One way it's good to imitate NYC

The Catholic League has again built a créche in New York's prime public forum, Central Park. Their reasons:

• We are celebrating the true purpose of Christmas, which is the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

• We want Christians to know that they have every legal right to display religious symbols on public property, unadorned by secular symbols, just so long as the property is regarded as a public forum (e.g., we do not seek to erect crèches on the grounds of City Hall).

• We are sending a message to militant secularists that Christians will never retreat from exercising their First Amendment right to religious liberty. We favor, as does Pope Francis, a robust public expression of religion. We will never settle [merely] for freedom to worship.

If the League can do this in one of the country's most aggressively secularized cities, what's wrong with the rest of us, wherever we are? What are we afraid of?

Pope Francis' message to the Americas

The Pope delivered a fine special message to the Americas yesterday:

...When the image of the Virgin appeared on the tilma of Juan Diego, it was the prophecy of an embrace: Mary’s embrace of all the peoples of the vast expanses of America – the peoples who already lived there, and those who were yet to come. Mary’s embrace showed what America – North and South – is called to be: a land where different peoples come together; a land prepared to accept human life at every stage, from the mother’s womb to old age; a land which welcomes immigrants, and the poor and the marginalized, in every age. A land of generosity. 

That is the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and it is also my message, the message of the Church. I ask all the people of the Americas to open wide their arms, like the Virgin, with love and tenderness.

Many people will quickly fasten onto the statement's explicit connection with immigration policies. Fewer will notice its explicit mention of abortion and euthanasia, or that these things are actually mentioned before the bit about welcoming immigrants, the poor, and the marginalized.

I'd like to point out that economic freedom such as the people of the United States have enjoyed for two centuries is also a form of embrace. People have flocked here from everywhere else because they had some justified confidence that if they offered goods or services with honesty and goodwill, they would be rewarded with personal prosperity, without facing insuperable barriers because of their race, their ethnicity, or who their parents were.

Mind you, I said insuperable. This is a fallen world. This side of Heaven, there is no perfect ubiquitous fairness or justice. There is only the daily struggle to make those things happen a little more often in our own families, neighborhoods, and businesses. 

That's the Catholic doctrine of Subsidiarity, and it is the friend, not the foe, of economic liberty.

Elections sure do have consequences

Many Catholics voted for Barack Obama despite his support for abortion-on-demand. After all, they told us, he's so good on Social Justice issues.

Many Catholics voted for Democratic senatorial candidates despite their support for abortion-on-demand. After all, they told us, they're so good on Social Justice issues.

Having predicted the end of the world a few years ago if Republicans altered the Senate's filibuster rules to allow President Bush's bench nominees to be confirmed, Democrats did exactly that last month, when faced with filibusters or threats thereof against President Obama's nominees. Republicans backed away from this so-called "nuclear option" in 2005. Democrats welcomed it in 2013.

The Catholics who re-elected President Obama enabled him to nominate the astonishingly pro-abortion Cornelia Pillard to the District of Columbia's Circuit Court. arguably the most influential Federal Court of Appeal in the country, since cases which concern the White House and the federal bureaucracy get heard there first. Little issues, like the HHS mandate, for example.

Then those Senators whom Catholics elected despite their pro-abortion record changed the Senate rules and confirmed Ms. Pillard with a bare majority of 51 votes, when it would formerly have taken 60.

So now, you good Catholics, we all have a new lifetime judge among whose milder pronouncements is this:

Antiabortion laws and other restraints on reproductive freedom not only enforce women’s incubation of unwanted pregnancies, but also prescribe a “vision of the woman’s role” as mother and caretaker of children in a way that is at odds with equal protection. Renewed attacks on abortion have turned attention to how the Equal Protection Clause, and the right to sex equality more generally, might advance reproductive self-determination.

She's also completely opposed to abstinence-based sex ed.

The abstinence-only approach is permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards about acceptable male and female sexual behavior and appropriate social roles. Public school teaching of gender stereotypes violates the constitutional bar against sex stereotyping and is vulnerable to equal protection challenge...

Catholics might want to remember that abstaining from sexual relations is exactly the Catholic Church's teaching on preventing unwanted pregnancy. Too bad that there's now a majority on the D.C. Circuit (it used to be evenly split between Democrats and Republicans) that thinks the Church's teaching is an affront to human rights.

And so the red tide of abortion will roll on, at a million dead children each year in the United States alone.

But I'll bet Ms. Pillard is so good on Social Justice issues...

Nelson Mandela, R.I.P.

The President of the USCCB has issued a statement mourning the passing of Nelson Mandela. You can read all of it here.

But a much better expression of Catholic witness was penned by Archbishop Tobin of Connecticut, as reported by LifeSite News:

“Many people around the world and in our own nation are mourning the loss of former South African President Nelson Mandela,” Bishop Tobin commented in a statement. “Indeed there is much to admire in Mandela’s long life and public service, particularly his personal courage and his stalwart defense of human rights. 

“There is part of President Mandela’s legacy, however, that is not at all praiseworthy, namely his shameful promotion of abortion in South Africa. In 1996 Mandela promoted and signed into law the ‘Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Bill’ that, according to the New York Times, ‘replaced one of the world’s toughest abortion laws with one of the most liberal.’” 

Tobin continues: “While we pray for the peaceful repose of President Mandela’s immortal soul and the forgiveness of his sins, we can only regret that his noble defense of human dignity did not include the youngest members of our human family, unborn children.”

To their great credit, the Catholic bishops of South Africa pointed out that same disconnect in Mandela's record. So did John Smeaton, a prominent pro-life leader in the United Kingdom:

“May God rest Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa who died last night,” he said. “But it is absolutely vital that Catholic leaders do not allow themselves to become respecters of persons, swept away by personality cults. Catholic leaders have a duty to stand up to public figures with  anti-life and anti-family records, however praiseworthy their record may be on other issues. The sanctity of human life and the dignity of the family are the foundation and guarantee of all other human rights.”

[Update]: Bishop Tobin is the Bishop of Rhode Island, not Connecticut. My bad.

About that Time magazine cover...

Much of the Catholic internet is abuzz with Pope Francis' selection as Time magazine's "Person of the Year." My take: Person of the Year is a recognition of notoriety, not of approval. But even if you think it's a positive thing, enjoy it while it lasts. The video below, from a riot demonstration by pro-abortion feminists outside a cathedral in the Pope's native Argentina, is an accurate expression of the pure hatred of Christ and His Church that bubbles just beneath the surface of Progressive niceness. In case it's not clear, the thing that gets set afire in the middle of the frame is an effigy of Pope Francis.



Michael Voris' post on this event has additional footage that shows how faithful Catholic men linked arms in a cordon around the cathedral to protect it, and absorbed without retaliation the verbal abuse and physical attacks heaped upon them by many in the crowd.



Now, those guys are real men, and real Catholics. How many of us American Catholic men, drowning in the lukewarm banality of the Church of Nice, still would have the guts to do what they did?