Friday 6 November 2009

More on Anti Catholics For Choice

can be found in this excellent carefully-researched paper by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute here

CFC's Lies about the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion:

The personhood or ensoulment lie

In its last statement on abortion, the 1974 Declaration on Procured Abortion,
theVatican acknowledged that it does not know when the fetus becomes a person:
“There is not a unanimous tradition on this point and authors are as yet in
disagreement.” This disagreement has a long history as well; neither St. Augustine
nor St. Thomas Aquinas, two of the most important theologians in the Catholic tradition, considered the fetus in the early stages of pregnancy to be a person. (Anti Life Lies about Catholicism, Jon O'Brien and Sara Morello)


The Truth

the Church’s constant condemnation of abortion, a teaching 2,000 years old, never relied on any particular theory of personhood or ensoulment for its binding force.16
For instance, both St. Jerome and St. Thomas Aquinas speculated as to the exact moment of ensoulment. Yet both of these saints, as well as all the saints who have addressed the issue of abortion, denounced abortion as an abominable crime; Jerome referred to it as the “murder of an unborn child.”17 The two issues had nothing to do with one another. As St. Basil the Great put it, “The hairsplitting difference between formed and unformed makes no difference to us.

C-FAM ibid

CFC's lies about conscience and probabilism:

The lie that Catholic teaching allows for pro abortion views

Church teachings, tradition and core Catholic tenets—including the primacy
of conscience ... leave room for supporting a more liberal position on abortion. (O'Brien and Morello ibid)


“if you found five or six theologians, known for their ‘prudence and learning,’ who held the liberal dissenting view, you could follow them in good conscience even if the other ten thousand theologians — including the pope — disagreed." Daniel Maguire quoted in C-FAM's War on the Faith.

The Truth

The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that"conscience can make either a right judgment in accordance with reason and the divine law or, on the contrary, an erroneous judgment that departs from them". It goes on to say that erroneous judgements result from, "Ignorance of Christ and His Gospel, bad example given by others, enslavement to one’s passions, assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy."

“[CFC's position] betrays a serious misunderstanding of the theory of probabilism. It has never been seen as authorizing deliberate disobedience to the clear moral teaching of the Church, and has always been seen as invalid when one’s action could lead to the killing of an innocent human being."

Richard Doerflinger associate director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities.

The lie that CFC is a Catholic organisation:

CFC's we're-Catholics-in-good-standing lie

"I'm a Catholic in good standing", Frances Kissling, former president of CFC.

At CFC, we strive to be an expression of Catholicism as it is lived by ordinary people. We are part of the great majority of the faithful in the Catholic church who disagrees with the dictates of the Vatican on a wide variety of issues, including sexuality, respect for women in the Church and the world, and the role of the institutional Church in public policy making." Sara Morello, IMWAC, 6th December 2009.

The Truth

[T]he media should not look to CFC for Catholic opinion — because CFC is not a Catholic organization. It is, instead, composed of a very small group of non-Catholics and ex-Catholics, and perhaps even excommunicated Catholics, who do not believe the Church’s fundamental dogmatic teachings (sexual or otherwise), and who advocate extremely radical steps towards further sexual permissiveness. CFC’s funding comes from sources like Playboy and Planned Parenthood, not Catholic parishes and charities; its theologians endorse a mixture of moral relativism and New Age thought, not Christianity. (C-FAM War on the Faith)

In 1996 Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln excommunicated members of "Catholics" for Choice. The excommunication was upheld by Rome.

That's just three sets of lies to be getting on with; there are plenty more where they came from.

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