British papal biographer Austen Ivereigh has called for a “reckoning” against pro-life U.S. Catholics, insisting that they enabled the Jan. 6 Capitol violence by refusing to support pro-abortion politicians.
“US Catholic pro-life movement’s hour of shame,” Mr. Ivereigh asserts on Twitter Saturday, “not a single unborn life saved, while enabling a spate of executions.”
It would be interesting to know the source for Ivereigh’s claim that “not a single unborn life” was saved, given the removal of funding for both domestic and foreign abortion providers, the naming of three Constitutional judges whose lasting impact has yet to be seen, and the prevention of radical pro-abortion candidate Hillary Clinton from taking office.
Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden support repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which saves an estimated 60,000 poor and mostly nonwhite lives per year. That would be 240,000 lives right there, had Clinton been elected.
The “spate of executions” Ivereigh refers to are the federal executions of 13 violent felons convicted for rape, tortures, and multiple murders. As a point of reference, 13 unborn children are dismembered, scalded to death, or ripped from their mother’s wombs every 8 minutes of every day in America. Nearly one in five pregnancies in the United States ends in abortion.
Like other progressive Catholics, Ivereigh finds more cause for weeping in the deaths of 13 convicted criminals over four years than over the thousands of babies who die violently in abortion every day.
“Millions of dollars spent to help a president who led a mob assault on democracy,” Ivereigh concludes. “There must be a reckoning.”
Never mind that President Trump did not “lead” a mob assault; more importantly, pro-life Catholics were manifestly appalled by the Capitol violence, which had nothing to do with their resistance to the pro-abortion, anti-religious freedom Democratic Party.
In their efforts to promote the Democratic Party, left-wing Catholics spent four years downplaying the evil of murdering unborn babies in the womb, one of the very few crimes considered so heinous as to incur automatic excommunication from their Church.
Recently, Joe Biden’s team of Catholic cheerleaders have tried to pin Capitol violence on Catholics who refused to throw their support behind the pro-abortion president-elect who openly flouts Catholic teaching on numerous issues.
Catholic Democrats, while relentlessly attacking pro-life Catholics for allying themselves to Trump over this most basic issue of justice, have done nothing to hold their side accountable, but have watched complacently as the Democratic Party has become more and more radicalized to the point where unlimited abortion rights funded by taxpayer dollars is now a fundamental plank in the party platform.
Prominent Jesuits have been particularly active in supporting the candidacy of President-Elect Biden, endeavoring to persuade Catholics of the viability of a Catholic politician who promotes Planned Parenthood, attacks the Little Sisters of the Poor, officiates at same-sex weddings, opposes school choice, embraces dangerous gender transitioning for young children, and promises to reinstate taxpayer-funded abortions at home and abroad.
For his part, Jesuit Father James Martin wrote this week that pro-life Catholic bishops and priests fueled the January 6 Capitol riots by characterizing the Democratic Party as the “party of death,” for which they need to repent.
“Can anyone doubt that the moral calculus proposed by some Christian leaders, including Catholic priests and bishops, framed in the language of pure good versus pure evil, contributed to the presence of so many rioters brandishing overtly Christian symbols as they carried out their violence?” Father Martin wrote in a Jan. 12 article for America magazine titled “How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol.”
“The mistake for which Catholic leaders should be corrected, the mistake for which the church now needs to repent, is not simply casting this election in terms of good and evil,” Father Martin wrote, “it is pretending that real questions of good and evil could be simplified to the point where violent responses, even acts of domestic terrorism, become thinkable and then are carried out.”
Catholics might consider asking Father Martin what he would call the industrial-scale, intentional, violent killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent children if not “pure evil.”