CARDINAL O'MALLEY WITHDRAWS FROM BC COMMENCEMENT FOLLOWING PROTESTS FROM CATHOLIC ACTION LEAGUE

The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today is calling upon faithful Catholics to protest the decision of Jesuit administered Boston College to confer an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny. The ceremony will occur on May20th during commencement exercises, where Kenny will be featured as the principal speaker.

The award to Kenny clearly contravenes the 2004 statement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholics in Political Life, which states: "The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions."

Kenny's government has just introduced legislation to legalize abortion in Ireland. It has also introduced legislation which would impose criminal penalties, including imprisonment, on Catholic priests who refuse to violate the seal of the confessional in cases of sexual abuse. Kenny has misrepresented the words of Pope Benedict XVI, insulted the Holy See and closed the Irish Embassy to the Vatican.

At a time when the Church and the entire pro-life movement in Ireland is resisting this evil man, Boston College is honoring him!

Please contact the following persons and express your opposition to this reprehensible decision!

Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J., President, Boston College, tel. 617-552-3250, 617-552-8000, or e-mail William.Leahy.1@bc.edu

Rev. Myles N. Sheehan, S.J., Provincial Superior, New England Province of the Society of Jesus, tel. 617-607-2800, or e-mail sjnen@sjnen.org 

His Eminence, Cardinal Sean O'Malley, Archbishop of Boston, tel. 617-782-2544, 617-254-0100, or e-mail ArchbishopSean@RCAB.org 

Cardinal O'Malley is the Chairman of the Pro-Life Activities Committee of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He was silent last year when Victoria Kennedy spoke at the BC Law School commencement. On this occasion, he must not be allowed to evade in silence his responsibilities as Ordinary when a Catholic institution in his archdiocese so shamefully betrays the pro-life movement, the innocent unborn and the Catholic Faith!

The incoming Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Boston College is John F. Fish, President and CEO of the Suffolk Construction Company. His company's business telephone is 617-445-3500. You may also write to him at his home address: 77 Corey Lane, Milton, MA 02186.

NEWS RELEASE

MONDAY, MAY 6, 2013

(Published in the Globe on March 22)

MARCH 19, 2013

Letters
The Boston Globe
P.O. Box 55819
Boston, MA 02205-5819

To the Editor:

Sincerely,

C. J. Doyle
Executive Director
Catholic Action League of Massachusetts
(781) 251-9739
Catholicactionleague@gmail.com

Perhaps nowhere else in Christendom can an entire nation and its vast diaspora of descendants trace their Catholic Faith and culture --- and their prospects for eternal salvation --- to a single saint. Our debt of gratitude to Saint Patrick is immense and unmeasurable.

Saint Patrick (+461) is the Apostle of Ireland and was the first bishop and archbishop of Armagh. He is also the principal patron saint of the Archdiocese of Boston.

The feast of Saint Patrick is not "a municipal festival," as one non-Catholic judge erroneously asserted during the Saint Patrick's Day parade case twenty years ago. Nor is it merely a communal celebration of ethnic pride, as one low wattage and recently retired state senator tried to tell us.

We commemorate the feast of our patron saint because he brought the Catholic Faith to Ireland, delivering that nation, and us, from the darkness of paganism, and showing us the fountains "that rise in the heart of Our Savior above."

As the contemporary forces of paganism renew their assault against the Christian character of March 17th, and attempt to deform our feast day, let us never forget that Saint Patrick's Day is a Catholic holy day in honor of a Catholic Saint. Sanctus Patricius, Ora pro nobis.

O God, You deigned to send Blessed Patrick, Your Confessor and Bishop, to preach Your glory to the Gentiles; grant by his merits and intercession, that those things which You command us to do, we may be enabled to accomplish by Your mercy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
        - Collect of the Feast of Saint Patrick from the Missal and Breviary of Saint Pius V

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

    Making sweeping generalizations about people you do not know might be regarded as a sign of bigotry and prejudice. That did not stop Margery Eagan from recklessly impugning the ethical character of the entire College of Cardinals, ninety percent of whom she could not identify ("At least we know what we're getting with Hub cardinal," 3/12/2013).

    Eagan might do better to consider the ethics of journalism, particularly the part about not accusing people of unethical behavior without facts or evidence.

NEWS RELEASE

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2013

BOSTON — Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley is in Rome Thursday meeting with Pope Benedict XVI on his last day and will then take part in the conclave to choose Benedict’s successor.

    O’Malley’s name has been floated in the Italian press as a possible candidate for the position but most acknowledge he is a long shot.

    Two members of the Catholic community in Boston have different views as to whether O’Malley is qualified for the post: C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, and Father Roger Landy, the pastor of St. Bernadette Church in Fall River, spoke with WBUR’s Bob Oakes on the topic.

CATHOLIC ACTION LEAGUE LAMENTS ABDICATION OF POPE BENEDICT XVI

      Politicians, like Lynch, who support Roe v. Wade, believe that the annual killing of 1.3 million unborn children through surgical abortion should remain legal in this country. That makes him pro-abortion, not pro-life.

Sincerely,

C. J. Doyle
Executive Director
Catholic Action League of Massachusetts
(781) 251-9739
Catholicactionleague@gmail.com

January 24 issue of The Wanderer . . .

By PAUL LIKOUDIS & C. JOSEPH DOYLE

One hundred years after the U.S. Congress passed legislation enacting pro-family crusader Anthony Comstock’s proposed laws against pornography, contraception, and abortion, the United States Supreme Court, in a series of decisions in the 1960s and early 1970s, reversed Comstock’s achievements that criminalized these offenses against human life, human dignity, and human rights.

Comstock, as family policy expert Allan Carlson shows in a new book, Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973 (Transaction Books: 2012), saw the links between the booming pornography trade in post-Civil War New York and contraception and abortion (both of which were common), and led a crusade against all three in the cause of “protecting children” in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous January 22, 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions — both of which were based on fraud — not only overturned Comstock’s magnificent achievements, but also, as the late Dr. C. Everett Koop remarked after the decision, became the “the last nail in the coffin of Christianity in America.”

It was the decisive milestone in the sexual revolution, which eventually culminated, exactly 30 years later in the court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision, which de­criminalized sodomy and other unnatural acts.

The court’s abortion ruling came eight years after its Griswold v. Connecticut decision which struck down the state’s “Comstock laws” prohibiting the promotion, sale, and distribution of contraceptives. With birth control now ubiquitously and inexpensively available, and abortion as an insurance policy should contraception fail, fornication became normative. The fear of pregnancy, which restrained unmarried women from acting like young, unmarried men, was removed. Women adopted the lower moral standards of men and promiscuity surged, and an entire society was given over to hedonism and libertinism — and, as Comstock predicted, the natural family is becoming extinct.

The second consequence of Roe, Bolton, and Griswold was demographic collapse. America has had 56 million surgical abortions since Roe, and perhaps an exponential number of chemical abortions as a result of abortifacient contraception. All hormonal contraceptives are capable of preventing implantation after conception.

We can see the consequences of this everywhere in our society today. We have a crisis of immigration and border security because there are not enough native­born Americans to fill low wage, entry-level jobs; we have a crisis in entitlement spending because there are fewer workers to support retirees and benefit recipients; we have a crisis in military force levels, what Sen. John Kerry called a “back­door draft,” whereby married men in their 30s, 40s and 50s are sent on multiple deployments overseas as reservists and national guardsmen; we have profound political change as the Anglophone-European majority recedes before waves of non-European and, in many cases, non-Christian immigration. Partisan politics has been changed forever: With Roe v. Wade, the New Deal coalition of Franklin Roosevelt came asunder, as white Southerners and Northern Catholic ethnics deserted the party of their ancestors — one effect of which was the radicalization of the Democratic Party which lost its balance as social conservatives departed.

Another effect was the rise of the Republican Party as the party of permanent government, which from the late 1960s dominated presidential politics until the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Republican Party elites, which had been historically liberal and in favor of population control, now gave lip service to the values of people they despised, but were prepared to exploit for political advantage.

The economic consequences have been enormous. Allan Carlson observed, back in 2006, on “the hidden economic costs of abortion” in an address before the Illinois Citizens for Life.

He said: “A couple of years ago, I calculated the annual U.S. income that will be lost through the 45 million legal [surgical] abortions that had occurred since 1970. Using very conservative assumptions, I found that these ghost Americans, in the year 2028 alone, would have generated an additional $3.8 trillion dollars — yes trillion — in national income. This would have brought an additional $968 billion in federal income tax revenues; and nearly $600 billion in payroll tax revenues (eliminating, for example, the much discussed Social Security deficit).”

The Catholic Church in the United States, because of Roe, was divided between corrupt cultural conformists who wanted to be accepted by society and get ahead socially, professionally and financially, and faithful orthodox Catholics who were prepared to suffer the scorn of the secular majority in order to give witness to the suffering and cruel deaths of unborn children. This division transcended partisan political identities.

The Catholic hierarchy and much of the clergy, so long identified with the Democratic Party, were finally forced to understand that it was not morally possible for them to retain their de facto alliance with the party that was increasingly defined by the values of George McGovern.

On the legal front, Roe marked the end of a federal judiciary constrained by the Constitution. Judicial justificationism based on political, ideological, and public policy preferences now became the norm. Judges no longer interpreted the Constitution; they amended it. Instead of administering justice, they legislated from the bench. Instead of protecting the rights of citizens, they imposed their own ideological choices.

Perhaps one of the least remarked consequences of Roe was the growth of police-state tactics in suppressing pro-life dissent from America’s secular neopagan establishment. As police brutality against peaceful, unoffending, law-abiding, pro-life demonstrators in such cities as West Hartford, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Boston proved, police could beat, torture, and arrest with impunity.

Acceptance of police brutality against pro-lifers paved the way, even prior to 9-11, for the creation of the national security state, in which it is now a crime to protest outside designated “bubble zones” when public officials are present. Demonstrators are put in cages, like animals in a zoo, as the Democratic Convention in Boston in 2004 showed.

Forty years after Roe, Americans have been desensitized to killing. Conflict resolution among gang members entails callous acts of murder; Americans are used to the bombings and shootings of innocent civilians in war; we are poised to legalize physician-assisted suicide and its companion, euthanasia; we accept torture of prisoners and we harvest human embryos for health and cosmetic purposes.

Indeed, Roe, as Dr. Harold O.J. Brown observed in an essay for the Howard Center’s Religion and Society Report (December 2005), is a “mental guillotine” that has “cut us off as effectively from our present realities and perils as the old guillotine cut its victims off from life.”

Reflecting on the irony of George W. Bush’s declared “war on terror” after 9-11, Dr. Brown observed that the slogan — “the war on terror” — was an example of the mental guillotine at work, while Americans were accepting of the “war on the unborn” that takes 4,000 lives a day, every day, day after day after day.

He then writes, in part: “Daniel Goldhagen described the German people as a whole as Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Perhaps the Germans, like so many Americans with abortion today, really did not know what Hitler’s henchmen were doing. Perhaps they too were innocent, their heads cut off by a 1940s variety of the mental guillotine that prevents us from seeing that ‘right to choose’ means right to kill.

“Where abortion in America is involved, the mental guillotine is hard at work. How can the Justices not know? How can the media, which largely support the present situation with respect to ‘terminating’ the unborn, fail to point out their apparent willful blindness? They refuse to recognize the humanity of the tiny being in the womb, which normally would be, to use Calvin’s words, ‘his most secure refuge.’ In his decision in Roe v. Wade, the late Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackman wrote, ‘the Court cannot speculate’ when human life begins. Can that be true? Or do we not hear the noise of the blade falling on our ability to think?

“Inasmuch as every student of biology knows that a new life begins with the fertilization of an ovum by a spermatozoan, the question was not actually when a new human life begins, but when it is recognized by the Justices as having begun, and therefore as deserving of legal protection. No diga mentiras, diga la verdad. Don’t tell lies, tell the truth. If our Justices, judges, and journalists would cease to tell and repeat lies, surely the people of America would wake up to what we are doing to every new generation — and in doing it to them, wounding ourselves. Or, if not, dreadful to contemplate, are we the American counterpart to Goldhagen’s Germans, America’s willing abortionists?” +++
___________________________
(Paul Likoudis is news editor for The Wanderer and C. Joseph Doyle is the executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts.)

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

To the Editor:

Sincerely,

C. J. Doyle
Executive Director
Catholic Action League of Massachusetts
(781) 251-9739
Catholicactionleague@gmail.com