Obama and Archbishop Raymond Burke

Obama and Archbishop Raymond Burke
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Saturday, September 19, 2009

Excerpts of Editorial by Robert Moynihan, “Inside the Vatican,” June – July 2009:

Burke’s remarks were made on May 8th in Washington, D.C., at the National Prayer Breakfast. Obama’s remarks were made on May 17 at the University of N.D.

The crux of the issue, the place where the visions of the two men cannot be reconciled, is simple to understand. It is the question of human life – the life of the unborn baby – and whether that human life has a claim to protection by law.

Burke’s position is that all human life has a life to be protected. For Burke, reason (natural law) teaches that all human societies should provide a benevolent protection for human life through laws. A society that does not do so, a society which allows a class of human beings to be killed without any legal sanction, introduces, in Burke’s view, a profound injustice into its legal system, with consequences that ripple out, undermining the respect for justice, and for human life, throughout society.

Obama presented a different vision – that justice is something relative, that the highest principle of human social order is not to find justice itself, and protect it with just laws, but to honor and respect the moral judgments of others, even if those judgments are unjust. In this vision, wrong has rights. It has rights because the goal is to reconcile competing visions of an uncertain moral law, not to arrive at justice itself.

This is Obama’s principle of “common ground,” where wrong and right are equally at home. “When we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do –or believe what we do – that’s when we discover, at least the possibility of common ground,” Obama said. “That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with moral and spiritual dimensions. So let’s work together to reduce the number of abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term.” {Clever!}

For Burke the highest principle is justice: if an action is unjust, it cannot be made just by human law.

For Obama, the highest principle seems to be a type of social peace: if an action is unjust, it can still be permitted for the sake of the supposed “peace” of society.

Burke finds in justice the measure of human action. Obama, seemingly, IN UTILITY, the useful.

And out of this difference, two types of human society inevitably unfold and develop: one based on justice, on what is good and right, the other on utility, on what is useful at the moment, without regard to transcendent consideration of the good or the just – our present society.

And the consequences are grave in all areas of human life, including family life, including the justice or injustice of the society’s financial system & the organization of its financial system & the organization of its economy – areas where the upcoming encyclical of the Pope will clarify how justice must be the goal of economic systems & laws….

George H. Kubeck: The above is the gauntlet that should be thrown at the minds of all U.S. Catholic-in-name-only politicians. If they refuse; the offender no longer belongs to the community. These are the words of Jesus Christ. That is best for individual and Church.