Key Upcoming Culture-of-Life Gatherings/Projects

e-link Advocacy REPORTBACK

Reportback from Kent...  We (Social Ministry Office staff at the diocesan level) never ask you (leaders at the parish level) to engage in an advocacy request in which we are not also actively engaged.  We make the same calls; we sign the same petitions; we deliver identical letters.

Following the advocacy request in the last e-link bulletin, #26, I gave copies of the California Bishops' letter to five individuals or groups and discussed Prop. 71 with each of those five.  A very short synopsis of the engagements follows:

God Bless,

Kent Peters

Web and e-mail-based Resources

Order a CD copy of Fr. Frank Pavone's presentation at the Annual Church Ministers Conference: We Proclaim the Kingdom, but Can We Vote for It? 

Most participants were moved by Fr. Frank's challenge to bring Catholic and humanitarian values into the real world of our democratic political system.

To order a copy of this 50 minute presentation for only $3.50, call or e-mail Jo Brower at the OSM office:

858-490-8323 or
jbrower@diocese-sdiego.org

Web links to the two following documents, Faithful Citizenship (USCCB) and the Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics (Catholic Answers updated version), are provided below.  They can become valuable tools as you prepare to vote on November 2nd, 2004.

http://www.usccb.org/faithfulcitizenship/index.htm Faithful Citizenship
      (Provided in both English and Spanish)

http://www.catholic.com/library/voters_guide.asp Voter's Guide for Serious Catholics

Our Sunday Visitor has also produced a detailed pamphlet entitled, Guidelines for Catholic Voters that can be odered in bulk online at, http://www.osv.com/Voting/index.asp 

You may also call Our Sunday Visitor at 800-348-2440 to order this pamphlet in bulk.

New Local/Regional Events and Gatherings 

If you are planning an event that falls within the mission of social ministry, send the particulars four to five weeks in advance to the Office for Social Ministry via e-mail, osmelink@diocese-sdiego.org.  The OSM reserves the right to publish or not to publish any proposed event information.  We hope this will assist your local efforts to re-build a culture of life.

1. East County Pregnancy Care Center presents internationally acclaimed abstinence speaker Pam Stenzel at its 12th Annual Fall Fundraiser Banquet on Friday, October 15, 2004, at the Town and Country Hotel in Mission Valley.

Pam travels worldwide, speaking to over 500,000 young people each year, tackling the tough issues of youth and sex with candor, insight, humor, and a challenge for young people to pursue abstinence.  Silent auction begins at 5:00 p.m., dinner at 6:00 p.m.  Reservations are $25 per person or $45 per couple.  Tables for ten teens have been discounted to $220.    For ticket reservations call 619-422-4357.

Watch for OSM e-link bulletin #28 around Friday, October 29, 2004   
 

Article/Statement for September 7, 2004

We hope you find Cy's reflection helpful as you attempt to select suitable candidates on election day. 

Who's Disqualified?

Cyril Jones-Kellett

When I started working for this newspaper, I used to have a hard time selecting photos to accompany stories. I would take all the available photos, lay them out on the graphics room table, and look for something I liked. I've learned from the artists I've worked with that this method is a waste of time. They taught me to look for the bad photos first and take them off the table. When only the usable photos are left, usually just two or three, it is much easier to make a decision.

I now apply this method to the political season. I start by taking the intolerable politicians off the table, so to speak, and from those who are left, I make my choice.
 
As election time approaches, it is worth asking yourself just what kind of behavior you won't put up with from a politician.
 
What if some politician were attractive to you as a family person, of generally good judgment, and with a good record of public service, but this person espoused the hatred of, let's say, Jews?
 
Wouldn't you take this person off the table?

All the good stuff wouldn't matter, would it? The hatred of Jews would expose the person as unworthy of public office. As a matter of fact, religious leaders would probably speak out against such a candidate, without fear of being seen as meddlers.

I bet you know where I'm going with this: Why, then, for so many Catholics, is a politician's public and repeated support for abortion not a disqualifying issue?

This is an especially pressing question this year because, here in California, SB1301, which enshrines abortion in state law as never before even while it lowers the medical standards under which an abortion can be performed, was passed by both houses of the legislature and signed by the governor.
 
Hardly a peep was heard.

Among those voting for the bill were two of San Diego County's Catholic legislators. Catholics will still vote for them.
 
For some Catholics, as for some of just about every demographic group, abortion is just no big deal. It doesn't matter how many times the pope or various bodies of bishops or Mother Teresa, or other Catholic leaders repeat that this is the most serious moral issue of our times, they just can't get themselves worked up about it.

For these Catholics, as for many who are lukewarm on the whole issue, the destruction of helpless humans is rendered abstract by the cloak of the mother's body and by the fact that in utero humans don't look all that human. An evil that is unseen is just not an evil that it is easy to get worked up about.
 
Also, for these Catholics, there is a conflicting good to consider -- the rights of the mother. Were there no conflict with the rights of women, abortion would be easy to reject.

In reasoning out such moral tangles, Christians are supposed to have an advantage -- centuries of moral reasoning by our forebears in the light of the Gospel. This is supposed to help us when confronted with competing goods. This history of moral reasoning is often neglected, however, because many of us are formed more by American consumerist culture than by our long, hard-won Christian heritage.
 
We hear the Church repeating, "Human life is sacred," and the words just sort of bounce off our foreheads. They have become a platitude. The abortion conflict is a barrage of platitudes. We adjust ourselves to tune them all out. We find other issues with which to measure our politicians: party affiliation, orientation toward the poor, views on taxes, or the First Amendment, or the Fifth Amendment, whatever.

Anything but face the most serious moral issue of our times.

We don't bother to take the pro-abortion candidate off the table because we know the whole abortion thing is a sticky moral wicket. We give the candidate the benefit of the doubt.

It has ever been thus. Most people need the wider culture to reinforce their own moral intuitions. In general, people didn't get themselves too worked up about slavery before it was eliminated; it was only after the Civil War that the evil of slavery became obvious, and no serious politician would then dare espouse it.

Can you imagine a pro-slavery politician succeeding today? We suppose we have made moral advances because we find it easy to reject slavery, but we are not more morally advanced than our ancestors because we can easily settle the most morally pressing issue of their era. We only advance morally when we can confront with courage the most morally pressing issue of our own era.

We are failing this test.

Today when the torturous implements of slavery are discussed in college classrooms - things that go far beyond mere whips, but are truly ingenious devices of pure cruelty -- students sometimes weep. They ask, "How could people have tolerated this right here in America?"

Similar students will one day similarly recoil when they are told about the killing of the pre-born for scientific experiments, or the unbelievable cruelty of partial-birth abortion (scissors stabbed into the back of an infant's head, brain sucked out, skull crushed), or the tawdry conditions under which young women, often minors, were encouraged by boyfriends and families and state legislatures to undergo these gruesome procedures.

By then the general moral reasoning will have risen against these obvious evils and even the cowardly will openly disqualify politicians who espouse and promote them.

The time for moral courage will have passed, without so much as inconveniencing most of us.

The Southern Cross