The progressive National Catholic Reporter (NCR) has declared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be “the future of the Catholic Church” noting her frequent references to “Catholic values” and her “passion for justice.”

In an op-ed Monday, NCR’s executive editor Heidi Schlumpf praised Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) as a “rock-star millennial leader of the left” who “grew up Catholic and even wrote about how her faith influences her views on public policies such as mass incarceration, for a Catholic magazine.”

As I listened to her “stunning speech” on the House floor last week, “I was struck by how often it referenced Catholic values,” Ms. Schlumpf wrote.

The National Catholic Reporter is notorious for parroting the positions of the Democrat Party even when they contradict clear teachings of the Catholic Church, and over the years has pushed for abortion, same-sex marriage, women’s ordination to the priesthood, an end to celibacy, and greater restrictions on religious liberty and conscience objections.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that among Rep. Ocasio-Cortez purportedly “Catholic” values one discovers a full-bore embrace of the Democrats’ advocacy of taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand as a “human right.”

Ocasio-Cortez has slammed attempts to pass legislation protecting unborn children, insisting that they are about “owning women” and establishing theocracy in America.

“Abortion bans aren’t just about controlling women’s bodies. They’re about controlling women’s sexuality. Owning women,” she tweeted in 2019. “From limiting birth control to banning comprehensive sex ed, US religious fundamentalists are working hard to outlaw sex that falls outside their theology.”

Laws criminalizing or restricting the killing of infants reveal that a woman’s right to receive an abortion “threatens a core element underpinning right-wing ideology: patriarchy,” she added. “It’s a brutal form of oppression to seize control of the 1 essential thing a person should command: their own body.”

Last year, Ocasio-Cortez went further still, launching a petition to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funds from being used for abortion.

Insisting that “abortion is health care,” Ocasio-Cortez said the Hyde Amendment “disproportionately harms low-income Americans and people of color just to suit the interests of anti-choice zealots.”

“It’s estimated that over 60,000 women are forced to go through with unwanted pregnancies every year just due to a lack of access to care. In a modern, moral, and wealthy nation such as the United States, that is unacceptable,” she wrote in an email to supporters, adding that access to abortion is “non-negotiable.”

“But thanks to partisan sabotage and zealotry, women across the country are losing access to this constitutionally protected right,” she said.

“That ends now. We’re going to fight to repeal the Hyde Amendment, and let people access the care that they need,” she added. “Sign your name if you stand for repealing the Hyde Amendment.”

In response, the United States bishops reiterated the Church’s long-standing opposition to abortion and support for the Hyde Amendment.

Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, head of the Bishops’ Pro-Life Committee said that abolishing the Hyde Amendment would undo over 40 years of broad, bipartisan consensus on freedom of conscience.

Archbishop Naumann decried “the extremism now that’s attacking what most Americans would consider a very important principle.”

“Why should taxpayers pay for something that they find morally objectionable?” Naumann asked, noting recent attempts by lawmakers to equate abortion with health care. “When you’re destroying a human life, this isn’t health care.”

According to official Catholic Church teaching, abortion constitutes murder and anyone procuring an abortion is automatically excommunicated from the Church.

“Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion,” The Catholic Catechism states. “This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.”

Apparently, in the minds of the directors at the nominally Catholic NCR, the future of the Catholic Church is taxpayer-funded abortion for all, an eminently “Catholic” value.

If there is to be a future for the Catholic Church in the United States, Schlumpf writes, it must “resemble Ocasio-Cortez in her passion for justice and human dignity, and in her courage and integrity, even in the face of vulgar attacks.”