The
Legacy of Cardinal Bernardin’s Common Ground Seamless Garment, Which is a Rag!
http://www.catholiccitizens.org/press/contentview.asp?c=9919
If Canon 915 and "A common excommunication is
automatically incurred by receiving or participating in an abortion" are
true, what's so hard for the US Bishops to understand?
11/15/2003 2:43:00 PM
By An essay by Barb Kralis
Tuesday, November 11, 2003, the USCCB attempted to consider
which Catholic politicians who dissent from Magisterial teachings should be
denied the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Catholic World News reported ' Some
bishops didn't want to limit the issues to abortion, but also wanted to include
"the use of the death penalty, questions of war and peace, the role of
marriage and family, the rights of parents to choose the best education for
their children, the priority for the poor, and welcome for immigrants" among
the criteria for judging the politicians.' What
was surprising to many of us watching from the pews was the resurrection of the
late Cd. Joseph Bernardin's social 'seamless garment' theory that seemingly
will haunt us until the end of time.
Do these above mentioned social issues constitute mortal sin and grounds for
excommunication in the same way that Abortion/Euthanasia do? Are these other
human issues to be classed in the same category as infallible teachings in
faith and morals? Or, are our U.S. Bishops creating a diversion against Canon
Law 915?
Joseph Cardinal Bernardin was general secretary of the United States
Catholic Conference (USCC) from 1968 to 1972 and its president from 1974 to
1977. His famous initiative for a 'seamless garment' or 'consistent ethic of
life' was introduced at a lecture at Fordham University in New York and was to
have important ramifications for the development of a Catholic bioethic in
America.
For over two decades, Bernardin's flawed
quality of life theory has provided 'cover' for countless pro abort politicians
to falsely claim they're pro life (Cuomoism) and has enabled Catholic
University academics to support abortion. Still today, Bernardin's theory lures
perhaps tens of thousands of Catholics at each election to support and vote for
the pro abortion candidates of their choice. Bernardin is still in control of
the direction of the 'American Church.'
The 'Single Issue' of Abortion/Euthanasia is being diluted once again by the
politically correct U.S. Bishops with other human sustenance issues; i.e.,
housing, global warming, war, capital punishment (holy criminy, they forgot to
include gun control) as if they were somehow equal. In fact, none of the other issues could exist without the
right to life issue of Abortion/Euthanasia. All other issues affirm this one
single issue.
The Abortion/ Euthanasia issue is most unique; it involves the killing of
the innocent. The USCCB are sure to hide that fact in their PC assessment of
who should be denied sacrilegious Holy Communion. Forgetting Canon Law, which
requires them to enforce restrictions against reception of the Eucharist, the
U.S. Bishops are going to show us laity that we can't tell them how to conduct
their affairs.
The true Catholic position on
Abortion/Euthanasia admonishes us to hold it to a heroic degree.
This one, single issue is decisive and defining and nothing is more important
than the preserving the life of the innocent. Anyone, be it a politician, an
abortion mill worker, a murderous doctor or nurse, who formally promotes or
provides legislation or medical service for Abortion/Euthanasia must be denied Holy Communion. This issue must first be
clearly defined by the U.S. Bishops. No other issues carry the same burden as
Abortion/Euthanasia.
So, will we once again see tree hugging Bernardin Legacy followers beating a
dead horse, animating 'seamless garment' propaganda, while erroneously teaching
that "Everyone has a right to receive Communion. We cannot judge; only
Jesus can judge their worthiness?" That
surely would put the kabash on our God given duty to make rational judgments
against good and evil, right and wrong. And, it would undermine and deeply
compromises those courageous hard working Catholics politicians who truly are
'pro life.'
It's not hard to decide who receives Holy
Communion, so why muddy the waters with countless confusing issues. Catholics
who are obstinate manifest (public) sinners (and not just politicians), 'who
persist in grave sins are not to be admitted to reception of the Eucharist.'
(Canon 915). Furthermore, "A common excommunication is automatically
incurred by receiving or participating in an abortion" (c. 1398) Finis.
###
Barbara Kralis is a Catholic writer for various Catholic publications. She
and her husband, Mitch, co-direct the
Jesus Through Mary Foundation in Howe, Tx. Barbara is also a member of
Catholic Media Coalition, an association of
Catholic lay writers and editors (www.catholicmediacoalition.org). Barbara
can be reached at: AveMaria@earthlink.net.
An addendum by
Gary L. Morella
Cardinal Bernardin was not a Catholic, as
evidenced by his common ground initiative, which I would argue
was primarily responsible for putting pro-life issues on
the backburner in favor of his "seamless garment", which
proved to be a rag! It was due in no small part to Bernardin
that we have pseudo-Catholics like Cuomo, Leahy, Kennedy, ad nauseam, who
have no problems supporting the entirety of the culture-of-death in
the name of Catholicism! Bernardin was indefensible in regard
to his bastardization of the Faith to the extreme of giving orders for a
publicly identified sodomite choir to sing at his funeral.
You
do not have other issues such as peace and social justice without life,
but that did not stop Bernardin from placing all of these in the same
category as life via his seamless garment. To be pro-life means to
be pro-ETERNAL-life, with the supernatural taking precedence over the natural,
something that many have forgotten in the Church today.
You
can support
capital punishment as a Catholic, which has always been the consistent Catholic teaching.
Jesus Christ Himself did not condemn capital punishment on the cross in his
comments to the Good Thief when He had the opportunity to do so.
Rather, Christ, unlike many in the modernist Church, realized that it is
the supernatural, which should by our priority, not the natural. To equate capital punishment with abortion is
nonsensical. The former deals with morally justified punishment of
the guilty; the latter deals with the immoral murdering of the innocent!
You would think that Catholics would at least get that right.
We
must not be satisfied with just "choosing a good to limit an evil." Catholics are called to be more than that. If
we are satisfied, we will never overturn Roe V. Wade.
The disciples of the devil are not inclined to be so limiting. They
are an "all or nothing" group. Why
should Catholics be anything less? The
problem that I have is that I see people who are willing to say, "This is
all that we can do," which is not true. Why should we apologize for being Catholic? Why should
believers be embarrassed in fear of allowing themselves to be
marginalized by politicos? Why should we
be reticent to say to the disciples of the devil, "We have had quite enough of your tripe, and we do
not have to stand for the barbarity of a world that you would force upon
our children and grandchildren? Why should we have to let the devil dictate our future? WE DO
NOT! And
unless we start to take the bull by the horns and stop using the language of
the secularists to defeat them, which is
ultimately futile in not showing the relationship between Faith and reason,
as the teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas did in regards to his
"preambles to the Faith", which are knowable through reason with
Faith enabling reason, and reason, in turn, reinforcing Faith, we are going to lose the culture wars. The God Who gave us Faith also gave us
reason. The two cannot contradict each other. If they did, God
would be a liar, which is impossible since He is All-Everything, to include
being All-Good. The last I heard Catholics are supposed to believe in
this All-Good God. Moreover, they are not
required to apologize to anyone for doing so. Nor are they required to be
quiet about holding to such a belief.
I
do not have any problems with limiting evil; I am
just uncomfortable with living with a degree of it to do it, which I
find increasingly hypocritical as a Catholic. Where I have
difficulties is in believing that this is ALL THAT WE SHOULD BE DOING, which is
the mindset of many of those who see no difficulties with forgetting that
the ultimate goal is to eradicate evil. That is CATHOLIC
teaching, not limiting it. Read Sacred
Scripture about which roads are easier traversed for the sake of our eternal
salvation. The Church teaching on the life of the mother, for
example, is that everything should be done to save BOTH the lives of the
Mother and her child, since both are equal in the eyes of God. If the
death of the child results from such an attempt, then that is not an immoral
act. We are getting into a minefield by
spending too much time dwelling on what is less evil than others as
Catholics. That moves us away from Catholic teaching, not closer to
it.
I
repeat, "Is the other side interested in limiting belief in the
Almighty and His laws?" No, they want to eradicate it. Why
should we have any less of a mindset in fighting the battles in the culture
wars as Catholics? We should be setting the example. It ought to be clear to us by now, given the
hysterical reaction of the devil and his minions to President Bush's PBA ban
signing (it is a sad day for America when the
elimination of infanticide has to be debated in the halls of Congress), and the Terri Schiavo case, that we are getting nowhere by being "nice" to the
devil, i.e., compromising our beliefs by putting politics ahead of what we know
to be the Perfect Truth that is a Someone, not a something.
How
can a Catholic in effect legitimize Mortal Sin by making concessions
to the secularists? A baby is just as dead regardless of whether it
happens one second after conception or one second prior to
birth. Catholics are supposed to consistently remind the world of
that irrefutable fact! What the heck is going on here? Those
who do not are supposed to be our leaders? They are doing nothing more
than adding to the confusion of an already confused Church on practically every
moral issue. Maybe if some of our
bishops had the guts to preach Catholicism on all of the hot button issues
going to the root cause of the culture war, the contraceptive mentality of the
age, we would not be in the mess that we find ourselves.
Catholic
moral theology has always been that "the end does not justify the
means. You do not do an evil for a greater good. Is still allowing
the killing of infants for whatever tortured reasons that the secularists come
up with in terms of a "limiting" philosophy a real good? I
would argue that by not preaching Catholicism and witnessing to Jesus Christ
via the Church that He founded upon the Rock that is Peter, we are doing an
"evil" that is condemned in that aforementioned Catholic moral
theology axiom. So what do we have? We are doing an evil for what
is not even close to being a "good". We fail on all counts
because we have become political, not Catholic.
All
things being equal, one must give evidence of being a Catholic first and
foremost by standing up for the hard teachings of the Church in the culture
war, else this war risks being lost. And
if we continue to lose sight of the fact that using the language of the
secularists takes us away from Catholicism, not toward it, we are putting
ourselves in grave danger of a final end that may be far different than what we
anticipate by our actions, which man justifies, not God.
I
cannot believe, that if the Catholic Church would have
spoken out with ONE CLEAR CATHOLIC VOICE on all of the hard teachings
when they became public issues from: 1) the Anglican Lambeth Conference of the '30s, which legitimized contraception after
centuries of Christian teaching to the contrary, thus encouraging all
forms of sexual promiscuity for which we are reaping the results today in
terms of skyrocketing STD rates among our youth, the disintegration of marriage
and the family with the two genders of Genesis no longer sufficing
courtesy of three more from the devil, (homosexuals, bisexuals, and
something called transgendereds), and the promotion of homosexuality as a civil
right in an affirmative action sense, to 2) Roe v. Wade and
Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which made the killing of babies legal, and man a god unto
himself respectively with the ability to define the laws of his own moral
universe in total ignorance of the inevitable collision with his
neighbor's in the absence of universal moral absolutes, to 3) Lawrence v. Texas, which made self destructive aberrant unnatural behavior,
contrary to any sense of promoting the common good, NO BIG THING, that these heinous evils would have been given a secular
life, no questions asked.
Interestingly
enough, all of the aforementioned hard teachings are reinforced by reason, not just Faith, which begs the question, "Why
should they be considered 'hard teachings' in that they follow directly by
applying common sense, which is THE characteristic of the Natural Law given to
us by a Loving God for the sake of our natural finite well-being leading
ultimately to our supernatural eternal well-being?"
In
simplistic terms the Natural Law can be defined as "doing good, and
avoiding evil." This "natural" good is what is classically
understood from the time of Aristotle's Politics as
defining a good regime, the tendency toward which MUST be the primary
consideration of a respected state for the welfare of its
citizenry. This is a law knowable through reason exclusive of any
connotations of revelation, as even cannibals know that "it is not good to
be eaten."
Formerly, the Natural Law is an ethics that recognizes: 1) all
things have a nature, essence or purpose a principle which is relatively
uncontroversial; 2) that nature in question is good; all things have
an internal principle that makes them tend towards what is good; 3) it is good
for things to act in accord with their nature.
For
animals reproduction is a necessary good for survival, which makes references
to homosexuality for animals an aberration. More to the point, what
benefits society when rational humans are sarcastically compared to
animals? Is this lowest common denominator approach THE standard by which
the human race is now to be measured?
How is promoting the common good achieved by killing innocents in the
womb, which never considers the “good” of what once we ALL were, and promoting
sodomy as a civil right in an affirmative action sense, which makes no sense,
given the well documented adverse consequences for doing so per the Center for
Disease Control HIV/AIDS Surveillance Reports which have consistently shown
that the main reservoir for AIDS in America is in the homosexual
community? What is good about confusing an orifice intended solely for
waste with one for reproduction?
Of course, the problem is that the Catholic Church gives the world the
impression that it does not really believe in what it professes to by
continuously compromising what is uncompromisable. Why, for
example, cannot Catholics let the world know that the PBA ban is the
very least that can be done to destroy the evil that is killing infants, in what
should be their safest place of refuge, their mothers' wombs? Why cannot
Catholics, especially Catholic politicians, admit that "Yes, we fully
intend to stamp out this evil ASAP, along with every other evil that is against
God's Natural Law." Why do Catholics have to be hesitant
in that regard? Moreover,
how can they be considered Catholic if they do not let the world know
about the grave evil involved in ignoring the Natural Law, the
consequences of which appear daily in the world press?
Again,
limiting evil must be done. But we must never forget that this
"limiting" is not an end unto itself. And if something does
not sound right, it usually is not. Catholics
have to start asking themselves, "Does it sound right to allow evil to
limit it?" If that is the case, how can there ever be a legitimate
attempt to eradicate evil if for every step forward along those lines, steps
backward are required? This
"limiting" thing is a two-edged sword, as you rapidly come to the
realization that you are dealing with essentially what is an infinite
regress in that "limiting" is all that is achievable when that is the
only goal. And even if one argues that man cannot completely eradicate
evil as a result of the concupiscence due to Original Sin, does that mean that Catholics cannot set the example for man,
following traditional Church teaching, to at least make the attempt via the
example of the saints? Does that mean that Catholics cannot take it upon themselves
to educate purported pro-life candidates to this Truth, spelled with a capital
"T" in order to "limit" our need for "limiting
arguments?” And this education most certainly must include formal
excommunication in the case of heretical pro-culture-of-death Catholics for the
sake of the souls of all concerned, not the least of which are their own.
That is showing true love and compassion by telling the Truth Who is Christ,
not de facto promoting the lies of the devil by doing NOTHING!
What
I see in this country is the result of Catholics embarrassed to be Catholic,
clergy and laity alike. What I see is a failure to take that
aforementioned "bull by the horns" and tell the world,
especially in America, "As Catholics, we
do not have to stand still for the secularists' insane promotion of evil
at all costs to particularly include our immortal souls." And as Catholics we have
a right to speak out in accord with the complete teaching of our Faith in that
regard. We do not have to compromise our Faith at the door in ANY walk of
life. And if the secularists do not understand that, e.g., the ACLU
and their radical left facilitators, especially in our institutions of
"lower learning" where amorally mindless Clintonian automatons are
turned out every four to five years, then that is THEIR problem, NOT ours! We have the complete history of the Church on moral
issues on our side in this matter, as the Church has been consistently right
from its founding on the consequences of ignoring the Natural Law of God, which
is a participation in His Divine Eternal Law.
It
is ONLY by giving a complete Catholic witness to the Faith that true, not
false, ecumenism occurs with conversions ala
Malcolm Muggeridge's resulting. Recall that it was the Church teaching
against contraception that cinched it for Mr. Muggeridge. Catholicism is
called to stand in contradiction to the world. Today, too many pseudo-Catholics ignore this charge in
favor of accommodating the world's errors by making Catholicism not only
indistinguishable from every other religion in a indifferent syncretistic
sense to mollify the masses as a narcotic, the
evidence for this being a Mass that is becoming increasingly unrecognizable as
Catholic (lex credendi, lex
orandi, "what we believe
is shown by how we pray" with "drums in the deep" replacing the
music of the Angels, Gregorian Chant, for but one example as the Mass continues
to devolve from Holy Sacrifice to entertainment), but also even
paganism in many instances, as evidenced by the recent reports of the
desecration of the Fatima Shrine in Portugal by allowing the worship of false
gods.
With
the help of God, through the intercession of Mary, Saint Joseph, and all
of the Archangels, Angels and Saints, which is the Church Triumphant in Heaven,
in unity with the Church Suffering in Purgatory, we, the Church Militant on
Earth, as a part of the Mystical Body of Christ, must make an unequivocal Catholic witness to the Faith for the sake
of our eternal salvation. If we do this, we will be practicing authentic
ecumenism in fulfilling what Christ asked us to do in the last paragraph of the
Gospel of Matthew by converting the world to the one, true Faith, which He
founded upon the Rock that is Peter, and his successors as Vicars of Christ on
Earth.
Gary
L. Morella