The Catholic Bishops of America are beginning to speak out against the Democratic Party’s championing of abortion. Green Bay Bishop David Ricken sent a pastoral letter over the weekend urging his parishioners to reject any party that holds views anathema to Catholic teaching.
The groundswell started on September 23, when the Catholic bishop from Springfield, Illinois, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki, condemned the Democratic Party for temporarily removing God from their platform, supporting abortion and recognizing that “gay rights are human rights.”
Paprocki continued:
“My job is not to tell you for whom you should vote. But I do have a duty to speak out on moral issues. I would be abdicating this duty if I remained silent out of fear of sounding ‘political’ and didn’t say anything about the morality of these issues. People of faith object to these platform positions that promote serious sins … Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against, but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.”
This was followed just eight days ago when Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia, speaking in Rome about abortion, said:
“We’re Catholics before we’re Democrats. We’re Catholics before we’re Republicans … We’re even Catholics before we’re Americans, because we know that God has a demand on us prior to any government demand on us. And this has been the story of the martyrs through the centuries … If we don’t stand united on this issue, we’re bound to failure, not only in the area of protecting unborn human life but in maintaining our religious freedom … Catholics have been historically part of the Democrat Party in great numbers, and I think really could’ve stopped that great development, movement, if they tried, but they didn’t in order to accommodate people from the other side of the issue … I think many of the Democrats have (taken) Democrat Catholic votes for granted because they’ll go with them no matter what the party position might be on abortion. That’s why the position of the Democrat Party has gotten worse, and worse, and worse as time goes on, because Catholics haven’t abandoned them as they’ve moved in that direction. So we just have to be insistent on that, Catholic identity takes precedence over everything.”
Now Bishop Ricken has spoken out forcefully this weekend. The forces for life are beginning to wake up.