Is
the Archbishop wrong? What do you think of this report.

Rome, Aug 19, 2008 / 10:00 am (CNA).-
The prefect of the Apostolic Signature, Archbishop Raymond Burke, said
this week that Catholics, especially politicians, who publically defend
abortion should not receive Communion, and that ministers of Communion
should be responsibly charitable in denying it to them if they ask for
it, “until they have reformed their lives.”

In an interview with the magazine, Radici Christiane, Archbishop
Burke pointed out that there is often a lack of reverence at Mass when
receiving Communion.  “Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ
unworthily is a sacrilege,” he warned.  “If it is done deliberately in
mortal sin it is a sacrilege.”

To illustrate his point, he referred to “public officials who, with
knowledge and consent, uphold actions that are against the Divine and
Eternal moral law. For example, if they support abortion, which entails
the taking of innocent and defenseless human lives.  A person who
commits sin in this way should be publicly admonished in such a way as
to not receive Communion until he or she has reformed his life,” the
archbishop said.

“If a person who has been admonished persists in public mortal sin
and attempts to receive Communion, the minister of the Eucharist has
the obligation to deny it to him. Why? Above all, for the salvation of
that person, preventing him from committing a sacrilege,” he added.

“We must avoid giving people the impression that one can be in a
state of mortal sin and receive the Eucharist,” the archbishop
continued.  “Secondly, there could be another form of scandal,
consisting of leading people to think that the public act that this
person is doing, which until now everyone believed was a serious sin,
is really not that serious -  if the Church allows him or her to
receive Communion.”

“If we have a public figure who is openly and deliberately upholding
abortion rights and receiving the Eucharist, what will the average
person think? He or she could come to believe that it up to a certain
point it is okay to do away with an innocent life in the mother’s
womb,” he warned.

Archbishop Burke also noted that when a bishop or a Church leader
prevents an abortion supporter from receiving Communion, “it is not
with the intention of interfering in public life but rather in the
spiritual state of the politician or public official who, if Catholic,
should follow the divine law in the public sphere as well.”

“Therefore, it is simply ridiculous and wrong to try to silence a
pastor, accusing him of interfering in politics so that he cannot do
good to the soul of a member of his flock,” he stated.

It is “simply wrong” to think that the faith must be reduced to the
private sphere and eliminated from public life, Archbishop Burke said,
encouraging Catholics “to bear witness to our faith not only in private
in our homes but also in our public lives with others in order to bear
strong witness to Christ.”

By Charles Krauthammer  November 30,
2007

"If human embryonic stem cell
research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not
thought about it enough."

– James A.
Thomson

A decade ago, Thomson was the first
to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya
Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the
discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem
cells.

Even a scientist who cares not a
whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because
it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is
over.

Which allows a bit of reflection on
the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President
Bush’s stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so
vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.

Why? Precisely because he took a
moral stance. Precisely because, to borrow Thomson’s phrase, Bush was made "a
little bit uncomfortable" by the implications of embryonic experimentation.
Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be
drawn.

In doing so, he invited unrelenting
demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists
and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on
the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical
politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity — a "moral ayatollah," as Sen. Tom
Harkin so scornfully put it.

Bush got it right. Not because he
necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better
line might have been drawn — between using doomed and discarded
fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and
using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research
cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of
enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on
requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral
considerations.

History will look at Bush’s 2001
speech and be surprised how balanced and measured it was, how much respect it
gave to the other side. Read it. Here was a presidential policy pronouncement
that so finely and fairly drew out the case for both sides that until the final
few minutes of his speech, you had no idea where the policy would end
up.

Bush finally ended up doing nothing
to hamper private research into embryonic stem cells and pledging federal monies
to support the study of existing stem cell lines — but refusing federal monies
for research on stem cell lines produced by newly destroyed
embryos.

The president’s policy recognized
that this might cause problems. The existing lines might dry up, prove
inadequate or become corrupted. Bush therefore appointed a President’s Council
on Bioethics to oversee ongoing stem cell research and evaluate how his
restrictions were affecting research and what means might be found to circumvent
ethical obstacles.

More vilification. The mainstream
media and the scientific establishment saw this as a smoke screen to cover his
fundamentalist, obscurantist, anti-scientific — the list of adjectives was
endless — tracks. "Some observers," wrote The Post’s Rick Weiss, "say the
president’s council is politically stacked."

I sat on the council for five years.
It was one of the most ideologically balanced bioethics commissions in the
history of this country. It consisted of scientists, ethicists, theologians,
philosophers, physicians — and others (James Q. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and me
among them) of a secular bent not committed to one school or the
other.

That balance of composition was
reflected in the balance in the reports issued by the council — documents of
sophistication and nuance that reflected the divisions both within the council
and within the nation in a way that respectfully presented the views of all
sides. One recommendation was to support research that might produce stem cells
through "de-differentiation" of adult cells, thus bypassing the creation of
human embryos.

That Holy Grail has now been
achieved. Largely because of the genius of Thomson and Yamanaka. And also
because of the astonishing good fortune that nature requires only four injected
genes to turn an ordinary adult skin cell into a magical stem cell that can
become bone or brain or heart or liver.

But for one more reason as well.
Because the moral disquiet that James Thomson always felt — and that George
Bush forced the country to confront — helped lead him and others to find some
ethically neutral way to produce stem cells. Providence then saw to it that the
technique be so elegant and beautiful that scientific reasons alone will now
incline even the most willful researchers to leave the human embryo
alone.

One of the most disturbing reports I’ve read in a long time: artificial life.

Wesley Smith puts matters, as usual, quite well in a recent article:

Infanticide, alas, has become a respectable notion, at least among some
elite opinion makers. History shows that this is how baby killing
begins — by convincing ourselves that there is such a thing as a human
life not worth living, and hence, not worth protecting. By calling for
a serious debate about infanticide, the [Royal College of Obstetricians
and Gynaecologists] has badly subverted the foundational moral
principle that each and every human being has equal moral value simply
and merely because he or she is human.

An interesting report on the WORLD blog site about Amazon’s move to correct a "glitch" in their search system in which a person entering the word "abortion" in the engine would receive a query at the top of the search results: "Did you mean adoption?"

A clear word of truth and affirmation for life from the Pope. I appreciate the fact that unlike the recent LCMS CTCR document on these same issue, this statement doesn’t mince words nor indulge in hand-wringing niceties or nuances, but simply says what must be said clearly and without any ambiguity.

Link: Health News Article | Reuters.com.

A new article by Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto.

Link: Concordia Seminary Institute of Lay Vocation: CALLED TO HEAL, NOT KILL.

Journalist Mollie Ziegler has a column in the New York Sun on the Pro-Choice Movement

How the Pro-Choice Movement Is Losing America

By MOLLIE ZIEGLER
February 1, 2006

Democrats have paid a heavy price for demanding that their elected
representatives support unrestricted access to abortion. In 1980,
Democrats dominated the House of Representatives with 292 members; 125
of them were pro-life. Now there are only 201 Democrats in the House,
and no more than 40 are pro-life. None are in leadership.
Abortion activists’ hard-line refusal to moderate has emboldened the
Democrat base but cost them widespread support. Many Americans believe
that at least some legal protections for unborn children are worthy -
a position that is anathema to the pro-choice movement. Activists
claim that 80% of the public supports legalized abortion, but their
greatest fear is that Roe v. Wade might be overturned.

Pro-choice advocates fight most of their political battles in the
courts because they worry about abortion laws being decided by the
democratic process on a state-by-state basis. And they probably have
good reason to worry. While the pro-choice base is strong, as
reflected in the million people it turned out for its 2005 March for
Women’s Lives, activists will be the first to tell you that 400
restrictions on abortion have been enacted throughout the country in
the last decade.

If the pro-choice position is as popular as pro-choice leaders claim,
how have pro-lifers racked up so many political wins?

The pro-choice movement ought to be reflecting on this state of
affairs. Instead, two new books from activists with the National
Abortion Rights Action League highlight how tone-deaf the movement has
become. They dismiss the views of religious Americans, fail to
understand the complexity of the abortion issue, and resort to
histrionic declarations of doom.

A former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Kate Michelman, gives
a personal look at the modern history of abortion rights in America in
"With Liberty and Justice for All: A Life Spent Protecting the Right
To Choose"(Hudson Street Press, 278 pages, $24.95). She begins with a
touching account of her fourth pregnancy, which occurred just before
her husband left her for another woman.

This being prior to Roe v. Wade, Ms. Michelman had to convince a
medical review board of her unfitness as a mother in order to receive
an abortion. Then she had to get permission from her philandering
husband. Ms. Michelman writes that she has "never, not once,
questioned my choice to have that abortion." The merits of such
consistency aside, the lack of rumination is carried on through the
next 200 pages of this light and unreflective memoir.

I suppose that something interesting must have happened in the
pro-choice movement over the last three decades, but if so, Ms.
Michelman keeps it secret. Instead she recounts mind-numbingly boring,
predictable, and platitudinous conversations about abortion laws and
judicial appointments with dozens of lawmakers. Ms. Michelman narrates
all stories with herself as the perfect hero, receiving praise from
all political corners.

NARAL Pro-Choice New York’s Cristina Page writes a book that fails to
even attempt to live up to its title: "How the Pro-Choice Movement
Saved America" (Basic Books, 256 pages, $24). Instead, its bizarre
thesis is that pro-life groups do not attempt to prevent abortion.
Rather, "they are against sex, and the sex lives the vast majority of
Americans enjoy."

Her odd claim that pro-lifers oppose sex for pleasure would be
laughable were it not espoused with vehemence. A book that critically
responds to the political work of either side of the abortion debate
would be welcome. Instead, she puts the worst possible construction on
a few select positions, notably a view among some pro-life advocates
that contraception is to be eschewed. She also conflates pro-life
opposition to abortifacients with opposition to all contraception.

Physicians who refuse to prescribe morning-after pills are "kooky" and
"outrageous." Their "dubious religious notions" cause them to engage
in "vigilante acts of obstruction-by-pharmacist." Apparently she
believes women should not be forced to have children they accidentally
conceived, but pharmacists should be forced to act against their
conscience.

Ms. Page is the Ann Coulter of the pro-choice movement. Not only are
reports that abortion causes lingering psychological damage false, but
girls who have abortions actually function better. Besides, everyone
knows that postpartum depression is a more legitimate concern for
women.

After calling President Reagan a "fundamentalist" and making an
obligatory comparison of pro-lifers and Iranian mullahs, Ms. Page
writes that the pro-choice movement "has been the realistic movement.
And if, as a result, it has given up the high ground of deeply felt,
religious intoned ‘values,’ it has gained something else. It has
science."

Apart from Ms. Page’s mocking of religious views and contention that
science is on her side, It seems that the pro-choice movement is the
one in thrall to ideology. The pro-life movement’s tactics of fighting
for incremental political gains in state legislatures and court
appointments is much more pragmatic than the pro-choice movement’s
rigid refusal to concede any ground against abortion on demand.

Both Ms. Michelman and Ms. Page claim in their books that the right to
abortion in some 30 states would likely be lost if Roe falls. With
yesterday’s confirmation of pro-life judge Samuel Alito to the closely
divided court, their concern may be legitimate. So why aren’t these
abortion advocates reaching out to the hearts and minds of American
voters, instead of writing books for their devoted fans?

Ms. Ziegler last wrote in these pages on Kate Bush.
http://www.nysun.com/article/26820?page_no=1

This is one to watch. In Illinois several pharmacists have sued after being terminated for refusing to give customers so-called "emergency contraception." Here in Missouri a Target pharmacist was fired for the same reason.

Link: BREITBART.COM – Pharmacists Sue Over Birth Control Policy.