CNA Staff, Jul 6, 2024 / 09:00 am (CNA).
As the 2024 U.S. presidential election heats up, a Wisconsin bishop is calling on President Joe Biden to consider “the dignity of life” while other Wisconsin Catholics are also voicing their support for the pro-life cause.
“Our goal is certainly that every one of our parishes has people equipped, informed to receive, to welcome, to accompany, and to really practically help both women and men that find themselves in crisis pregnancy or crisis parenthood,” Bishop Donald Hying of Madison, Wisconsin, told EWTN News correspondent Owen Jensen.
When asked what he would say to Catholic president Biden, Hying responded: “I would say, Mr. President, we invite you to look at what the Church says about the dignity of life.”
“It’s important to point out that abortion isn’t wrong because the Catholic Church says it’s wrong,” Hying continued. “The Catholic Church says it’s wrong because it’s inherently wrong.”
Wisconsin pro-life advocates are awaiting a state court decision on an 1849 abortion law protecting unborn children. The legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, Matt Sande, voiced concern about the Wisconsin State Supreme Court’s current makeup, calling the court, which has a liberal majority of 4-3, “radicalized.”
“Not only are we looking at them ruling 940.04, our abortion ban, unenforceable, overturning it, they could be looking to find a right to abortion in our state constitution,” he told Jensen on “EWTN News Nightly.”
Tom Usle, the northern regional manager of Students for Life, noted that now is the time to “step up” for the right to life.
“It’s a battleground state, to be sure,” Usle said. “But we also see just more and more people are really coming to the realization that it is on us now to step up.”
“We no longer have the excuse of: ‘Roe’ is in the way, we can’t do anything about abortion,” he said. “Now is the time that we really do have the power.”
A pro-life student in Milwaukee credited adoption with saving her life from abortion.
“All glory be to God that I was kept and able to live given the chance at life,” Isabelle Thompson told Jensen.
Thompson, who is Catholic, gave advice for expectant mothers who may be considering abortion.
“A pregnancy that you’ll go through is nine months of your life, and that’s hard to give that up, even if you’re not going to keep that child — especially if you’re not going to keep that child,” she said. “That’s a hard nine months to give of your life, but that’s nine months as opposed to a child’s entire life that could be gone.”
To her biological mother who put her up for adoption years ago, Thompson said: “Just thank you. Not only for giving me life, but you gave my parents a child, something that they couldn’t have. Adoption is one of their greatest blessings.”
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Carnage and the Cross
I look at the blood and devastation,
Decimation of God’s creation.
Innocence on full display,
There is no execution stay.
A body pierced by a blade,
As a life begins to fade.
I see wounds everywhere,
More than my heart can bear.
Evil on full display,
No words, nothing to say.
Not thinking of Calvary,
But killing fields for all to see.
Unborn children torn apart,
Forever stopping a beating heart.
Jesus cried two thousand years ago,
His tears continue to flow.
“When asked what he would say to Catholic president Biden, Hying responded: “I would say, Mr. President, we invite you to look at what the Church says about the dignity of life.”
What a weak statement! The CCC lists several sins that cry to heaven – murder is first on the list. Abortion is murder, the deliberate killing of the unborn. Those in the abortion business, women seeking abortion, and politicians promoting abortion (murder) are endangering their eternal salvation. Would it be too much to ask a bishop to state this, rather than just saying it is “wrong.” Lots of things are “wrong” but they don’t necessarily endanger one’s soul.
I am not singling out Bishop Hying, because what he said is typical of bishops’ statements on abortion. Not long ago I saw one state’s bishops reacting to the state’s latest pro-abortion action as “problematic.” Hard to see Saint Paul telling some of the Corinthians that what they were doing was “problematic.”
Unfortunately, the bishops’ statements on abortion are in line with their actions, or should I say their lack of actions. They refuse to enforce canon 915 by continuing to give the Eucharist to public notorious sinners. So, what are people to think?
There is a description for people who do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome. and it is not a positive description.
I am looking for a little outrage. Is it too much to ask, for example, for the same level of outrage by the bishops over the murder of the unborn that many bishops show when our country enforces our border immigration laws?
“The CCC lists several sins that cry to heaven – murder is first on the list.”
Yes, the Catechism and the Magisterium (nn. 2033-5) identify intrinsically evil acts which are immoral under all circumstances and non-negotiable. These include: intentional killing of the innocent (n. 2273), infanticide (n. 2268), abortion (n. 2273), euthanasia (n. 2277); and sexual immorality (nn. 2352, 2353, 2356, 2357, 2370, 2380, 2381).
The Second Vatican Council makes direct reference to the binding force in all cases of universal Natural Law (n. 79), and then expands the list:
“Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraced working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator” (n. 27).
QUESTION: About the appeasements of so-called “gradualism,” why doesn’t Dignitas Infinita remove Fiducia Supplicans’ drop of cyanide in the punchbowl—the crypto-blessing of “irregular” couples—as “couples” rather than as persons?
Munich in 1938. Rome in 2023?
Bishop Hying is one of the good guys. He deserves support.
One may reasonably suspect that Biden has known the Catholic position on abortion for decades and has come to reject that teaching for political, perhaps financial gain. Biden made his choice to promote and sustain abortion.
Good on him for taking a stand, but where are the rest of the US Bishops on calling out Biden and all the other self-professed “Catholics” in the political world, and where have they been the past 7 years? Aside from the very few who have shown courage, US Catholic “leadership” has been guilty of silence on so many vital issues.
Your Excellency, demand Biden’s excommunication or sit down and shut up. Those are your options.
Abortion isn’t bad because the church says it’s bad, abortion is bad because the Bible says so. God says that murder is a sin against humanity and Gods Holy nature and his Word, not because the Catholic Church says so.
Not only because the sola Scriptura Bible says so…
St. Irenaeus said it this way: “From the beginning, God had implanted in the heart of man the precepts of the natural law. Then he was content to remind him of them. This was the Decalogue [the Bible].” And St. John Paul II underlines both the baked-in natural law plus your point: “The Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (n. 95).
Amen!!!
Can we please stop dancing around this issue and tell the blunt truth? Abortion is murder and as such, it’s a mortal sin. The punishment for mortal sin if never confessed and forgiven is hell. This is real simple.
Amen!!!
The Bishop, as well as all the Bishops, should be inviting Biden to either repent or to leave the Catholic Church altogether. Biden knows full well what the Church has to say about abortion and he has made it clear time-and-time again that he doesn’t care. Given that, he should be invited to honor his choice to not be Catholic and to leave the church (or made to if he doesn’t accept that invitation or the invitation to repent). We need to stop being weak about our faith, and live it the way the Lord requires us to as revealed in Scripture!