Catholic Excuses 5 -23

Catholic Excuses 5 – 23
Your family access to the blog is: cinops be gone Tuesday, July 1, 2008
(Correction: yesterday’s “Catholic Social Studies Principles” s/b Cath. Soc. Justice Pr.)

It is an honor to have David Carlin’s book, Can a Catholic Be a Democrat? on this blog for the 23rd time. We are in Chapter 5 section, Catholic Excuses, p. 115-125. It’s about voting for a political party of abortion, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research. These are not prudential issues but absolutely intrinsically evil issues. Catholics can disagree on the prudential issues.

What follows are direct excerpts which will help for instance, explain the mind-set of Obama’s National Catholic Advisors today and their supporters.

44. The Primacy of Conscience: “Nothing is right or wrong, but thinking makes it so,”

“And of course, since average human nature has a great capacity for self-deception, this Catholic politician will find that his “honest” feelings can be strongly influenced by those who hold the key to his political future. He won’t heed Natural Law or the pronouncements of the popes, but he will heed the wishes of the constituents – and especially the wishes of his major campaign contributors.
Cardinal Newman held that the voice of conscience was the voice of God within us. It’s obvious, then, that Newman never had the privilege of meeting a twenty-first century Catholic Democratic member of Congress. For if he had, he would have realized that sometimes the “voice of conscience” is the voice of ideologues, usually those with deep pockets.”

45. The Seamless Garment: “We must be concerned with all life issues.”

“Another method Catholics use to validate their membership in the Democratic Party, despite the party’s anti-Christian moral agenda, goes like this: they concede that abortion for example, is morally wrong and that it’s tragically wrong for the Democratic Party to support it; but then they talk about what they need for “balance” and the importance of not taking a single-issue approach to politics. “The Democrats,” they say, “might be wrong on a few issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage – but they are right about so many other important issues: race, poverty, peace, education, health care, the environment” …

46. “At all events, in the end, Bernadin’s “consistent ethic of life” proposal came to nothing of significance. Its only lasting consequence can be found in the Catholics who misunderstood it (deliberately, in more than a few cases), invoking the seamless to rationalize their support for liberal Democratic politicians. “I’m sorry to have to admit that Sen. X is wrong on abortion,” they said, “But please note that he’s right on everything else that the late, great Cardinal Bernardin was concerned about: taxes, health care, education, welfare, racism, sexism, war, capital punishment, and anything else you can mention. His consistent ethic-of-life record is eighty or ninety percent – not perfect, but far better than the record of his so-called ‘pro-life’ Republican opponent.”

“This superficially persuasive line of reasoning could have been used to support the Nazis in the 1930s. A pro-Nazi Catholic could say, “Oh yes, it’s too bad – the policy of the Fuehrer toward the Jews. We deplore the firing of Jewish professors, we deplore the Nuremberg laws, we deplore Kristellnacht. But anti-Semitism, while a great evil, isn’t the only evil. Far from it. We have to balance the evil done by the National Socialists against the good they’ve accomplished. Hitler has revived the economy, has restored law and order, has built autobahns and VW… Are they better than the available alternatives – namely, socialist and communists? The answer to this question is, without doubt, yes.”

George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish and Vietnamese.