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards said in an online press release.

“Covering birth control with no co-pays means college students will not have to choose between paying for tuition and books, or paying for basic health care like birth control.”

Click “like” if you want to end abortion!

“Today the Obama administration took the next step in making sure women get insurance coverage of contraception,” agreed Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“Unfortunately, some politicians and their allies want to take away contraceptive coverage from nurses, janitors, administrative staff, and college instructors,” Keenan said. “They risk losing even more public support if they continue to politicize women’s health through legislative attacks or mean-spirited and disparaging rhetoric on talk radio or in other channels.”

As has happened in the case of announcements from the Obama administration about its birth control mandate in the past, supporters of the mandate issued laudatory statements immediately following the release of the proposal, while opponents were left scrambling trying to make sense of it.

LifeSiteNews.com spoke to a media spokesperson at Alliance Defense Fund, a legal organization that has been leading the charge against the Obama admin’s mandate. The spokesperson explained that ADF attorneys were still sifting through today’s document and weren’t yet prepared to comment.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said she found it unusual the announcement came as part of a Friday news dump on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day.

“I am surprised that such important information would be announced late Friday of St. Patrick’s Day Weekend and as we prepare for the fourth Sunday of Lent,” she said.

“The bishops will begin analyzing it immediately but now is too soon to know what it actually says. The bishops will consider how the proposal gels with the principles outlined in United for Religious Liberty, the statement that the USCCB Administrative Committee issued March 14.”

Both she and Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, declined to offer any further statement to media Friday afternoon, saying they needed more time to study the proposal.

Sr. Keehan’s silence stands in sharp contrast to her prior knowledge and endorsement of the president’s February 10 “accommodation.”

The public may comment on this proposal for the next 90 days. To submit a comment, click here. Follow the instructions under the “More Search Options” tab.

Comments may also be sent via snail mail to:

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
Department of Health and Human Services
Attention: CMS-9968-ANPRM
P.O. Box 8016
Baltimore, MD 21244-1850.

Obama finally crosses the line with HHS contraception mandate

I felt a curious sense of elation while reading the outpouring of outrage over the HHS mandate that Catholic institutions have one year to offer contraceptive coverage to employees and patients. I was pleasantly surprised to note that outrage has come not only from the expected sources like USCCB Head Cardinal Designate Timothy Dolan    but even some surprising quarters like Cardinal Roger Mahony and EJDionne. who said,

Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the Church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here.

One of my favorite quotes on this situation is "Obama has done what the Pope has failed to do, unite US Bishops". Reading this I began to understand my positive feelings toward what is clearly a threat to the First Amendment rights of Catholics. I am pleased to see Catholics of all stripes actually care about the fact that our institutions will be forced to provide contraception/abortifacients for our patients and employees. Read a roundup of reactions to the mandate at MercatorNet article here. 

Like most orthodox Catholics I have become a bit cynical over thedecades of Catholic indifference on the contraception issue. You don't have to go any further than TV/radio host Sean Hannity to see a Catholic passionately justify his flouting of Church teaching.  Here are some of my experiences of how casually the Church's ban on contraception has disregarded.

Twenty years ago, a Catholic nun was running a health fair in my parish on Long Island. I suggested that a couple who teach Natural Family Planning run a booth helping young couples like my new husband and I plan our families with respect for Church teaching. She gave me a disdainful look and reminded me that the parish allowed her to work as a social worker for federal funds, and that precluded her from doing anything "Catholic" like NFP.

I was not stunned, I had seen the same phenomenon as a social worker at Catholic Charities in the eighties. When a church or social service agency accepts government funds it accepts government control. The difference is, up until now the encroachments have been gradual and voluntarily accepted by the faithful themselves. After all, how many Catholics entered that health fair seeking Natural Family Planning?

When my husband and I took the diocesan course in preparation for marriage, half the couples were using NFP because too many years of contraceptives had left them sterile. Few were doing it in obedience to Humanae Vitae. In fact, NFP training should have been part of our Pre-Cana program, but the couple running the program admitted they used the pill and it "worked for them".I didn't bother reporting this to the pastor of the parish, I knew I would be met with a shrug.

A great majority of Catholics have disregarded Church teaching on contraception, in fact the Sisters of Mercy who taught me at the all girls high school I attended, instructed us on how to use it and where to obtain it, warning us not to let our parents see our notebooks. My mother did, and was horrified.

Contraception has been widely accepted in the Catholic community for nearly half a century. So why the fuss over the HHS mandate that Catholic institutions provide contraception for its employees?  Perhaps we as a Church thought it was our dirty little secret. We convinced ourselves that no one outside knew how few Catholics actually obeyed this Church teaching to have the marital act be perpetually open to life. Except the research arm of Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute who reported last spring in the Huffington Post that 98% of Catholic women have used contraceptives. They have been dispensing contraceptives to Catholics for decades.Shame on us! So now we are outraged to be forced to do what we have been volunteering to do for half a century.

Elizabeth Scalia explains.

With the administration’s decision, the covert culture of death has finally made a truly overt move against the culture of life. 

PP Director Cecile Richards with Obama

 Obama just had the arrogance to think we wouldn't care if he was open about it. After all, when Rick Santorum explained how contraception led us to the legalization of abortion, Catholics yawned while the media attacked him. So Obama assumed, carefully advised by liberal Catholics friendly to his administration who helped him get Obamacare approved, that just one more push and he'd have Catholics on the ropes. No one cares about contraception, then we can use this mandate to force abortion down the line.

After all, it worked for Bill Baird an abortion clinic owner whose case in the Supreme Court made it legal for unmarried couples to obtain contraception, creating a gold mine for abortionists like himself.
Here's a little history of Bill Baird's activism from the website "The Pro-Choice League". Note how birth control leads to abortion.

Some facts about Pro Choice League's founder Bill Baird:March 22 is the anniversary of Baird v. Eisenstadt, his 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized birth control for all Americans (replacing the 1965 decision for married couples only).  Baird v. Eisenstadt was a landmark case that became the bedrock of countless privacy cases such as Roe v. Wade and the gay rights victory Lawrence v. Texas (2003).  1964  - Baird established the nation's first aboveground abortion referral and birth control clinic (Well before abortion was legal facing a potential 10-year jail term). 1965 - Baird led the first demonstration ever outside of St. Patrick's Cathedral against the Church's stance against birth control for all citizens not only Catholics. 1965 - Established the nation's first birth control and abortion club on a college campus (Hofstra University - NY) 1965 & 1966 Challenged anti-birth control statutes in New York and then New Jersey for which he was arrested and jailed. 1967 - established the nation's first "abortion slush fund" to help students pay for illegal abortions. 1967 Baird led another march against the Catholic Church saying "... no religion has a right to impose its dogma on others."

Note how his activism lead to the legalization of all kinds of perversion from abortion to homosexuality. When Catholics disregarded Humanae Vitae in the sixties, they gave Bill Baird, Planned Parenthood, their ally,  Barack Obama the abortion president, the opening they needed to slowly and covertly undermine the Church's influence on the culture.
 Until Humanae Vitae in 1967, Catholics were holding the line on morality, keeping sexuality largely inside marriage, but our hedonism and love of government money provided the opening for the intolerable situation we find ourselves in today, where our Catholic institutions will have to pay for contraceptives and abortificients. Its time to shut the barn door, but the horse has already escaped.

Senator Marco Rubio

Rick and Bella Santorum

I am grateful for the opportunity to see my Church unite behind this issue and hope it becomes a teachable moment on how our own sinfulness created this weakness which Obama so wickedly exploited. I bet he and his staff are shocked at the amount of outrage they created, and are hoping it dies down in time for the election.

Thanks to Senator Marco Rubio, son of Cuban refugees and no stranger to creeping religious oppression, for introducing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 2012. 
Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio have shown the moral courage which the Kennedys  and the Cuomos lacked when abortion was overtaking our formerly moral culture. They along with bishops like Robert Tobin of Rhode Island, Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia,  and Fabian Bruskewitz of Nebraska have long held such Catholic politicians' feet to the fire on life issues. Now the Johnnny-come-latelies are at long last realizing where ignoring the Church's teaching on contraception has led. May this moment be one of conversion of all hearts on this issue, and bond us together into a force for authentic moral reform in this nation. This is what can save America from total implosion.

What Obama won't tell you about the budget

There's a lot of fat which could be cut from the Federal Budget to be sure. Both sides of this contentious debate have pet projects which they want to stay in the budget,  but some of President Obama's reveal a lot of disturbing facts about his sense of priorities.
When a family is in financial crisis, they cut expenditures down to the bare essentials. Those things which are really necessary, and it often is very instructive to see what a particular family considers necessary.
The fact that the Pew Research Center said that the wealth of minorities has hit a 25 year low, thanks to the Great Recession (is that one step up from a Minor Depression?) the Obama Administration's spending continues to focus on obtaining abortions for the poor, not helping them maintain their families or keep their homes, oftentimes, their only source of investment.
From the first days of the Obama Administration, abortion has been the President's number one priority as revealed in this Life Site News article. 

President Obama struck down the Mexico City policy by Executive Order three days after his inauguration in January 2009. His administration also restored $50 million in annual aid to the UNFPA with no comment about the China allegations, and has ignored further investigations by the Population Research Institute (PRI) confirming the UNFPA’s continued complicity in the gross maltreatment of Chinese citizens.
Earlier in the month, the U.S. Catholics bishops’ committee dealing with social justice issues and Catholic Relief Services urged U.S. House lawmakers to reinstate the ban on UNFPA funding and the Mexico City Policy.

Despite USCCB's offer to work out a budget which respects the poor and human dignity, the President and his allies stubbornly refuse to defund the UNPFA or Planned Parenthood which received in taxpayer funds this year according to this article from the Pro-life Alliance, and operates 80% of its killing centers in minority neighborhoods.

Abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood continue to receive hundreds of millions of tax dollars every year under Title X, which subsidizes their overhead for promoting abortion as they divert more and more resources towards the killing of the unborn.   In 2010, Planned Parenthood revealed a total income of $1.1 billion. Taxpayers shelled out $363 million to pad the abortion provider's bottom line through federal and state grants and contracts (or 33% of its entire income).

This stunning expenditure for a for-profit agency which focuses on killing children reveals that Obama is using the budget debate to demonize Republicans as immoveable while protecting his supporter's interests. According to the Faith and Freedom Foundation, Planned Parenthood Director Cecile Richards has bragged on Twitter about her unprecedented access to the White House and attended an expensive fundraiser with the President last May for Texas abortionists. You are known by the company you keep, Mr Obama!

Bishop Tobin breaks ties with Catholic Health Association over Obamacare

Tobin told CHA director Sr. Carol Keehan in a March 29 letter that he was “very disappointed that the Catholic Health Association, under your leadership, publicly endorsed the recent health care legislation that was passed and signed into law.”


“This action was taken despite the fact that the legislation will very possibly provide additional public funding for abortion and threaten the freedom of conscience of Catholic individuals and institutions,” wrote the outspokenly pro-life bishop.

This is what every bishop with hospitals in CHA should  be doing now. God bless Bishop Tobin, an outstanding leader.
Read the entire story here.

Catholic hospitals uspport Obamacare, USCCB does not

The USCCB does not support Obamacare, but the Catholic Health Association does. Read the story here
.http://www.lifenews.com/nat6118.html

Read the hosptial story at One News Now.

The damage done by JFK

I wrote here about the near worship Catholics gave John F Kennedy in the 1960's which was extended to Robert and Teddy, even down to Patrick and Maria Shriver. Was this adulation warranted? Did JFK erect more barriers than he smashed by promising to seperate his personal Catholic beliefs from his political career becoming the first Catholic president?
Archbishop Charles Chaput, in this address to Houston Baptist Univeristy says "yes".

Fifty years ago this fall, in September 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for president, spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He had one purpose. He needed to convince 300 uneasy Protestant ministers, and the country at large, that a Catholic like himself could serve loyally as our nation’s chief executive. Kennedy convinced the country, if not the ministers, and went on to be elected. And his speech left a lasting mark on American politics. It was sincere, compelling, articulate – and wrong. Not wrong about the patriotism of Catholics, but wrong about American history and very wrong about the role of religious faith in our nation’s life. And he wasn’t merely “wrong.” His Houston remarks profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political conversation. Today, half a century later, we’re paying for the damage.

It's time for faithful Christians to ignore the false barrier between Church and State erected by Justice Black in 1947, and enage fully in the political process. Our morals and character are urgently needed as salt and light  in a culture of death which is rapidly becoming a totalitarian aetheist state.
Obama talks about the familiar Christian principles of charity and love of neighbor, but his actions belie his words. His administration is promoting abortion, homosexuality, alienation of children from their parents, barring poor children from good schools,  as the schoolteachers move into the role of moral guides, and, perhaps most ominous of all, his administration is intimidating those who would protest. Remember David Axelrod's list of those who are speaking against the health care plan? I signed up, and I hope you did. We Christians need to be on record at times like these as opponents of such draconian tactics. Yes, it may cost us, but someday we will have to face the Just Judge who has entrusted us to live in times like these for a reason.
Its an uphill battle and it hurts more when seedy politicans like Nancy Pelosi lie to the bishops saying there is no funding of abortion in the health care bill. Or when she asks legislators to pass it "to find out what's in it". But we are living in the Church militant, and while 500 Christians are being hacked to death in Nigeria by militant Muslims, staging an ongoing protest to abortion funding and moral decline is a comparatively small burden.
Call your Representatives and tell them you oppose the health care bill as it stands, supporting abortion.


Read the entire speech on MercatorNet.

Obama as a modern day Herod the Great

 Veritatis the Catholic cartoon blog has made a strong case for their similarities here. Lets pray that our nation does not suffer the consequences God inflicted upon Israel for ignoring the Saviour. We have Our Lord but instead of turning to Him in our time of crisis, we voted for a false messiah and get what we deserve; a full fledged proponent of the Culture of Death. And yet we are shocked when he has a cold response to a terrorist attack.We expect a man who publicly admits he would abort his grandchildren to care about the lives of strangers? A man who is supported by NARAL to be a lover of human life?
Deacon Keith Fournier has some thoughts about what America needs to do in the new decade.

" Two years before he became Pope, Karol Cardinal Wotyla (Pope John Paul II) spoke to the Catholic Bishops of the United States. His observation was republished in the Wall Street Journal on November 9, 1978: “We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel and the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine providence. It is a trial which the whole Church… must take up.”

He was so right, over 30 years ago, that the Church had no clue about this mighty confrontation, this central challenge Our Lord was handing as a mission to His Body on earth. We still don't; when Catholic hospitals side with abortion proponents on health care, and the bishops stand by wringing their hands. Our Church has a mission to be militant against the forces of evil; and YES to suffer the consequences. To take up our cross as Our Lord did. Anything less is cowardice and we are failing in our divine call.
I spent my adolescence fascinated reading true stories of righteous men and women who were imprisoned by evil empires; from Vietnam POWs and Cardinal Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan to Corrie Ten Boom, Sts Maximilian Kolbe and Theresa Benedicta of the Cross  and Dietrich Bonhoffer by the Nazis, to Solzhenitsyn's  "The Gulag Archipelago" and Fr Walter Ciszek's "With God in Russia".The reason I read these books, I suspect, is that since the legalization of abortion in my early adolescence, God was strengthening my spine for this conflict. I have only begun to fight.
Are you ready to stand for justice in the face of a darkening national landscape? Against the power hungry, human rights-trampling government? Against your own neighbors and employers with darkened consciences and spiritual blindness? This may seem over the top, but when I see the president's lackluster response to a terrorist attack, his radical appointments to positions of power,  and his constant push last year for the greatest expansion of abortion in our time, I can't help but feel a sense of foreboding.This can only go on for so long with dire consequences for society.
Make this the year you take a stand in the " greatest historical confrontation of our time" to quote Venerable Pope John Paul the Great. Stay close to Our Lord and under the Mantle of Our Lady in prayer and in the sacraments. Stick your neck out, be heard, and be prepared to suffer for what is right.
May God grant us the courage to defend His truth in 2010.

Pat Buchanan on the Church Militant

Read Pat's stirring article "Is the Church Militant Back?"  at Human Events, and see if you, like me, find yourself cheering at the end. Here is the comment I left: Mr Buchanan is right; for decades of "I'm OK, you're OK" , and "let's just ignore the advance of the Culture of Death" attitude promoted by the American hierarchy, has disheartened those faithful Catholics who see in the True Faith, the solution for the world's problems.
He ends,
" Catholicism is necessarily an adversary faith and culture in an America where a triumphant secularism has captured the heights, from Hollywood to the media, the arts and the academy, and relishes nothing more than insults to and blasphemous mockery of the Church of Rome.

Our new battling bishops may be surprised to find they have a large cheering section among a heretofore silent and sullen faithful who have been desperate to find a few clerical champions. "
My comment was "Finally, the absolute moral bankruptcy of the Obama Administration, aided and abetted by shameful Catholics Pelosi, Kennedy and the CCHD crowd, has caused the braver members of the hierarchy to rise up. Lead on, Archbishop Burke, Bishops Tobin and Wuerhl, the faithful are behind you.

This feels like the Gdansk shipyards, where the joy of fellowship overcame the fear of reprisals from the Communists, and Solidarity, led by our Polish Pope, rode on to victory over Godless Communism. We can do it here in America as well, and reclaim our nation from the Godless. "

Our Lady of Victory, pray for us!"

New reason not to support the CCHD collection this Sunday; George Soros

USCCB comes out against health care reform bills in Congress

At last, Catholics can unite against the dangerous health care bill about to see a vote in Congress.



According to Cardinal George's inteview with Ray Arroyo on "The World Over" the USCCB's main objection to the bill is that abortion is funded and there are no conscience clauses for medical professionals, not that the government will be running something that 85% of Americans agree works well; insurance company-based healtcare. Raymond said, and I agree that this government takeover of 1/6 of the economy violates the Catholic principal of subsidiarity (all functions of governance should take place on the level closest to the people involved) but that was not an issue mentioned by the bishops, however we appreciate the bishops' clarity on the crucial issue, respect for human life.



Rush Limbagh in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, said that Obama wants to control our every move; where we live, what we drive, what we eat, where we work. He insists that if the health care bill passes, all these things will be tied into health care and therefore come under government control. It's just a massive power grab. He explained how some of the money from the defecit could be used to insure the 12 million uninsured people in this nation who want insurance, without the trillions which are proposed in the health care reform bill.





This bill, if it fails will be Obama's Waterloo. He can expect to be roundly defeated in the election of 2012. Perhaps by a woman.
If it succeeds, I have done my best to oppose it. Have you? Remember my favorite saying, that all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.



1.)I attended the only public Town Hall meeting offered in my Congressional District and voiced my concern that abortion funding will be included in the health care bill.





2. )I traveled to Martha's Vineyard with Rev Patrick Mahoney and Chris Slattery during the President's summer vacation to make sure that he heard my opposition was heard. Watch the video on AirMaria.com.



3. )I have written extensively on the health care bill, both on my blog Causa Nostrae Laetitiae, on Catholics Against Obamacare, and on Catholic Vote.com.

4. )I participated in a prayer vigil on the lawn of the Capitol Building with Rev Patrick Mahoney to voice my protest over abortion's inclusion in health care (see photo).



5. )I traveled to Washington to voice my oposition to the bill, with the group Health Care for Gunner. Watch our press conference on the group's website.



6. )While we were lobbing on the Hill, I met my Congressman Joe Courtney from the First Congressional District in CT and asked him to oppose this toxic bill. I got political doublespeak about how he loves the insurance industry. He better, many of his constuents work in the insurance industry in Hartford, where many corporate headquarters are located. The insurance industry will be dismantled under the Public Option.
Congressman Courtney will receive a copy of this post which will also be on Facebook and Twitter. I have over 1,000 readers a day to inform of his support of this pernicious legislation which Catholic bishops oppose.



6.) I visited Senator Lieberman's office with Healthcare for Gunner delegation, including UNC Neonatology Professor Martin McCaffrey, who voiced our concerns that the public option would not inlucde our children. We spoke with Shoshanna, the Senator's health care assistant. A month later, when I read the news that our voices had been heard, I thanked Senator Joe Lieberman for his wise decision to oppose the public option in health care.

Now, as a Catholic, ask yourself what have YOU done to oppose health care plan which threatens to install Planned Parenthood as a part of the government and use your tax dollars to pay for abortions?

Will you have to explain to your children why you remained idle while our liberties were taken away and the unborn were further targeted for extermination?Will you be able to explain to your aged parents why their request for life saving surgeries has been denied by the death panels?Or why my disabled child was denied heart surgery because she doesn't have a high enough quality of life?
Here is a link to the bishops' letter which was supposed to be in all Catholic church bulletins yesterday. The PDF directs the public to this page, >> http://www.usccb.org/healthcare/ which has an easy to use GREEN BUTTON to click and send a note to your congress people. The beauty of this is that the link does the mailing for you automatically.

The Campaign for Human Development and ACORN

So you thought, that when you gave your tithe to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development that you were feeding the poor? So did I.
" It is an error to think of CCHD as an ordinary charity. In fact, it is an extreme left-wing political organization whose ties stretch back to the “father” of community organizing himself, Saul Alinsky, and to Barack Obama in his community-organizing days in Chicago.
And unbeknownst to most Catholics, almost no CCHD grants actually provide direct relief to the poor."

I feel so betrayed when I seethe work the pro-lifers in this area do among poor homeless pregnant women. Those millions could house these women, help them choose life for their babies and give them decent clothing and food.

Instead our contributions went to fund the campaign of the most pro-abortion politician in America. No wonder he thinks Catholics can be bought.

He's been buying us for years.

Read the entire article at Human Events.

Bishop D'Arcy not letting Notre Dame Controversy Rest

"The real question posed by the situation is whether or not a Catholic university has a responsibility to give a public witness to the faith, D'Arcy states. "If not, what is the meaning of a life of faith? And how can a Catholic institution expect its students to live by faith in the difficult decisions that will confront them in a culture often opposed to the Gospel?" he wonders.

"In its decision to give its highest honor to a president who has repeatedly opposed even the smallest legal protection of the child in the womb, did Notre Dame surrender the responsibility that Pope Benedict believes Catholic universities have to give public witness to the truths revealed by God and taught by the church?" the bishop also asks."

Bishop D'Arcy will have the lead article onthis subject in this month's America magazine. Good for him for keeping this scandal from being buried in Obama's attempt to court Catholics for his Health Care Proposal.
Read the entire story at CNA.

Bishop Vasa says "NO" to Obmacare

Tragically, just as Catholics who support the Church's teaching on life issues had to stand firm in their beliefs against pro-abortion Obama last election, often against their clergy, they are feeling very lonely in the fight against Obamacare.
But we have champions; brave individual bishops like Bishop Vasa who says, "Without these changes (and significant changes in other medical, moral and conscience issues) the health care bill is fatally flawed and as such cannot be supported," said the bishop.
Several Catholic organizations, including the Catholic Health Association and Catholic Charities USA, have joined the push for "health care reform" in the abstract, while remaining silent on the troubling aspects of the current legislation sponsored by the Obama administration. Although the groups have responded with statements vowing not to support abortion-promoting legislation per se, none have backed down from their original July statement calling upon legislators to enact health care reform "immediately."

Sr Carol Keehan said repeatedly to Raymond Arroyo on this Friday's "The World Over" that we have to work with the Obama Administration. Not if they hold all the cards and are so vehemently pro-abortion! Ove 50 million Americans have lost their lives to abortion; no liberal can tell me that supporting this terrible health care legisation will save more lives than that.

Read the entire article at Life Site News.

USCCB has new health care reform website

Take a look at it here and ask yourself where Catholic Charities, St Vincent de Paul and Catholic Health Association find their rationale to join forces with Obamacare. Raymond Arroyo on Friday's "The World Over" asked CHA's CEO Sr Carol Keehan how her org could be at cross purposes with the bishops.

The Clarity of Truth

I have noticed that the closer a soul is to God, the clearer and more powerful their words are, cutting through the thick rhetoric of those whose goal is to confuse and deceive. Those who work for the enemy.
The nation saw such astonishing clarity in the words of Sarah Palin regarding the 'death panels' of Obamacare, and in the White House's swift response to her penetrating words, as noted by Gateway Pundit. From her Facebook posting:
" The rationing system proposed by one of President Obama’s key health care advisors is particularly disturbing. I’m speaking of the “Complete Lives System” advocated by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the president’s chief of staff. President Obama has not yet stated any opposition to the “Complete Lives System,” a system which, if enacted, would refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled who have less economic potential. [1] Why the silence from the president on this aspect of his nationalization of health care? Does he agree with the “Complete Lives System”? If not, then why is Dr. Emanuel his policy advisor? What is he advising the president on? I just learned that Dr. Emanuel is now distancing himself from his own work and claiming that his “thinking has evolved” on the question of rationing care to benefit the strong and deny the weak. [2] How convenient that he disavowed his own work only after the nature of his scholarship was revealed to the public at large."
Revealed by your outspoken defense of human life, Sarah. God bless you! You are a modern day Judith, defending our nation from self-destruction.

I also saw such clarity in the prophetic words of Pope John Paul II in his comments made in 1994 at the death of pro-life French geneticist Dr Jerome Lejeune, quoted from his biography, "Life is a Blessing".

"He became one of the ardent defenders of life, especially of the life of preborn children, which, in our contemporary civilisation, is often endangers to such an extent that one could think the danger to be by design. Today,this danger extends equally to elderly and sick persons. Human tribunals and democratically elected parliaments usurp the right to determine who has the right to life, and conversely, who could find that this right has been denied him through no fault of his own. In different ways, our century has experimented with such an attitude, above all during the Second World War, yet also after the end of the war."

By all means, do your own analysis of the clarity of truth when you watch the re-run of Fridays August 14 edition of "The World Over" on EWTN. Raymond Arroyo and Judie Brown of American Life League asked direct questions to Catholic Health Association CEO Sr Carol Keehan and she equivocates time after time using amorphorous campaign-style phrases about 'cooperation'.
Her organization is on board with the Obama health care plan, along with Catholic Charities and St Vincent de Paul. Where is the moral clarity in these organizations? Giving free reign to the likes of Zeke Emmanuel to condemn the elderly and disabled to death is NOT Catholic. How is that going to help the poor? So many of the poor are elderly and disabled, is the plan to eliminate the problem?
That is what the Nazi's "Final Solution" was. The T4 program was a plan to eliminate "useless eaters", the disabled, whom Hitler pried away from their families for the good of the state, then sent to the showers, brining back their clothing and gold teeth.
Seek those who speak the truth with boldness and clarity, and reveal the lies of the equivocators. If you share a Church with them, repeat the truth to them until they listen. It's an act of charity to correct those in error.
Go Sarah, speak the truth to power, we, the people are behind you!
Pope John Paul the Great, pray for us!
Servant of God, Dr Jerome Lejeune, pray for us!

Catholic agencies sell out to Obamacare

Fr Mitch Pacwa and Obama; both students of Saul Alinsky?

"I recognize the community organizer approach that Townsend commends in this piece. I learned Sol Alinsky style of community organizing as a novice in Chicago when President Obama was a little boy living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mr. Tom Gaudette, an associate of Sol Alinsky, trained a number of us Jesuits. I was the youngest man in the group, and I was certainly not well developed in the practice of organizing, but I tried my best in COUP - the acronym for Community of United People - on Chicago's near West Side."
Here is where Obama and the Catholic Church have their meeting place; helping the poor. Here is where they separate; lack of respect for human sexuality and human life.

Read Alinsky's Rules for Radicals here. Read Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's Newsweek article.

Read the entire story on the Ignatius Insight Blog.

Archbishop Dolan on Obamacare and human life

The Archbishop of New York explained that the first thing that needs to be said is that “every health care system exists only to serve human life, not the other way around.”
“Human life is not some commodity, some customer, some cog that is at the service of a bigger system or some bureaucratic network,” but rather, it is “the end in itself and health care is how it is protected. Hear that, Peter Singer!
"If health care begins to lead to the “destruction of human life” through avenues such as abortion, end of life care, or the discarding human embryos, then “we say it’s no longer health care at all. “It’s unhealthy care and we can’t be part of that,” Archbishop Dolan stated.

Perfectly said from a true shepherd of souls; Cardinal O'Connor, you have found us a man after your own heart!

Read the entire story at CNS.

Obama's pro-life legislation missed the point

It's the old "if you want this, you'll have to vote for that" routine. Hope and change my foot.
The White House wants to force contraception and comprehensive sex ed on us in exchange for financial support of pregnant women. To the world it sounds good; contraception and sex ed prevent pregnancy, right? WRONG!Dr Janet Smith professor at Detroit Seminary settled this question decisively with her famous talk, "Contraception Why Not?"
"Has it(contraception) made for fewer unwanted pregnancies? The statistics on this are wild. In 1960, some 6% of white babies were born out of wedlock. Six percent. In 1992, 22% of white babies were born out of wedlock. Almost a four-fold increase, and it's rapidly rising. Rapidly rising. In 1960, some 22%, same figure, 22% of black babies were born out of wedlock. Anybody know the percentage now? Sixty-eight percent. Sixty-eight percent of black babies are born out of wedlock. That took thirty years. I don't think it will take thirty years for the 22% of whites to go up to 68 if we follow down the same path we are currently following. Now, here's my connection: First of all, the world tells us that if we have more and better contraceptives we can solve these problems. There will be fewer unwanted pregnancies. But the point was, in 1960, there were almost no contraceptives available, especially to teenagers. You had to know some tacky gas station somewhere and have a few quarters and that's about the best you could do. But any teenager now can get contraceptives from the guidance counselor, in fact, from some welcome-to-school kits in some schools. We live in a culture in which condoms can be handed out in schools and Bibles can't. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about our society. So, it seems to me that clearly, more and better contraceptives aren't going to help. Teenagers have incredible access to them. But teenagers are just as good at using contraceptives as they are at making their beds and doing their homework and doing their chores, at about the same degree of reliability.
I used to help with a pregnancy help center in South Bend. We would talk with these young girls and we'd ask them, "Did you use a contraceptive", and they would say, "No, no. I wanted to buy a Prince album this month and I had to use my money for that", or, "I didn't like the side effects so I stopped", or, "We broke up and I thought we weren't going to see each other again but he came around again." And they get pregnant and they're surprised. And, of course, we have a million and a half abortions a year. And how did these happen? Fifty percent of women who go to abortion clinics tell us that they're there because of contraceptive failure. Fifty percent. Eighty percent tell us that they are contraceptively experienced, that they know about it and they've used it before, but, again, for one reason or another, they've stopped.
But the real point, in my mind, is that contraceptives have launched people on a lifestyle that makes for sex outside of marriage -- makes for sex in which babies and bonding are not welcome likelihoods. And when pregnancies occur, disaster strikes. People now say, when they're having sex outside of marriage and they get pregnant, what do they say? They use this wonderful phrase, "I got pregnant by accident." And I always was mystified by this phrase and I would say, "Tell me, how did that happen again?" I know I'm rather naive but I caught on to this some time ago and I know you can't get pregnant by accident. You can get hit by a car by accident, fall off a cliff by accident, but you can't get pregnant by accident. It actually means something's gone right with an act of sexual intercourse, not that something's gone wrong. But because people are using contraceptives, they get pregnant and they're surprised. "My gosh! We got pregnant! We didn't have that in mind. That wasn't part of this picture. So, we have to do something about it. What'll we have to do? We have to trot down to the abortion clinic."
Now, I'll give you the highest authority of our land, the Supreme Court says so. There's an article out there, which I wrote on the table you can have for free. It's called, "The Connection between Contraception and Abortion" and I cite Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In that decision (this is not quite verbatim but it's close) it says that "in several important respects, the decision to use contraceptives is the same as the decision to abort." Or the decision to have an abortion is the same as the decision to contracept. And it goes on to explain. It says that, "For two decades, couples have based their intimate relationships on the availability of abortion should contraceptives fail." For two decades, couples have based their intimate relationships on the availability of abortion should contraceptives fail. Now in this whole Supreme Court decision, which is on abortion, there is not one mention of the humanity of the unborn child, not one mention of whether the fetus was a person or not. It's not even dismissed as a question. It's not even considered. But it does say we must have abortions because we have contraceptives. It's a necessity. For two decades, couples have counted on it should their contraceptives fail. The Supreme Court says so.
Now, again, I think in the 60's, it was not a stupid expectation that contraceptives would make for better marriages, fewer unwanted pregnancies, fewer abortions, but I think the cultural evidence today shows absolutely the contrary. And it's very hard for us to see because again, our culture, our president, his cabinet tell us that more and better contraceptives and more and greater access to abortion is absolutely necessary in this society, it's a good thing. (This was Bill Clinton, but you can easily apply it to Obama).


I used to believe that tripe too, until I was set straight by the director of a Crisis Pregancy Center who had the same experiences of Dr Smith. Conservatives have too, and they're not falling for the old trick. They won't accept contraceptives and sex ed which sells sex, since that's what caused the problem in the first place. The article in US News says,
"But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women."


Read the entire article in US News and World Report.
HT Spirit Daily

The Heroes of Notre Dame this weekend

Norma McCorvey, Fr Norman Weslin, and Joan Andrews Bell are in the front row.

We were with you in prayer.