The following comes from a June 20 story in Crisis Magazine.
Last week, during an exchange with a reporter from the Weekly Standard about Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors in the City of Brotherly Love, Nancy Pelosi again proclaimed her fealty to the highest sacrament in the leftist church: the mass murder of the unborn….
But Pelosi’s eyewash aside, the real import of her remarks is that they remind us of an ugly truth: Catholic Democrats played a significant role in the creation of the contraceptive culture that led to the legalization of abortion. A Catholic, for instance, invented the birth-control pill, and it was Catholic clergy in Boston, for example, who cooperated in repealing the state’s ban on the sale of contraceptives.
In 1963, Cardinal Richard James Cushing, archbishop of Boston, appeared on a radio program and suggested that laws forbidding the sale of contraceptives should be repealed because “I have no right to impose my thinking, which is rooted in religious thought, on those who do not think as I do,” a reversal of his publicly stated position in 1948. Cushing was merely repeating what John F. Kennedy told the Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, which also prefigured Catholic New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s famous “personally-opposed-but …” position on abortion.
The Catholic role in repealing the laws on contraception is only part of the story. As Phil Lawler reported in his book, Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, the scheme to legalize abortion took place not in a candle-lit basement where Satanists celebrated black masses, but at the home of America’s leading Catholic family, the Kennedys.
In 1964, Lawler wrote, leftist Catholic priests Robert Drinan, Charles Curran and other theologians convened at Hyannis Port, Mass., with the brain trust behind the Senate campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. They concocted the teaching that abortion could be justified if it were the “lesser of two evils” and that “a blanket prohibition might be more harmful to the common good” because political leaders might “impose their own private views on public policy. …The skillful operatives of the Kennedy family would round up the votes to end restrictions on abortion and eventually provide public subsidies.
The Jesuit theologians would provide protective cover” and sabotage Catholic teaching in the universities. “Thus, the basic lines of ‘pro-choice’ rhetoric were sketched out by Catholic theologians, at the residence of America’s most famous Catholic family, nine years before the Roe v. Wade decision….”
To read entire story, click here.
“I have no right to impose my thinking, which is rooted in religious thought, on those who do not think as I do,”: Cardinal Cushing in this statement spit in the eye of God. Jesus told the apostles to disciple the nations; then Cdl Cushing tells Jesus to go away and stop bothering people. Which cardinal, Cushing or Mahony, comes closest to Judas Iscariot?
And it was he, the then Archbishop Cushing, who, as Phil Lawler has in his book, had Fr. Feeney excommunicated for teaching the then obscure, but defined, doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church. This caused the Church the embarassment of having to vindicate Fr. Feeney by the euphemistic process of reconciliation without abjuration. The English colony branch of the American Church hid the Faith for Protestant acceptance (Americanism) up until Cushing denied it saying “that’s hate speech”, so now we are in the pits, unable to discipline politicians or teach the Faith without erroneous exceptions.
Skai it’s interesting how they say that they have no right to impose their thinking but they sure impose something on us…….and they do it violently….if only these wicked men can hear the heavens cry violently for these sins of killing the unborn and their advancing and imposing the unnatural.
I believe the good Cardinal Cushing is correct. If the Catholic heirarchy can dictate the civil law, then we have a Roman Catholic theocracy. The heirarchy can present official Church positions. They can even point out the perceived ‘error’ in contrary positions.
Remember American history. There is a reason religion is mentioned in the First Amendment.
Great Commission: Go into all the world, preaching the Gospel and discipling the nations. So, mike magee, you and Jesus have a dispute … go for it, dude. There is a goddess of the American church, and she is called the Statue of Liberty. So you have to decide whether to follow mammon or God; when is the last time the US govt promised you heaven? or did it promise you some version of what it defines as liberty? Which do you prefer, the golden calf or Heaven?
It is mentioned so that the government cannot disalow the practice of relition IN PUBLIC or anywhere else. Protection of the practice of one’s faith is protected whether that person is in public office or not. BUT they must practice it, and faithfully, or they are responsible for the error that they create and enforce by their own authority, given by the people, whom they govern. You can’t have it both ways, unless you live a a duplicitous life. You either ARE a Catholic, and practice according to the teaching of the Catholic Faith, or you claim you are Catholic, and do not practice that faith, in public or private.
Cardinal Cushing was correct to not want to impose ‘his’ thinking. His duty as shepherd was to sanctify by teaching of the preciousness of God’s gift of life, beginning in the womb. His statement subverted the sanctity of life to the detriment of the people of God, especially the most vulnerable.
As Cushing preached during the Kennedy Inaugural smoke rose from the lectern, some thought it was a defective heater.
The contraception battle wasn’t joined at Boston, it was at the Vatican. Pope Paul VI inherited the Population Commission from John XXIII and kept the issue alive through very thorough discussion and debate. In 1966, the full Commission voted 52-4 to overturn the Church’s ban on artificial contraception (excluding abortion, of course). The recommendation was then reviewed by a panel of Cardinals who voted 9-3 that conception was not intrinsically evil, voted 9-5 that such a recommendation would not be inconsistent with past Church teaching, and voted 14-1 for the Church to release these findings as soon as possible. The report was then submitted to Pope Paul VI, who privately wrestled with the issue for two years before upholding the Church’s traditional ban on contraception in 1968’s Humanae Vitae. The Church is still suffering from the tidal wave of rejection by the laity that greeted that encyclical in the years following 1968. Most US priests privately disavow it, and rejection by the laity in the US is approximately 80%. You can’t keep a credible rulemaking authority at the Vatican with that kind of antipathy. Pope Francis would be well advised to cut the Church’s losses by acknowledging the obvious, that the 1968 decision was wrong, that responsible Christian family planning provides enormous benefits, and that keeping the ban of abortion is far more important and urgent than constantly arguing about the Pill.
Jesuit John Murray was instrumental in getting state of Massachusetts to abolish its ban on birth control, but couched it as a Catholic way of continuing to administer the own faithful to its teachings, but leaving the larger society to set up its own rules.
I hate to have to point out the rather of obvious fallacy of assuming a teaching is wrong if most people disagree with it. The evil of contraception has been taught by the Church all throughout its history. It is a solemn and unchangeable teaching even if no one agrees with it.
The argument I have heard ridiculed the most is the “slippery slope”.
It’s also very true. Next time someone scoffs at it, I can refer them to this article, too.
Its the Catholic Politicians that have the blood of the unborn in their hands. How far will man go…..they take for granted our Lord and His warnings.
“I have no right to impose my thinking, which is rooted in religious thought, on those who do not think as I do”
Ergo, since virtually all man-made laws are “rooted in religious thought”, no one has the right to impose his or her thinking on the immorality of rape, pederasty, pedophilia, pornography, bestiality, murder, theft, lying, etc., on others, right?
Through God His justice will be served. He knows all including the intentions and thoughts in the hearts and souls of men and women, no one can escape His justice, and because the consequences of our actions are truly known by God, we deserve every morsel of His judgment. God is perfect!
Then came the breast and other cancer era for young and middle-aged women and the pollution of our waterways from women having taken the carcinogen the Birth Control Pill. Thanks! Cardinal Cushing for your lack of foresight and prudence. It would have been better had you said, “It ain’t nice to fool Mother Nature.” I was told by Protestants at that time that some of the Kennedys used birth control. I did not believe them then, but I do now.
JFK appointed Byron White to the Supreme Court and even though, he has passed on he is to this day the Court’s strongest voice for the pro life movement having written many eloquent dissenting opinions on the issue. RFK jr is pro life and so too, was his mother. Democrats who are pro life understand the economic and cultural restraints for young women who are pregnant. It is rumored that FDR in his latter years realized this as well which, is why he proposed the Second Bill of Rights.
Also, if you think that the Republican Party are pro life then, I encourage you to go back and listen to the Nixon tapes and why he stacked the courts to legalize abortion. Additionally, a then Gov Reagan of liberal California eagerly opened the doors of many clinics.
Both parties are corrupt but the pro life Democrats get it.