ObamaCare is a problem for Catholics, Cardinal says in Respect Life Month message
Johanna Dasteel
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 28, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – The nation’s Catholic bishops are calling on their faithful to observe October as Respect Life Month, and pro-life activists are eager to answer the call.
“This October is a particularly important Respect Life Month, as we approach the most important national election we have ever had,” said Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life.
On Tuesday, Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, chairman on the Committee of Pro-life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement in honor of the annual observance.
Although he noted “Americans increasingly identify as pro-life,” and the nation has seen a decline in the number of abortions, he said Catholics must work to curb the “staggering” death toll due to euthanasia and abortion.
He also called attention to the fact that this situation stemmed from the nation’s history of medically neglecting vulnerable people.
“In time, neglect led to the acceptance of active measures to end the lives of such human beings, whose existence came to be viewed as a ‘burden,’” explained the Cardinal. “Now early induction and late-term abortion for ‘fetal anomalies,’ and doctor-assisted death by overdose for the sick and elderly, are not only State-approved but even publicly funded in some states.”
The Affordable Care Act poses serious problems for Catholics, according to the USCCB statement.
“Under the ‘preventive services’ mandate of the Affordable Care Act, Catholic employers and most Catholic institutions offering health coverage to their employees, will be forced to cover all these objectionable items,” said the Cardinal.
A subsequent mandate issued by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, after the passage of the ACA further restricts the rights of conscience for Catholics. The Cardinal explains, “Under the administration’s rule, even individuals who work for these Catholic institutions will have no right to reject such coverage for themselves or their minor children.”
The USCCB statement encourages Catholics to participate in “prayer services and educational conferences, engaging in public witness and advocacy, and helping to offer church and community services to those in need.”
It also points Catholics to their Respect Life Program resources. For instance, Cardinal DiNardo asked priests to use the USCCB’s homily notes for Respect Life Month.
Fr. Pavone said he and a phalanx of other priests are prepared to defend the unborn from the pulpit and altar. “The thousands of priests who belong to Priests for Life will respond to the call of the Lord, through their ordination, to preach clearly and vigorously about the need to protect the unborn and to elect public servants who know the difference between serving the public and killing the public,” he told LifeSiteNews.com. “The various documents of the bishops and of the Holy Father urge us to do this. Moreover, as we begin the Year of Faith, Priests for Life will illustrate how defending life is not something added to the Faith, but that flows from its very foundations.”
Cardinal DiNardo celebrated pro-life youth who “have come of age since Bl. Pope John Paul II inaugurated World Youth Day,” and recognized Catholics who were “ exposed for years to the media’s caricatures of Catholic teaching.”
Those Catholics, it goes on to say, “are often surprised by the wisdom and rightness of those teachings when they are given an opportunity to learn more about them. That is why Respect Life Month and the Year of Faith are vitally important.”
But not all Americans benefited from or held to those teachings. “A key aspect of this is offering the mercy of God to those who have had abortions,” Fr. Pavone told LifeSiteNews. “The bishops again emphasize this point, and Priests for Life carries it out in particular by overseeing the work of Rachel’s Vineyard, the world’s largest ministry for healing after abortion.”
Cardinal DiNardo is full of hot air, the same as Cardinal Dolan. They talk the talk but do the opposite in the name of political correctness.
AmChurch and the Great Pro-Life Betrayal
Part I
Cardinal DiNardo and Houston’s Planned Parenthood Supercenter
By Randy Engel, Director, USCL
Cardinal DiNardo’s Vigil Mass Homily
On the evening of Sunday, January 23, 2011, Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, Texas, served as the main celebrant and homilist at the Solemn Vigil Mass for Life at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D.C. The Mass is part of the many memorial events marking Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision of January 22, 1973. The Cardinal was joined by four fellow cardinals, 39 bishops, 400 priests, deacons, priests and religious, and thousands of Catholics pro-lifers, mostly young people.
DiNardo’s homily as Chair of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)’s Pro-Life Committee followed a pattern already familiar to pro-life marchers from previous years – Scriptural quotes and comments; a general welcome with special emphasis on the youthful contingent in the audience; a brief summary of anti-abortion legislation pending in Congress; a call for Christian unity; and finally a story about DiNardo’s prison ministry which is tied into the “Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty,” a program funded and operated by the USCCB Secretariat for Justice, Peace and Human Development not the Pro-Life Office.
DiNardo made no mention of euthanasia, contraception (abortifacients), sterilization; population control, lethal human embryo and fetal experimentation, classroom sex instruction programs which Planned Parenthood says are necessary to secure Roe v. Wade, pornography, homosexuality, sexual abuse, human vital organ transplantation and other dangers to human life and the family which make up part of the traditional broad spectrum of life issues facing Catholics today. His homily was pretty much a pro forma performance on abortion, with little real substance. The kind that we have come to expect from the AmChurch hierarchy.
Houston’s New Abortion Mega Center
Watching EWTN coverage of the Vigil Mass, I wondered how many Catholics in the audience were aware that Planned Parenthood’s newest and the second largest abortion super center in the world (China has the first), is located in the Cardinal’s back yard, on I- 45, just a few miles from the Archdiocese’s new Cathedral and renovated Chancery Office.
The 78,000 square foot free standing Planned Parenthood (PP) flagship houses fully-licensed ambulatory surgical suites for late-term infanticide killings up to six months plus one week gestation, birth prevention (read abortifacients) facilities, and regional administrative offices for 35 counties in Southeast Texas and Louisiana. Ironically, the renovated building, once a bank, is fashioned in the form of a cash register, a constant reminder to everyone that money is the nexus of PP. Each year, the lives of more than 80,000 babies are snuffed out by chemical and surgical abortion in PP’s Galveston-Houston facilities at $500 to $2,500 per life. Planned Parenthood is hoping that business will pick up with its new regional facility. PP says it cannot be held accountable for “faulty or omitted contraception,” hence the need for abortion as a back-up.
The new massive death machine located at the inner city intersection of four black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Houston will continue to serve as a genocidal extermination center for thousands of babies of minority women of low income. The nearby University of Houston and Texas Southern University will provide additional fodder for PP’s anti-life engine.
DiNardo Silent on Western Hemisphere’s Largest Aboritorium
Imagine how inspired, how fired up, Cardinal DiNardo’s listeners at the Vigil Mass would have been to hear how the Cardinal, like a modern-day Saint George, had undertaken a well-orchestrated and relentless campaign to slay the Planned Parenthood dragon. How he rallied his flock of one and a half million laypeople in opposition to the mega abortion center in his Archdiocese. Surely, this is stuff that legends are made of.
But alas! DiNardo was religiously silent on the subject at the Pro-life Vigil Mass. As silent as he had been the year before at the 2010 Vigil Mass, shortly after PP had announced its intensions to build its new Murder Inc. complex in Houston.
True to their mission, many national, state and especially Houston pro-life groups have been picketing and protesting PP’s massive killing center since day one. But Cardinal DiNardo, the Chair of AmChurch’s National Pro-Life Office, has been conspicuously silent over the past two years.
One of the few public statements he has made in opposition to the new PP mega- center was in early 2010 during the Protestant-led ecumenical “40 Days for Life” Prayer Campaign which was co-sponsored by the Houston Coalition for Life and the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.
In a jointly prepared media release dated March 4, 2010, DiNardo stated:
Our participation in this ecumenical effort is an opportunity to implement the prayer aspect of our Catholic prolife activities and also fulfill our call to Christian unity. … Followers of Christ share a belief in respect for all human life, from conception to natural death. Together, we will offer a prayerful, peaceful witness of our common commitment to the human person. … The opening of this new Planned Parenthood center in Houston calls all people of faith to defend innocent human life that is voiceless. … Prayer and witness on behalf of human life in the womb deserve our utmost attention as people dedicated to upholding human rights and the God-given dignity and worth of each person (emphasis added).”
However, the Cardinal has not given his “utmost attention” to the matter.
Indeed, to date, DiNardo has said little and done even less when faced with this reality of pure unadulterated evil in his own Archdiocese. The children being murdered are his flock. Doesn’t he care? He is supposed to be a shepherd not a hireling. Indeed, his crimson robes are a reminder that he must, if necessary, lay down his life for his flock, not throw them under a Planned Parenthood bus.
Sadly, as I shall document in my next installment to this series, DiNardo is but one of many in a long-line of post-Conciliar AmChurch bishops whose silence and inaction have brought moral ruin and death to America’s shores.
Cardinal DiNardo’s silence and inaction is a scandal of the first degree not only to Houston Catholics, but also to Catholics throughout the U.S., because the Cardinal represents the head of the USCCB Pro-Life Committee. Clearly, the Committee needs a new leader.
- End-
Note: Part II of this commentary “How AmChurch Bishops Opened the Door to Roe v. Wade” is scheduled to appear in April 2011.
Contact Information: Randy Engel, Director, USCL
rvte61@comcast.net
Box 315, Export, PA 15632 724 – 327 – 7379
Cardinal DiNardo refuses to acknowledge and protest the largest Planned Parenthood abortuary in the U.S., which is literally in the heart of his Archdiocese, yet he treks to 50 miles north to Huntsville, Texas to pull off his Rembert Weakland type seemless garment parade.
Saying they want to promote the sanctity of life, several hundred people traveled to Huntsville Monday morning. The group was made up mostly of Catholics, including one very prominent one – Cardinal Daniel DiNardo.
They said their protest was to call attention to the value of life, whether unborn or condemned, which is why the group ended their procession at TDCJ’s death row.
The prayers were as constant as the step. The procession moved forward at a steady clip as over 300 people walked quietly through the heart of Huntsville from the Planned Parenthood offices traveling north of the Walls Unit. It was a chance, many say, to protest against abortion and state executions of convicted criminals.
Oh LOTI, you go and wreck it for the neos. C’mon, it’s a pro life cardinal! With pro life priest, Fr. Pavone — his title says it, “Priests for Life.” His groupies in the newchurch bubble deserve such a pro life show. Don’t wake them up. Don’t deprive them of those “USCCB’s homily notes for Respect Life Month,” stuff like aborted babies go to Heaven, vaccines grown in murdered baby flesh are OK for your kids, immigrants are people, too, Democrats care for people, don’t get uppity, be tolerant like moslems, etc.
After being to the USCCB’s web site and trying several ways of searching, I’m having a hard time finding the link for the USCCB’s homily notes for Respect Life Month. Can you or anyone else help please, with something more than the link for the home page? I’ve already checked out one of their pamphlets for Respect Life and am frankly appalled, but wondering if there’s a better page, something perhaps similar to the easy way of finding the daily readings, where you can review upcoming homily notes. Anyone?
Ipecac works just as well.
Last time I visited the USCCCP site was to get a link to their April letter on “religious liberty” that creates “Seamless Garment II,” raising amnesty for criminal border invaders to be a critical issue for voters.
The bottom line on pro life is Pope John Paul II’s terrible “Gospel of Life” letter that put aborted babies in Heaven (redacted) and opposed the Church’s 2000-year-old support for capital punishment. That pretty well doctrinally castrates all the bishops and priests. Basically, murder doesn’t deserve a suitable punishment, and after all, the victims go to Heaven anyhow.
The monthly USCCB “Word of Life” pdf files at www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/resources-for-the-eucharist/word-of-life/ supposedly include “occasional homily notes” along with petitions for the prayer of the faithful and quotes for the Sunday bulletin. I checked a few of the files for recent months (including the October 2012 Respect Life Month) and could find no homily notes. You may have to check other Catholic sources to find such homilies; for example, the following for last year’s Respect Life Sunday at gerardnadal.com/2011/10/01/homily-for-respect-life-sunday/