(Courtesy of Cashill Newsletter - September 24, 2002 )

PLEASE COPY AND PASTE AND SEND TO YOUR CATHOLIC FRIENDS IN MISSOURI

Dear Friends,

In Missouri this year, the real scandal in the Catholic Church is not pedophilia, as evil as that is. The real scandal is that certain priests will do nothing to discourage thousands of otherwise good and decent Catholics from casting a vote that will likely institutionalize the abortion industry for a generation.

I am referring here to a vote for Jean Carnahan, the U.S. Senate candidate for Missouri. Her own record is bad enough. The radical pro-abortion group NARAL, for instance, dedicated its State-by-Stare Review to her late husband and promised that through Jean, "The legacy of Governor Carnahan's devotion to freedom of choice will continue to touch the hearts and minds of the nation."

But the problem goes beyond Carnahan's own sad inclinations. With the Democrats holding a one vote majority in the Senate they are not allowing pro-life judicial candidates out of committee. Most recently, they defeated the nomination of Pricilla Owens, the first nominee rated unanimously "well-qualified" by the American Bar Association ever to be rejected in committee. Her offense? Owens was on record favoring parental notification for underage abortions. With a Democratic-controlled Senate, we may never see another pro- life Supreme Court justice in our lifetime.

The Catholic Church allows for the possibility of a just war and even capital punishment under certain circumstances, but there is no such thing as a just abortion. Anyone who has doubts about the Church's official position need only read the Pope John Paul II's 1999 revisiting of Pope Paul VI's historic encyclical, Humanae Vitae.

The Pope does not mince words. Depriving an innocent human being of life, and life undeniably begins at conception, is "always morally evil."

He adds, "This tradition is unchanged and unchangeable." There can be no yielding, he adds, to "convenient compromises" or the "temptation of self-deception." How can there be? "We are dealing," says the Pope bluntly, "with murder."

Most Catholics have been Democrats at one time in their life. I was. But the party has changed, and after a while, one has to choose between voting Democratic, at least on key votes like this one, and remaining Catholic. At the pearly gates, it will be hard to rationalize having done both.

Jack Cashill