Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Canada's Catholic Bishops Downplay Evil In Election Guide UPDATED



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Canadian Bishops Go Green

Their new federal election guide devotes more time to environmental reform than to saving the unborn


OTTAWA, August 19, 2015 (ChurchMilitant.com) - Canada's bishops have issued an election guide that devotes more time to environmental concerns than it does to protection of the unborn.

Issued this month by the Episcopal Commission on Peace and Justice, a national commission of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), the document purports to provide guidance to lay faithful on how to vote for politicians. Most striking is that the guide only devotes a single line to fighting for the lives of the preborn (which are killed to the tune of at least 65,000 per year in a country with the laxest abortion laws in the world), while devoting multiple admonitions on immigrants' and workers' rights as well as an entire section on the environment.

The first section, titled "Respect for life and human dignity: from conception to natural death," offers examples of what the bishops deem essential to "choosing life." The right to life of "the human embryo and the foetus" is one duty on the list, along with the obligation to fight capital punishment and poverty, among other things. The guide fails to list a hierarchy of duties by priority, and gives the impression that fighting poverty is equal in importance to fighting abortion.

This is problematic, as it represents the seamless garment theory — a notion coined by Chicago cardinal Joseph Bernardin that equates the importance of protecting the unborn with fighting poverty, hunger, oppression, capital punishment and the like. The Catholic Church has always held, however, that abortion is an intrinsic evil and can never be justified, whereas capital punishment can be justly applied in some circumstances, and therefore cannot rank in level of gravity as the crime of abortion. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The good new is that no one reads these "guides" and Catholics generally don't care what these bishop's conferences say.