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Denver, Colo., Jul 31, 2018 / 02:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Former Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak has one word to sum up the plight of the pro-life Democrat: “Lonely.”
“We’re not trusted in our party. We are not appreciated by Republicans, even though nothing can pass without us,” he told a gathering of pro-life Democrats in Denver. “It really is a hard road to go.”
Stupak was among the speakers at the Democrats for Life of America annual conference held July 20-22 on the theme “We want our party back.”
When Stupak joined Congress in 1992, there were 20 pro-life Democrats. Now there are only three who openly take a pro-life stand.
“I think there’s more, I think there’s a lot more,” he said. “But our numbers have dwindled so much that there’s no leadership within the Democratic Party to ask these members to vote for pro-life legislation.”
He said he was positive a 20-week ban on abortion could pass Congress with enough key pro-life Democrats. In his view, about 30 Democratic votes are needed to counter to votes of pro-choice Republicans.
“Republicans will never admit it but if you go back and look no right to life legislation can pass in the U.S. Congress without the support of Democrats,” said Stupak.
The nine-term Congressman was a key leader in an amendment intended to limit the provision of abortion in the 2010 health care bill known as the Affordable Care Act. His 2017 book “For All Americans” discusses the passage of the act.
“You need to constantly support the right-to-life Democrats. Remind them they’re doing the Lord’s work. You have to be there for them,” he told his audience. “We have to support our pro-life Democrats and have to remind our party why we are such an integral part.”
Lincoln Davis, a former congressman from Tennessee, also attended the Denver event. U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), who faced a strong primary challenge this year from a candidate backed by pro-abortion rights groups, addressed the gathering in a pre-recorded video. He received the Democrats for Life Bob Casey Whole Life Award, named for the former governor of Pennsylvania.
Michael Wear, a political strategist who directed faith outreach for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, spoke to the conference via live video. He recounted his background in an all-Democrat, blue-collar union family. When he became a Christian, he said, it “put new life and meaning behind what I viewed as the central commitments of the Democratic Party: fighting poverty, civil rights, human dignity.”
“The pro-life movement needs Democrats, and the Democratic Party need pro-lifers. You have earned your place in politics, we have earned our place. Our responsibility is to steward the influence we have as best we know how to do the most good as we know it,” he said.
While on some issue the Democratic Party did not necessarily fit, Wear said, “you join a political party not for that party to influence you, but for you to influence that party.”
“Registering for a political party does not mean signing one’s conscience over to “every jot and tittle of the party platform,” he told the audience.
“You’re willing to hold in the tension of contributing to something you don’t always agree with all the time… but our civic life is not just about our personal preferences. It’s about the common good, about how we live together,” said Wear. “Political parties are a very important way of how to do that.”
Wear saw the Democratic Party of 2006 and 2008 as better for pro-life advocates than the current situation. In his view, the pro-life movement is a “helpful, sort-of-nagging element” that pushes Democrats to “stand up for life.”
He believed President Barack Obama cautioned his party against alienating others, including on the issue of abortion. Obama’s controversial visit to the University of Notre Dame had positive elements for Wear. The Democratic Party platform at the time had language about reducing abortion, language which “ended up pleasing nobody,” the president decided to keep this language in his speech.
The conference drew some opposition from Colorado Democrats and Democrat-leaning groups.
Progress Now Colorado, which previously attracted attention for misleading ads against pro-life pregnancy centers in the state, ran internet ads critical of the conference. In a parking lot outside the conference hotel, the group set up a billboard truck which said, “abortion access is a progressive value.”
On the morning of July 21, several critics gathered outside the hotel for a small press conference: Karen Middleton, executive director of NARAL Colorado; Sam DeWitt, access campaign manager for Compassion and Choices Colorado; and Democratic state legislators Sen. Rhonda Fields and Reps. Leslie Herod and Jovan Melton.
Herod objected to the effort to make space for Democrats who are opposed to abortion.
“Democratic values are not up for debate… the national and Colorado Democratic platforms are clear. Upholding the legal right for anyone to access a safe and legal abortion is essential and non-negotiable,” she said.
Herod characterized abortion as fundamental “to achieving the kind of gender, race and economic equality that we as Democrats have been fighting for, for decades.”
“Let me be clear: a Democrat is someone who stands for equality, stands for choice, stands for racial justice. If you don’t stand for those things then you are not a Democrat,” she said.
Middleton, herself a former Democratic state legislator, said Colorado was “a solidly pro-choice state” and contended that those gathered for the conference were not in fact Democrats, but present “under a ruse.”
“This notion, a false narrative of a false move into the party really needs to be pushed back,” she said. “We’re here to say, ‘No, we don’t believe you, you are not welcome here, we want to see you really let us move forward together, unifying access to abortion care for all.’”
Over a dozen pro-life Democrats and their allies held a brief counter-demonstration. Playing up the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate’s opposition to unionization of its workers, they held signs such as “Pro-Labor, Pro-Life.”
Just minutes later, the conference hosted speaker Justin Giboney, an attorney and political strategist from Atlanta who was elected as a delegate to the 2012 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions.
“A lot of Democrats disagree with the party on abortion but stay silent. We’ve got to speak up,” he said. “Without the assumption of ill intentions on the part of pro-lifers, people would have to acknowledge that there is another life at stake in these debates.”
He said he appreciates the Democratic Party’s “commitment to serving the least of these” and its recognition that government “has a role to play in improving people’s lives.
“The party must not turn away from these fundamental values,” he added.
Giboney, who is African-American, said his formation in traditional black Protestantism “means my faith cannot be separated from my politics.” He placed himself in the Progressive Era tradition of social programs for the poor, workers’ rights, government reform, and criminal justice issues.
Giboney rejected political progressivism that defines itself in “the Western European expressive individualism, permissive culture sense of the term.” While many people appreciate the Democratic Party’s stand on immigration and heath care, he said, they “see the party as speeding recklessly away not only from a sense of morality, but also a sense of reason, a sense of pluralism, and moving so far left on social issues that it is irresponsible. It has become illiberal.”
He feared that other issues will be sidelined for secular progressive issues he said are being championed and funded by a few interest groups.
According to Giboney, there were groups that wanted him kicked out of the Georgia delegation to the Democratic convention. He worried the party is “openly engaging in religious exclusion” to limit the participation of people with certain religious beliefs, hindering any pro-life Democrats’ run for office.
Such candidates will not get exposure or funding if they maintain their beliefs publicly; staff will leave candidates because they fear they won’t get a job later.
“While the party accepts the vote of religious voters, it will treat them as unfit if they try to run for public office,” he charged.
In Giboney’s view, some pro-life advocates on the political right had contributed to false narratives. He found it hard to relate to the Republican Party’s version of the pro-life movement, which he said isn’t “whole life.”
“How can you care about the unborn, if you don’t care about the poor or the immigrant?” he asked. “People ask these questions because too many pro-lifers don’t have a strong record on some of these other issues.”
He stressed the need for pro-life advocates to show compassion for people in a crisis situation and to do more than simply encourage a pregnant woman to have a child, who will then grow up in poverty and the pressures of a harsh criminal justice system.
“I think pro-life Democrats are in the best position to do those things and we need to take up that task.”
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Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Jul 30, 2018 / 06:02 pm (ACI Prensa).- The Honduran bishops’ conference on Monday denied there exists a homosexual culture at the national seminary, as suggested by a recent report from the National Catholic Register.
In a statement released July 30, the Honduran bishops lamented that “the ‘information’ from Mr. Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register, a media outlet belonging to the EWTN network, and which is the origin of the information that appears in various digital media of the country and/or abroad, causes pain and scandal in those it supposedly wants to defend.”
“With complete certainty and truth, we affirm there does not exist, nor has there existed, nor ought there exist in the seminary an atmosphere as presented by the aforementioned National Catholic Register report, in which the impression is given that [the seminary] institutionally promotes and sustains practices contrary to morality and the norms of the Church, viewed with complacency by the bishops,” the bishops’ conference stated.
In “Honduran Seminarians Allege Widespread Homosexual Misconduct”, published July 25 in the National Catholic Register, Edward Pentin reported on an anonymous letter written by 48 of the 180 students at the Our Lady of Suyapa Major Seminary.
In the letter, the seminarians say that “we are living and going through a time of tension in our house, due to gravely immoral situations, especially an active homosexuality within the seminary which has been a taboo during all this time.”
They also stated that by “covering it up,” the problem has gained strength, becoming, as a priest said not long ago, an “epidemic in the seminary.”
The seminarians’ letter was supposedly submitted to scrutiny at the plenary assembly of the Honduran bishops’ conference in June this year.
According to Pentin’s sources, when the document was read before the bishops, Cardinal Óscar Andres Rodríguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa (who coordinates the group of cardinals assisting Pope Francis in his reform of the Roman Curia), along with Bishop Angel Garachana Perez of San Pedro Sula, president of the bishops’ conference, criticized the authors of the letter.
The existence of the letter was confirmed to the National Catholic Register by Bishop Guy Charbonneau of Choluteca, who said the bishop’s conference is conducting an investigation to determine if the accusations are true.
“We are currently in this process,” the prelate said. “Each bishop has to deal with this, interviewing the seminarians of his own diocese.”
The National Catholic Register article came out a few days after Pope Francis accepted the resignation of the Auxiliary Bishop of Tegucigalpa, Juan José Pineda Fasquelle, who at 57 was 18 years away from the obligatory age for a prelate to present his resignation.
Bishop Pineda has also been immersed in accusations of serious sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement.
In their July 30 statement, the Honduran bishops lamented that these news reports may have “disturbed” the People of God.
The bishops’ conference explained that Our Lady of Suyapa Major Seminary is “an inter-diocesan institution which, although it is located in in the Archdiocese of Tegucigalpa, it is at the service of the formation of candidates to the priesthood from all the dioceses of Honduras, with the exception of the Diocese of Comayagua.”
“The bishops, who are ultimately responsible for the formation of our seminarians, entrusted in 1997 the immediate task (of their formation) to the Congregation of Jesus and Mary (the Eudists) of the Colombian Province, and in recent years they have been joined by Honduran diocesan priests.”
“In the academic formation of the seminarians,” they said, “a significant number of professors including the Cardinal (Rodríguez Maradiaga), priests, nuns and lay people are involved. And, ultimately, each one of the bishops of the Honduran Bishops’ Conference is responsible for the formation, financial support and monitoring the human, spiritual and pastoral growth of the seminarians of our own dioceses.”
The bishops thanked God because “the enthusiasm, commitment, and dedication of so many people at the major seminary, in each one of the dioceses and parishes are bearing abundant fruit.”
However, they noted that it does not surprise them that “in the midst of that fruit weeds would appear.”
For the Honduran bishops “it is evident that there are weeds and evil, especially, in making ‘anonymous’ reports;’ in airing them, mixing in facts, suspicions and interpretations; while ignoring the monitoring given to the challenges that arise.”
“There are weeds in sexual and affective weakness, which affects all of us and can creates inappropriate attitudes and behaviors. There are weeds in sterile pessimism, in spiritual worldliness, in the search of forms of power, human glories or financial well being,” they added.
The bishops acknowledged “that these temptations affect us and that we fall into them. But we equally recognize that the power of God is manifested in our weakness.”
The bishops’ conference said that the bishops, formators, and seminarians are “engaged in a constructive and demanding dialogue to discern how to face the challenges that are posed to us by reality.”
“At this time, to support that commitment, we have requested the collaboration of a bishop emeritus of our continent, with experience in the field of priestly formation and who has also accepted our request.”
The Honduran bishops asked priests to “increase your commitment, and generous dedication to the service of the Gospel such that, following your example, free and mature vocations may come forth, unafraid to serve.”
“We ask current and future seminarians to engage enthusiastically in your discernment process, grow in confidence, authenticity and transparency with your bishops and formators, and let your communities and parishes honestly see the strengths and weaknesses of the seminary.”
Finally, they said, “we ask everyone to increase your prayers for our Major Seminary and avoid any kind of speculation which fails to respect the dignity of bishops, seminarians, the formators, and that of all of us who with limitations and failings seek to carry out the Lord’s work.”
Both Catholic News Agency and the National Catholic Register are part of EWTN News, Inc.
This article was originally published by our Spanish language sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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