So the Court overturned Roe. The price was far too high. The 1/6 insurrectionists and those who support or condone them still loom over future elections, and the same Trump who made 1/6 possible, who egged those traitors on, and who pals around with anti-Semites, still holds the GOP and GOP voters hostage to his ego and his desire for power. The GOP has been overtaken by nationalists, which is just a polite word for fascists. Anti-abortion states lust to exact retributive justice on women who, once upon a time before Roe, were understood to be victims in need of compassion. I’d rather have Roe back and lose all those other things. Quod scripsi, scripsi.
I was wrong about Trump & Roe, but Dobbs is a Pyrrhic victory.
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • January 16, 2023 • Politics; Pro-Life Issues
Amarillo bishop Patrick Zurek makes the charge about exhumation a letter to Pavone dated May 5, 2017. The purpose of the letter was to demand that Pavone ask to be laicized. If Pavone did not request it himself, Bishop Zurek would ask Pope Francis to laicize him involuntarily. In the letter, Zurek cites two grounds for this course of action: (1) Pavone’s “incorrigible” disobedience; (2) Pavone’s exploitation of a dead baby for partisan political purposes. In the middle of all that, Zurek includes an extraordinary paragraph.
Mary writes: “Meanwhile I have seen many, many people whose birth trauma or traumatic memories of abortion were triggered by the photos and videos the past several days, leading to terrible suffering. I have seen many, many pro-choice people more convinced than ever that pro-lifers are ghoulish and insane. I have seen no minds or hearts changed. None at all. Graphic and disturbing attention-seeking media circuses don’t change people’s minds about abortion. If they did, they would have by now. We’ve had many. They don’t work.”
By now you’ve all heard the horrific details about Lauren Handy, the so-called pro-life activist who was keeping five frozen fetuses in her home. There are still unanswered questions about how these dead bodies were obtained, and whether they were all (or if any of them were) actually aborted; for example, one was still intact and attached to the placenta, and another was en caul. There is some speculation that Handy, with or without the group she belongs to (Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, or PAAU), intended to use the corpses in a publicity stunt of some sort. I don’t know. My friend Mary Pezzulo at Steel Magnificat writes about all of it here, and you should read her article. It’s the only really good thing I’ve read about the whole ugly story.
And that’s false. Gaudium et Spes 27: “Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.”
Nancy Pelosi had an audience with the pope, and as sure as Old Faithful will blow, right-wing Catholics proved themselves faithful. Among them was Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas; who mounted his pulpit on Twitter and declared, with all the solemnity of an edict, that Pelosi was not even a member of the Catholic Church. “Claiming to be Catholic is easy,” he tweeted. “Living the Catholic faith centered in Jesus Christ is extremely hard. As long as Nancy promotes the slaughter of the unborn she is not a member of the Catholic faith centered in Jesus.” Stop there.
Poor Raymond Burke, a prince of the Church, who everyone tells me is a canon lawyer, doesn’t seem to know his canon law. He seems to think Joe Biden is an “apostate” who can be excommunicated over being pro-choice. (That is to say, Mr. Biden thinks that abortion should be legal, not necessarily that abortion is good.) I’m afraid both claims are false, and we can dispatch with both of them quickly. On the latter point, canon law expressly lays out what a Catholic may be excommunicated for, and disagreeing with the Church’s teaching about legal abortion is not one of them. 
In the main he’s getting dumped on for this, which is encouraging. Boreing is deeply confused. If someone breaks into your property, you certainly do have a right to defend yourself with lethal force—but only if your own life or safety is at stake. If someone is in your driveway beating up your car with a baseball bat, you’re not allowed to kill him. Only defense of life merits taking another life, never defense of property. In a riot, police certainly have the right to use deadly force against rioters, but they’re quelling the riot in order to protect the lives and the safety of persons, including their own.
Fr. Frank Pavone, despite being forced by anonymous “Church authorities” to resign from Trump’s re-election campaign (i.e., in an “official” capacity), keeps insisting that Catholic clergy somehow ought to be calling out the immorality of “Democrats.” No one can seem to find out to whom Pavone is accountable. At the same time, random strangers in social media keep trying to bully Catholic voters who plan to vote for Joe Biden. Actual Church teaching takes a dim view of both stances. [
You have a Culture of Life when you act and talk as though every life is of equal value and equally worth caring for and saving. And part of how you do that, when you have a pandemic like COVID-19, is by wearing a face mask. Wearing a face mask is not about the person doing the wearing, it’s about everyone else you might infect. It’s about the 80-year-old Rosary-praying grandmother you pass in the supermarket, and it’s also about the homeless diabetic you ignore on your way there.
Self-described pro-lifers have a jealousy issue about abortion. Propose the existence of other pro-life issues and they get exasperated. Where does it end? Is the kitchen sink a pro-life issue too? More than one pro-life issue “waters down” opposition to abortion, they say. They’re like the child who fears a new baby in the family means mom and dad will start to love them less. Should we limit families to one child to be genuinely pro-life? Pope St. John Paul II saw it differently; he writes in Evangelium Vitae 29 that the world is faced with “countless grave threats to life.”
On Twitter, Fr. Frank Pavone wrote this: “There is an immigration crisis, the 1st immigrant is the unborn child. There is a #Crisis at the border of the womb. They are not being detained or deported, they’re being #dismembered. We’re not going to be able to welcome an immigrant when we can’t welcome our own children.” No, excuse me. This is exactly why people say that those who are pro-life care only about the unborn, not about the born. Exhibit 1 is the odious Frank “Coughlin” Pavone, who pits the unborn child against the migrant child.
