UPDATE.2: In 1962, New Orleans Archbishop Joseph Rummel excommunicated four Louisiana Catholic politicians for publicly opposing his decree that archdiocesan schools be desegregated. Paul on Dolan’s duties as a pastor is found in this passage from I Corinthians 5: UPDATE: A Catholic reader e-mails to say that the relevant instruction from St. To apply an apt vulgarism of LBJ’s to this situation, Cardinal Dolan thinks he’s saving his face, but he’s really losing his ass. If the gates of hell do not prevail against the Catholic Church, it will not be thanks to genial backslappers like the cardinal archbishop of New York. How on earth can you reconcile the first part of this letter with its conclusion? The only thing I can see is that either Dolan does not believe a word of what he’s saying about abortion and the abortion bill, or he is afraid. “Horrific,” he says, and “grisly.”Īnd then, the cardinal turns around and says, but the Bible tells me to play nice. The cardinal accurately described the abortion bill, championed by the Catholic governor, as a grotesque moral evil that shocks the conscience.
With gratitude for your attention, and promising my prayers as I ask for yours, I am, Thank God we have the promise of Jesus that “not even the gates of hell will prevail.” No matter the hurt, frustration, the disappointment, and yes, even the anger we may feel nowĪt the passage of this horrific and grisly bill, we should not respond with more bitterness andĭivisiveness, but continue to put our trust in the Lord and ask for his guidance and inspiration. It does not rejoice over wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.” Single mom worrying how she will feed her family, our dying grandparents, or the poorĪt the same time, we can recall the words of Saint Paul in his moving letter to theĬorinthians, from today’s Bible readings, “Love is patient, love is kind…It is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury.
In the womb as strongly and passionately as we should the undocumented immigrant, the Leaders, to urge them to re-examine their priorities, and to respect and protect the unborn baby I’m a pastor, not a politician, and as a pastor, I am obliged to challenge our political Quote from Pope Francis as an applause line. We also had to watch and listen as our governor proudly proclaimed his dissent from this and other clear Church teaching, as if it were a badge of honor, and used an out-of-context Those who told us that abortion had to remain safe, legal, and rare, now have made it dangerous, imposed, and frequent. In the “throw-away” culture that Pope Francis so often decries, we saw actualĬelebrations at the passage of a bill that makes it even easier to dispose of a life that someone might find inconvenient or troublesome, for any reason at all. The tomb, than these words from the prophet Jeremiah in today’s first reading? “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you.”Ĭan there be any clearer statement of God’s eternal love for each one of us from the womb to Of the highest rates of abortion, in the nation. All this in a state which already had the most permissive abortion climate, and one Used to suppress the conscience rights of healthcare professionals not to assist in the grisly Make an abortion more convenient and easy, a physician need not perform it and could be Somehow survived the scissors, scalpel, saline, and dismemberment, to die mandates that, to Moment of birth drops all charges against an abortionist who allows an aborted baby, who This chilling law, if you have not heard, insists on the right to an abortion up to the The radical abortion expansion bill, recently passed by our state legislature and signed with Of the events of the past two weeks, our priests have asked me to share some reflections on Rarely do I intrude on your Sunday Mass, our most sacred time of the week, but in light This went out today to priests of the Archdiocese of New York, from Cardinal Dolan.