Catholic Church Pursued Social Justice, Bargained With The Devil And Lost

March 24, 2010

In an October 2008 interview, Barack Obama said, "I've tried to apply the precepts of compassion and care for the vulnerable that are so central to Catholic teachings to my work, making health care a right for all Americans - I was the sponsor in the state legislature for the Bernardin Amendment, named after Cardinal Bernardin, a wonderful figure in Chicago I had the opportunity to work with who said that health care should be a right."

With that and similarly deceptive rhetoric, Obama convinced 54% of American Catholics that electing him President of the United States would lead to worldwide 'social justice'.

Jesus said: "Love one another as I have loved you".

The Catholic Church has a long, distinguished history of acting on this commandment through social service (charity, or direct help for those in need)

On occasion it has engaged in social action (an attempt to change institutions perceived as perpetuating privation and/or oppression).

The Church considers vast disparities in wealth among individuals as a lack of social justice and has advocated policies which it believes would narrow those gaps.

In the past, it has recognized that Communism and socialism expand poverty and create oppression, but has expressed also its view that free-market Capitalism has limitations and that some regulation of it is a requisite for social justice.

Pope John Paul II was a formidable opponent of Communism and played a significant role in its overthrow in his native Poland, but spoke disapprovingly of the accumulation of wealth without regard for the suffering of those who fail to provide for their own needs.

More recently, the Church has advocated the concept of healthcare as a right worthy of enforcement by the federal government, and has pushed aggressively for immigration "reform" that would grant amnesty to illegal aliens and create another wave of immigration in pursuit of the 'social justice' of family reunification.

Obama played the social justice card skillfully in 2008. He trotted out heartbreaking stories of mothers desperately seeking healthcare for their uninsured children and spoke of his own mother's problems with her health insurance company in the final months of her vain struggle against cancer.

Few Americans would have denied the imperative of access to medical care, and most had had experience with recalcitrant insurance companies. Obama's pitch struck a responsive chord with Catholics intent on working for their concept of social justice, and he won the Catholic vote over John McCain by 54%-45%.

In practice, however, Obama's stint as an Illinois state legislator bore little resemblance to the teachings or beliefs of the Catholic Church.

His concept of "making healthcare a right for all Americans" didn't extend to the most vulnerable among us, the babies who survive botched abortions.

On the floor of the legislature in 2001, Obama said: "Number one, whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we're really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a -- a child, a nine-month-old -- child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it -- it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute."

That doesn't quite square with "I've tried to apply the precepts of compassion and care for the vulnerable that are so central to Catholic teachings to my work…", does it.

Fast forward to the passage of Obamacare in the United States Congress on March 21st, and the carnival atmosphere at The White House yesterday when Obama signed it into law, and consider whether the abortion and euthanasia provisions in the law resemble in any way the tenets of the Catholic Church.

Obamacare requires everyone to buy health insurance and subsidizes with federal money those who can't afford the premiums. Insurance policies will pay for abortions, and the subsidies will pay for the insurance. While the law requires "segregation" of federal funds, that provision is an exercise in accounting semantics.

Before he caved and voted for passage, Congressman Bart Stupak made a show of winning a meaningless executive order from the President which would bar the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.

It's meaningless because the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the pro late-term abortion Kathleen Sebelius, will simply declare that the federal funding of abortions which Obamacare compels does not in fact constitute federal funding for abortions.

If you've read "The Gulag Obama", you've seen the citations to Obamacare, beginning on page 693, that empower Ms. Sebelius to determine who gets medical care and who doesn't, which conditions get treated and which don't, and which elderly people and special needs people will be denied life-saving medical care based upon the remaining 'usefulness' of their lives.

In ObamaWorld these two classes of vulnerable people aren't worthy of "compassion and care" and the government is empowered to deny medical treatment to them.

Or, as Obama said on ABC, "Maybe you're (grandma) better off not having the (life-saving) surgery, but taking the pain pill".

In fairness, 50 Catholic bishops urged Catholics not to vote for Obama, and Catholics who attend mass every week voted for McCain 55%-43%.

The Church's pursuit of social justice via the avenue of government compulsion, however, led directly to the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, a pro-abortion Democrat Congress, and the enactment of a law which commands the government to prey upon the least of us.

Over one million American babies are killed in the name of "choice" every year. Obamacare now compels taxpayers for the first time in our history to pay for some of those abortions, and it is an unhappy fact that the Catholic Church will be complicit in the deaths of those children.

Social justice is best pursued through fidelity to the Constitution of the United States, which was written by brilliant men who designed it as a restraint on government and a guarantee of individual liberty and responsibility.

The Catholic Church doesn't have a monopoly on virtue, and before it again pursues 'social justice' and 'change' at the expense of our institutions and traditions, it would be wise for it to remember that the road to perdition is paved with good intentions.

Opinion