Catholic Voices' blog creates smokescreen for bishop-protected dissent

The Catholic Voices Media Monitor (hereafter Monitor) blog yesterday published a post criticising me. Here is my rebuttal of that post.

Monitor :

"Smeaton attacks Catholic Voices"

My response:

• I have never attacked Catholic Voices. I have, rather, criticised its coordinators Dr Austen Ivereigh and Jack Valero, and some of the content of its blog, which one assumes was (at the very least) published with their approval.

Monitor:

"According to John Smeaton (photo) of the hardline lobby SPUC, Catholic Voices seeks 'to redefine the common perception of what constitutes mainstream Catholicism in England'. Behind this conspiracy, he asserts, lies The Tablet. And his reason for believing that CV coordinators Ivereigh and Valero share this aim? Why, 'Dr Ivereigh's loyalty to The Tablet' -- on the basis that he refused to accept a blogger's invitation to describe the weekly as a 'vehicle for dissent'.

My response:

• I did not say that it is "Catholic Voices", but rather "Catholic Voices' leaders" Dr Ivereigh and Mr Valero who seek to redefine, etc. 
• Dr Ivereigh, a former Tablet deputy editor, did not merely "refuse to accept a blogger's invitation to describe [The Tablet] as a 'vehicle for dissent' but actually rejected the claim that The Tablet is a vehicle for dissent. On his blog Laurence England asked Dr Ivereigh: "[A]t what point in your career did you decide that The Tablet had lost sight of the Catholic Faith and had become a vehicle for dissent of Catholic Teaching? ... [W]hat you make of it nowadays?" Dr Ivereigh replied: "I've never decided that about the Tablet ... I write for it still. And subscribe. That should answer your question."
• It is a cheap debating trick to rubbish as conspiracy theories the highlighting of possible threats to Catholic pro-life/pro-family witness. Also, it goes against the teaching of St Francis de Sales, a Doctor of the Church, who wrote: "It is true charity to point out the wolf wheresoever he creeps in among the flock." No truly charitable Catholic familiar with The Tablet can deny that it is a vehicle for dissent, a wolf among the flock.
  

Monitor:

"Indeed, Smeaton's attempt at an auto-da-fe on this question -- because Ivereigh reads the Tablet (as he does other Catholic papers)..."

My response:

• I made no mention of Dr Ivereigh "read[ing] the Tablet".
• My objection to Dr Ivereigh's role representing Catholicism includes Dr Ivereigh's loyalty to The Tablet, his defence and promotion of some of the errors of The Tablet on pro-life/pro-family issues, and his Tablet-esque whitewashing of (among things) Tony Blair's record, condom use in relation to the Catholic Church's perennial prohibition on contraception, and Catholic schooling in England and Wales.

Monitor:

"...is typical of the 'Taliban' mentality of many in the blogosphere who call for the banning, destruction or burning of literature and people they regard as "heretical", even when there has been no such call or declaration by whom the Church's own law entrusts with the authority to do so."

My response:

• In England and Wales it is precisely those "whom the Church's own law entrusts with the authority" (i.e. the Catholic bishops) who are producing the very literature and promoting the very people undermining the Church's teaching on pro-life/pro-family issues.

Monitor:

"Smeaton has long considered himself a guardian of the limits of Catholic orthodoxy, preferring his own Magisterium to that of the bishops and of Rome"

My response:

• Canon 212 #3 of the Code of Canon Law 1983 which says: "According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, [Christ's faithful] have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons." [my emphases]. I challenge Monitor to find even one single statement or action of mine at variance with the Church's Magisterium. (Hint: you won't find one).

Monitor:

"scouring the statements of bishops in search of 'heterodoxy', frequently misquoting them or distorting their words in a conscious attempt to undermine the authority of the Church's pastors."

My response:

• Dr Ivereigh made a similar claim on Laurence England's blog, yet provides not one single piece of evidence of how I have misquoted or distorted any bishop's words - because he has no evidence, because there is no evidence.

Monitor:

"He has consistently undermined the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, in ways that in the view of Catholic Voices is quite inconsistent with the Catholic commitment to communion."

My response:

• St Thomas Aquinas, the common Doctor of the Church, teaches on the matter: "There being an imminent danger for the Faith, prelates must be questioned, even publicly, by their subjects." (Summa Theologiae, IIa IIae, Q. 33, A. 4). Archbishop Nichols' approach to homosexulity and to sex and relationships education are "imminent danger[s] for the Faith".

Monitor:

"And while his organisation, SPUC, does some useful research, its policies of refusing to engage with attempts by Parliament to reduce the numbers of abortions are at odds with the very clear and stated policy of the Catholic bishops of England and Wales 'to work and vote for achievable and incremental improvements to an unjust law'."

My response:

• SPUC is the world's oldest pro-life lobbying and educational organisation, founded in 1967, and the largest in Europe, comprised of tens of thousands of faithful Catholics and people of other beliefs. SPUC has wons the plaudits of countless Catholic bishops, pro-life leaders, politicians and academics throughout the world for defending human life with love from conception to natural death, not only for our work in the UK but at the UN and within the European institutions. By contrast, Catholic Voices is a brand new, tiny organisation, by its own admission mostly comprised of fairly inexperienced volunteers.
• SPUC opposed recent so-called "attempts by Parliament to reduce the numbers of abortions" precisely because those attempts not only would have failed to reduce the numbers of abortions, but may even have led to increasing those numbers. Those attempts therefore did not represent "improvements" and were not even "achievable", being defeated by comfortable margins in parliament, as SPUC long predicted.
• SPUC is not a Catholic organisation and is therefore in no way bound to follow the policies of the Catholic bishops of England and Wales or their national conference. Also, a national bishops' conference is no more the Catholic Church than are Catholic Voices or Catholics in SPUC: "[T]he episcopal conferences have no theological basis, they do not belong to the structure of the Church, as willed by Christ, that cannot be eliminated ... No episcopal conference, as such, has a teaching mission: its documents have no weight of their own save that of the consent given to them by the individual bishops." (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "The Ratzinger Report", 1992)

Monitor's post is in reality a smokescreen by Dr Ivereigh and Mr Valero to protect dissent within the Catholic Church and the bishops who also protect that dissent.

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The Tablet's deceitful homosexual* manifesto means churches should unsubscribe

The Tablet's latest editorial, "Deepest human desire", argues that "the Church [should] move on with confidence, if not doctrinally then at least pastorally" on the subject of homosexuality". Among other things, it:

• implies that the Church is open to the charge of "anti-­homosexual prejudice, even bigotry"
• says that the Church should "move beyond a sterile state of dis­approval" of homosexuality, lest it "lose the sympathy of wide sections of the public"
• criticises "the Church's inability to comprehend and value [homosexual persons'] emotional lives [and] their relationships"
• implies homosexual love "is to be treasured and respected"
• insists that homosexuals must be defined "positively ... by their affections"
• claims that there are homosexual couples who "demonstrate a constancy and a stability in their partnerships that, rather than causing scandal, set an example to their heterosexual friends and relations"
• questions whether homosexual men or women are unsuitable parents
• questions whether homosexuality is unnatural, and implies that homosexuality is innate rather than acquired

*(The reason why the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality is so important for the pro-life cause can be found in Pope John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae. In paragraph 97, Pope John Paul teaches that it is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection.)

Most perniciously, The Tablet's editorial attempts to co-opt Pope Benedict, the late Cardinal Hume and the former Master-General of the Dominicans. Whilst the quoted words of the latter two leave (to say the least) a lot to be desired, in no way can any words of Pope Benedict be used to endorse homosexuality. The editorial nonetheless claims that "the reintegration of erotic love into Christian spirituality" in his encyclical Deus caritas est "has a direct relevance" which provides a "compelling" basis for normalising homosexual love. Although the editorial admits that "[t]he role of eros in homosexuality the Pope leaves alone", it still uses the Pope's reflection on eros to promote a pro-homosexual agenda, even though the Pope clearly stated that his definition of eros is "love between man and woman" [Deus caritas est, 3]

The Tablet's editorial goes beyond mere opinion, and is in fact a manifesto for homosexual equality. To that end, it is part of a softening-up and consciousness-raising exercise within the Church. It is clear that The Tablet intends to use the months leading up to the Pope's visit as part of a media campaign to entrench an anti-life and anti-family agenda within official Catholic circles. In The Tablet's 30 January edition, Sue Gaisford, The Tablet's literary editor, writes about Kay Gilderdale, who helped cause the death of Lynn, her daughter who had ME:

"[S]he was innocent of attempted murder. Nor - and this is harder - do I think that what she did could be considered sinful."

In contrast, Pope Benedict made clear in his ad limina address to the Scottish bishops that:

"Support for euthanasia strikes at the very heart of the Christian understanding of the dignity of human life."

One hundred years ago, St Pius X, a similarly courageous pope, rejected the very essence of Tablet-think when he taught that Catholic teaching

"[does not] evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously"

and

"may [not] be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age".

It is simply a matter of historical fact that official Catholic teaching on pro-life and pro-life family matters has never changed. Some of the Church's earliest documents condemn abortion, euthanasia, contraception and homosexuality.

The only reason I am subscribed to receive (a single copy of) The Tablet is so I can expose its deceitful agenda. For a parish priest, however, to take (i.e. subscribe to) The Tablet in bulk for sale to his parishioners is like a psychiatrist ordering cyanide capsules in bulk for sale to his depressed patients. The Tablet isn't known as "The Bitter Pill" for nothing, not least its notorious dissent from Humanae Vitae.

Some may argue that it's wrong to seek to restrict The Tablet's distribution, arguing that there are other publications on sale at churches which offer a counter-balance to it. Yet, again, it makes no sense to supply poison liberally simply because there are antidotes available. Pope Benedict made this clear in his ad limina address to the English and Welsh bishops:

"[I]t is important to recognize dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate."

We should prepare for Pope Benedict's visit to Britain in September by honouring that teaching and by deleting The Tablet. I am therefore today joining Fr Tim Finigan's campaign "Tabula delenda est" (image courtesy of Fr Finigan) to encourage churches and other Catholic points of sale to cancel their bulk subscriptions.

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The Tablet: the anti-Humanae Vitae megaphone drowing out the voice of reason

Catherine Pepinster uses The Tablet, of which she’s the editor, like a megaphone to bellow her opposition to Humanae Vitae and to drown out the voice of reason. Like the bigot at a public meeting who has no intention of listening to those on the public platform, she declares in The Times today:

“The Church has much to teach society about the needs of the developing world and the nature of justice. Yet dialogue between secular society and the Catholic Church over climate change has been painfully limited and stymied until very recently. With the impact of a rapidly escalating world population playing its part in climate change, birth control has been the elephant in the room in discussions.”

Maybe she didn’t hear or read Pope Benedict’s address on 10th May, when he said:

“What was true yesterday is true also today. The truth expressed in Humanae Vitae does not change; on the contrary, precisely in the light of the new scientific discoveries, its teaching becomes more timely and elicits reflection on the intrinsic value it possesses.”

Pope Benedict was addressing the participants of the international congress organized by the Pontifical Lateran University on the 40th anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae. I wonder if Catherine Pepinster sent any of her editorial staff to hear what the speakers had to say at that conference.

And I wonder if The Tablet sent anyone to the conference in Rome the following month when over 200 FertilityCare Practitioners and NaProTechnology physicians and gynaecologists gathered for the annual meeting of the American Academy of FertilityCare Practitioners, inspired by the teaching of Humanae Vitae. I can send Catherine Pepinster a full report if she likes!

Evidence presented there shows that the medical applications of NaPro have grown to become a comprehensive branch of women’s health medicine, which respects both the natural fertility cycle and the teaching of the Catholic Church. Working cooperatively with the woman’s body, NaPro has been shown to treat many gynaecological conditions including Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, miscarriage and other causes of infertility. Is The Tablet interested by any chance?

Other evidence presented at the conference by Dr. Phil Boyle showing that NaPro has between a 40-60% success rate in achieving pregnancy. This compares to a maximum success rate of 30% for IVF (UK average raw data “take-home-baby” rate).

As I blogged yesterday, IVF – which gave birth to the first IVF child thirty years ago – has led to over two million embryos discarded, or frozen, or selectively aborted, or miscarried or used in destructive experiments. (2,137,924 human embryos were created by specialists while assisting couples in the UK to have babies between 1991 and 2005, according to BioNews. During this period, the HFEA informs us that the total of live babies born through IVF procedures was 109,469.)

Pope Benedict’s address (above) continues:

“As I wrote in my first Encyclical Deus Caritas Est: "Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united.... Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves" (n. 5). If this unity is removed, the value of the person is lost and there is a serious risk of considering the body a commodity that can be bought or sold (cf. ibid). In a culture subjected to the prevalence of "having" over "being", human life risks losing its value.”

Would Catherine Pepinster be interested in exploring in The Tablet the connection between the Pope’s words and what’s happened during the past 30 years with the IVF industry?

Catherine Pepinster reminds The Times readers that “The Church has much to teach society about the needs of the developing world and the nature of justice”

If she could put down her anti-Humanae Vitae megaphone for a moment and reflect on Pope Benedict’s words in the opening address of his visit to Australia for World Youth Day:

"The concerns for non-violence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity. They cannot, however, be understood apart from a profound reflection upon the innate dignity of every human life from conception to natural death: a dignity conferred by God himself and thus inviolable."

One starting-point for this “profound reflection” might be the abortifacient nature of virtually all contraceptive drugs and devices – with the exception of course of prophylactics like condoms – as freely acknowledged by their manufacturers. And what about about the fulfilment in England and Wales of Pope Paul VI’s prophecy in Humanae Vitae, that governments will impose on countries birth control measures which are considered lawful by couples in pursuit of a solution to particular family difficulties? And how the Catholic authorities in England and Wales are co-operating with the British government in imposing birth control, including abortion, on families through children’s access to secret abortion in schools, including in Catholic schools?

Are these aspects of Humanae Vitae in which Catherine Pepinster is interested? Or is she actually on the other side of the abortion debate? After all, a recent edition of the Tablet (which describes itself as "the international Catholic weekly") contains a glossy full-colour insert advertising Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), sometimes known by its English name Doctors Without Borders (DWB). The insert's front page has a modern paraphrase of the Hippocratic Oath, "I will tread with care in matters of life and death". Yet inside, an MSF nurse working in the Democratic Republic of Congo recounts how her team "trained local nurses to provide emergency contraception", i.e. the morning-after pill, which may cause an early abortion. See my recent blog on this here.

Finally, if Ms Pepinster must continue to use the Tablet as an anti-Humanae Vitae megaphone, spare us the percentages of Catholics who ignore or don’t know or don’t understand the Church’s teaching. It will be less grating to hear such observations when journals like The Tablet put down their megaphones and begin to follow what’s happening in the world and to count the human cost of Humanae Vitae’s message being ignored.

The Tablet helps radical pro-abortion group raise money

The 14 May edition of The Tablet, the self-styled "International Catholic Weekly", came with an insert (pictured) from an organisation called Womankind, appealing for donations to help it and its partner groups "support girls and women wanting change". Womankind is a radical pro-abortion group which attacks the Catholic Church for upholding the sanctity of human life  - see the list of references below. This is not the first time The Tablet has included a fundraising insert for a pro-abortion organisation: in 2008 the 12 July edition contained an insert from Médecins Sans Frontières ("Doctors Without Borders"), which both performs and defends abortion.

The 14 May Womankind insert follows soon after The Tablet's 30 April editorial which, citing the pre-marital cohabitation of HRH the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, argued that the Churches should endorse cohabitation "as a sensible precaution".*

Raising money for abortion campaigners, publishing pro-abortion dissent, endorsing pre-marital cohabitation, campaigning for so-called gay rights, disobeying Church teaching on contraception ... May I encourage readers of this blog to contact the Catholic bishop in their area, as well as the parish priests of any local churches which stock The Tablet, urging them to cancel and ban sales of The Tablet. Tabula delenda est

* Why is the area of sexual ethics important specifically for the pro-life movement? The late Pope John Paul II, the great pro-life champion, taught in no. 97 of his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae that it is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection. 

Web references to Womankind's support for abortion
N.B. "Sexual and reproductive health and rights" is commonly used by pro-abortion bodies as both a technical term and an euphemism for abortion on demand (Technical definitions prepared for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), Cairo, 1994; Hillary Clinton, April 2009).

"[Womankind's] efforts...guaranteeing women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights" [link]

"2005 – women defend their gains at the ten year review of implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and successfully defeat a proposal led by the U.S government for an anti-abortion amendment to the declaration" [link]

"But, increasingly, this vital work is threatened by a powerful group of right-wing organisations. Linked with conservative governments, they oppose sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms for women and girls." [link]

"In Peru, the problem of legal abortion is embedded in a society in which the exercise of women’s sexual and reproductive rights is not achieved".[link]

"WOMANKIND’s partners are keen to point out that the ongoing restrictions on women's rights are...to do with the wider external environment which is often hostile towomen’s rights. In Peru, Maria-Ysabel Cedano, from DEMUS, puts this down to ‘the interference of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church’, particularly in matters related to sexual and reproductive health." [link]

"WOMANKIND’s four Peruvian partners are working in a very difficult environment. There is a real backlash against women’s rights, after a period in which community organisations and women’s organisations...made significant advances. Women started to benefit from better sexual and reproductive rights ... Many battles were won. But right now the influence of the Catholic Church is very apparent in relation to sexual and reproductive rights: even though the law allows abortion for women whose life may be in danger, public hospitals don’t have the necessary guidance. When the main women’s hospital in Lima did develop guidelines, the Ministry of Health caved into pressure from the Church and invalidated them." [link]
 
Womankind's Peruvian partner-organisation DEMUS has created a cartoon character called Barbi. "Barbi uses [Facebook] to comment on current issues and developments such as Peru‘s recent efforts to decriminalise abortion". [link]

"Bolivia’s women also face serious and substantial risks to their sexual and reproductive health ... Access to legal abortion is restricted to cases of rape, incest, abduction not followed by marriage, or when the mother’s health is at risk ... While contraception is available throughout the country, sustainable use is limited to educated, urban women ... Educating women about their health and particularly their sexual and reproductive rights, enables them to ‘take ownership’ of issues that fundamentally affect their lives."[link]

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Tony Blair continues to manipulate the Catholic Church

Tony Blair has written an article in the latest edition of The Tablet, which describes itself as an "international Catholic weekly". The article's subject is the work of Mr Blair's Faith Foundation in promoting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Mr Blair neglects to tell Tablet readers that his government interpreted the MDGs to include a universal right to abortion on demand which, along with other anti-life policies he pursued, he has refused to repudiate since being received into the Catholic Church (see below). Mr Blair quotes Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez who has said that "the needless deaths of nearly 10 million children a year are an abomination that cannot be tolerated". Cardinal Rodriguez was referring to the deaths of born children from disease. Interestingly, Mr Blair does not quote Cardinal Rodriguez's call for life and the family made to politicians and legislators in 1996, the year before Mr Blair became prime minister:

"Abortion is a primordial evil and one of the fundamental problems of our age ... We call for a massive international effort by politicians and legislators in favour of human life ... We call for legal protection for the unborn child from the moment of conception. We recommend unequivocal pro-life legislation on embryo experimentation and genetic engineering ... We call for an end to the 'contraceptive imperialism' of population control promoted with the use of abortion, sterilization and contraception."

Nor does Mr Blair quote what Cardinal Rodriguez said about politicians who support abortion, shortly before Mr Blair was received into the Catholic Church in 2007:

"A politician who publicly supports abortion, he excommunicates himself ... [T]hat person himself is doing an act that is inconsistent with what he says he believes. That is, we're talking about a person who...is doing something that is a lie."

Since being received into the Catholic Church shortly after leaving office, Mr Blair has refused even to comment upon, let alone repudiate, the swathe of anti-life laws and policies he supported as prime minister and as a parliamentarian.

Mr Blair goes on to praise Pope Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio on international development. Yet Mr Blair makes no reference to certain other of Paul VI's words:

• "It is inadmissible that those who have control of the wealth and resources of mankind should try to resolve the problem of hunger by forbidding the poor to be born." (address to UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, 1974)
• "[I] declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children." (Humanae Vitae, 1968)
• "[W]hatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction...are infamies indeed. They poison human society" (Gaudium et Spes, 1965)

Mr Blair explains the Faith Acts Fellowship programme that his Faith Foundation is running in partnership with the InterFaith Youth Core, but neglects to inform Tablet readers that the Interfaith Youth Core is bankrolled by pro-abortion foundations and that the Faith Acts Fellowship works with World Vision, which is calling for abortion on demand to be legalised in the world's poorest nations. Mr Blair says the programme's fellows will need "compassion in the face of needless suffering and death" - yet what compassion has Mr Blair shown for the needless suffering and death of the unborn and the vulnerable caused by the laws and policies he promoted?

Mr Blair, stretching to his full moral stature, preaches to us: "[S]ins of omission can vary in their gravity, and the worst can be more grievously damaging than sins of commission." Indeed - omitting to repudiate anti-life laws and policies for which one is mainly and personally responsible, and refusing to witness to the sanctity of human life.

Mr Blair predictably reminds Tablet readers that "countering climate change [is] the greatest moral challenge of this century." So, Mr Blair, is countering climate change the greatest moral challenge of this century, or abortion? Was Pope John Paul II wrong to tell pro-life leader Fr Paul Marx that he was "doing the most important work on earth"?

Tony Blair, and his anti-life wife, is undermining the faith of the church into which he has been received.

Supposing Tony Blair had pursued throughout his political career, policies in support of killing bishops or the lay faithful of, say, the Catholic Church or the Anglican Communion? And, supposing, having been received into the Catholic Church, he refused to repudiate such policies? Would The Tablet give him free rein to present his thinking on religious matters? If not, why not? What distinctions does The Tablet draw between unborn children and the respect due to their right to life, and the right to life of Catholic and Anglican bishops and lay faithful?

Birthday wish for Sir Stepen Wall, Cardinal Murphy O'Connor's former principal adviser

Sir Stephen Wall, former principal adviser to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, 2004 - 2005, is 62 today, according to The Times. Happy birthday, Sir Stephen.

I have a birthday wish for Sir Stephen Wall, on behalf of those fighting to protect the lives of unborn children and the lives of vulnerable patients, particularly the elderly and disabled.

It's that next December,in the month before his birthday, he does not write in the Catholic media, or in any other publication, attacking the Church's teaching on the sanctity of human life. In doing so, he further undermines the right to life of the most vulnerable human beings, and betrays the Gospel message of the Church which entrusted him with such high office.

As Pope John Paul II put it in the first sentence of his encyclical Evangelium Vitae: "The Gospel of Life is at the heart of Jesus's message."

In December, 2007, he published a badly-informed article attacking the Church on IVF, contraception and on other matters; and last month, he attacked the Church's position on euthanasia in a letter to The Tablet. On 1st December, 2007, The Tablet published his article "Rendering Unto Caesar", in which he wrote:

"Last week, the Church in our own country was arguing that giving same-sex couples access to in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was wrong, because of the harm to be done by bringing fatherless children into the world. Yet this is the same Church which, by proclaiming the iniquity of artificial contraception, wills into the world millions of children who will never know true parental love of any kind ... The Church makes another mistake by giving pre-eminence to its concept of law and disregarding its duty of love. In the case of IVF, we are talking about couples who would not go through the heartache of the process unless they wanted, out of their love for each other, to bring a much-loved child into the world ... "

One of the many problems with Sir Stephen's thinking (only to be fully appreciated by reading his article to which I link above) is its implicit rejection of children who are not "much-loved"; the countless children killed by abortifacient "artificial contraception" - birth control drugs and devices which, according to the manufacturers, can prevent a newly-conceived embryo from implanting in the lining of the womb; and IVF – which gave birth to the first IVF child over thirty years ago – has led to over two million embryos discarded, or frozen, or selectively aborted, or miscarried or used in destructive experiments. (2,137,924 human embryos were created by specialists while assisting couples in the UK to have babies between 1991 and 2005, according to BioNews.)

The recently published Dignitas Personae spells out beautifully the fundamental ethical criterion used in the Catholic Church's teaching (in Donum Vitae) which is to be used to evaluate all moral questions arising from any procedures which involve the human embryo: the fruit of human generation, from the first moment of its existence, that is to say, from the moment the zygote has formed, demands the unconditional respect that is morally due to the human being in his bodily and spiritual totality. The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life. (Donum vitae, 1,1: 45 80 (1988), 79, cited in DP, n 4)

Dignitas Personae reiterates the ethical unacceptability of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) since “all techniques of in vitro fertilisation proceed as if the human embryo were simply a mass of cells to be used, selected, and discarded"(Dignitas Personae n 14); and it comments on the very high wastage of human embryos associated with IVF and related procedures. “In many cases the abandonment, destruction and loss of embryos are foreseen and willed" (Dignitas Personae, n 15)

I strongly recommend that Sir Stephen Wall studies this document in order to appreciate that love truly is at the heart of Church's proclamation of the Gospel of life; and that he looks at the compassionate, realistic alternative to IVF to be found in Naprotechnology which has grown to become a comprehensive branch of women’s health medicine, which respects both the natural fertility cycle and the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Fortunately, Sir Stephen's letter to The Tablet last month was answered well by Dr Julian Hughes, as you can see below.

The Tablet, Letters, 20/27 December 2008

Palliative care has limits

My sister, Mary, died from cancer in early December. The day after her death there was a renewed surge of public interest in the question of assisted dying because of the first such death to be shown on British television.In February 2006, at the age of 67, my sister was found to have fluid in the lining of her lung and the fluid contained malignant cells. For the next two and a half years she underwent successive courses of chemotherapy, with little respite. She suffered hair loss, loss of feeling in her feet (makingwalking difficult), nausea and insomnia. But she did not lose her will to live and, when she was feeling well enough, she pursued her life as normally as anyone can who has a death sentence hanging over them and whose life is geared to the rhythms of a nasty disease.

At the end of November, my sister was found to have a perforated bowel. She was not strong enough to undergo a repair operation and, on the advice of her doctors and with her consent, treatment was stopped because it would have been pointless and painful and she was admitted to hospital for palliative care. She said that she hoped she could go out "on a pink cloud"and the palliative care team said they would do their best to achieve just that. In the event, she died exactly two weeks later.

Ever-increasing doses of morphine and other sedatives kept my sister's pain under control. But she was not at all times pain-free and she was certainly not free from distress. Some days before her death, when she was still able to whisper, she asked me, "When is this going to end? I cannot bear it much longer". At that point, had her carers had the power to give her an amount of morphine, or other drug, that would have peacefully ended her life she - and we - would have accepted with gratitude. Yet all of us were powerless under the existing law.

There is something hypocritical about the present law. It allows ever-increasing doses of morphine, which are undoubtedly a contributorycause of death, however precisely and clinically they are measured. Yet it does not allow the combined consent of the patient, family and medical advisers to foreshorten the period of pain and anguish. Is that the will of a loving God? I cannot bring myself to think so.

(Sir) Stephen Wall, London SW18

The Tablet, Letters, 3 January 2009

Yes to care, no to killing

Even those of us who are very inclined to agree with Clifford Longley’s arguments (20/27 December) about the dangers of autonomy as far as physician-assisted suicide is concerned cannot but be moved by Stephen Wall’s story about the sad death of his sister (Letters, 20/27 December). Nonetheless, Sir Stephen’s suggestions must be challenged.

Sir Stephen accepts that medication kept his sister’s pain under control, but goes on to say that she was not always pain-free and "certainly not free from distress". He says he cannot bring himself to think that this is the will of a loving God. He is right that we are confronted by a difficulty here, but it’s not one confined to palliative care. It’s the problem of evil generally: how does the loving God will any of the enormous suffering that occurs in the world? If we cannot answer this question, and understand to some degree the role of suffering in our lives, there are difficulties for our belief in the idea of a loving God.

Secondly, Sir Stephen suggests that ever increasing doses of morphine are "undoubtedly a contributory cause of death". Palliative physicians would rightly respond that morphine, when used for pain, even in high doses, does not cause death. And there is still the doctrine of double effect, that it is licit to do things, foreseeing their bad consequences, but intending good. This is a cause of much philosophical dispute, but the doctrine underpins quotidian medical decisions: I foresee side effects from all drugs, but I aim at some sort of good when I prescribe them.

Sir Stephen asserts that there is "something hypocritical about the present law". But the prohibition on ending innocent human lives remains a cornerstone of civil society, which would be removed by Sir Stephen’s call for euthanasia. My suggestion would be that we need better palliative care, not intentional killing.

In saying this, however, I suspect that the line between the two is often thin and indistinct in practice. Clinical judgements have to be finely made with a good deal of practical wisdom, courage and compassion. One fear about a change to the present law is that it would undermine the basis of such virtues.

(Dr) Julian Hughes, Newcastle upon Tyne

Catholic Voices' leaders seek to redefine Catholicism on life and family issues

Dr Austen Ivereigh, co-ordinator of Catholic Voices, former director of public affairs to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor and former deputy editor of The Tablet, refers to me and to others as Taliban Catholics. Here is an extract from an interview with John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter:

Mr Allen: You put this in the plural, “Catholic Voices.” How do you define a Catholic voice?

Dr Ivereigh answered:

"... [One] criterion was Catholicity, which is where the controversy arises ... [One] thing was that they have to be comfortable with all aspects of church teaching, comfortable enough to put the church’s view across in a way that doesn’t make them squirm. Interestingly, that did automatically exclude people who are critical of the bishops from either side ... We did get a few [applications] from what you would call the “Taliban Catholics,” who of course have become very vociferous on the blogosphere in the last few years. They’re very critical of the bishops for compromising too much with modernity and not promoting Catholic truth as they see it."

This is interesting language from someone who recently took it upon himself to teach the pro-life movement (including me) "lessons in civility"! (These lessons include "civil" descriptions and comparisons of other Catholics and their work, such as "mob", "puritans", "loopiness", "craziness" and "the tactics of Soviet Communism".)

Dr Ivereigh's position on "Taliban Catholics" would be more impressive if he could explain how Archbishop Nichols's notorious comments on gay "unions"* promote Catholic truth, or how the Catholic Education Service (CES), an agency of the Catholic bishops' conference of England and Wales, promotes Catholic truth by appointing an anti-life, anti-family former MP as its deputy director.

Elsewhere, in the comments-box of Laurence England's blog, Mr England put the following question to Dr Ivereigh:

"[A]t what point in your career did you decide that The Tablet had lost sight of the Catholic Faith and had become a vehicle for dissent of Catholic Teaching? ... [W]hat you make of it nowadays?"

Dr Ivereigh replied:

"I've never decided that about the Tablet ... I write for it still. And subscribe. That should answer your question."

But as Fr Timothy Finigan has rightly put it in another context:

"This paper [The Tablet] has no place in any Catholic home, parish Church, or Cathedral. Tabula delenda est."

Dr Ivereigh's loyalty to The Tablet should be sufficient evidence for any faithful pro-life/pro-family Catholic to conclude that he should not be appointed to any representative position in any official or unofficial Catholic or pro-life/pro-family organisation.

Dr Ivereigh appears to be using the profile and position afforded him by the Catholic Voices project to redefine the common perception of what constitutes mainstream Catholicism in England, an agenda pursued by The Tablet for decades.

Sadly, not only is Dr Ivereigh apparently indifferent to the errors of The Tablet on pro-life/pro-family issues, he and his fellow Catholic Voices leader, Jack Valero, defend and promote at least some of those errors.

* The late Pope John Paul II, the great pro-life champion, taught in paragraph 97 of his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae that it is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection.

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My letter in this weekend's Tablet rebutting Clifford Longley's 'pro-choice' position

The 19 November edition of The Tablet (the de facto house journal of British Catholic dissent) contains a column-piece on abortion by Clifford Longley (pictured), the broadcaster (who inter alia assists Catholic Voices, co-run by former Tablet deputy editor Austen Ivereigh). My published letter responding to Mr Longley is immediately below, and below that is (for the sake of completeness) Mr Longley's column-piece. Tabula delenda est.

The Tablet, Letters, 26 November 2011

Catholic MPs must oppose abortion

Clifford Longley’s tendentious reasoning (“The argument that criminal law must mirror moral law is surely not tenable”, 19 November) supporting Catholic MPs embracing a “pro-choice” position does him little credit.

At the heart of Longley’s account is his flawed notion of the relationship between democracy and abortion. In Evangelium Vitae (nn. 69-73), Blessed Pope John Paul II makes it clear that democratic systems cannot operate without moral foundations. He critically refers to the “commonly held” view that “the legal system of any society should limit itself to taking account of and accepting the convictions of the majority”. This “commonly held” view is and always has been rejected by the Church. “Democracy cannot be idolised to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality,” says Evangelium Vitae.

The fundamental values of society – in the case of abortion, the fundamental right of an innocent person to be protected from intentional killing – are not provisional and changeable “majority opinions”, says Blessed Pope John Paul II. Democracy can only flourish when fundamental human values are protected in law. Catholic MPs, and all MPs of goodwill, have a conscientious duty to protect fundamental human values.

Evangelium Vitae (n. 73) encapsulates the matter, where MPs are concerned, in these terms: “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it or to ‘take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it’.”

John Smeaton
National director, Society for the Protection of
Unborn Children, London SE11

The Tablet, "The argument that criminal law must mirror moral law is surely not tenable", Clifford Longley, 19 November 2011

Is it plausible for a Catholic MP to be “pro-choice”? The issue is raised once more by the case of Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham and a practising Catholic, who has incurred church disapproval for saying that he thinks abortion should be – to quote President Bill Clinton – “safe, legal and rare”.

Cruddas has also said he is happy with the law as it stands in Britain, which is not quite a standard pro-choice position because of the 24-week time limit and because two doctors have to confirm that the statutory criteria have been met. But Cruddas’ views were nonetheless described by a spokesman from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales as “significantly at variance with the Church’s position”.

That position is set forth in general in the 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, that “direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder”. It therefore follows, it goes on to argue, that the law must protect all unborn human life, from the moment of conception, from deliberate harm. It would not surprise me if a Catholic MP held the first of these two points, yet hesitated about the second. Indeed the first of these two positions is probably not far from what most people feel.

Even Ann Furedi, director of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and therefore a major lobbyist on the pro-choice side of the argument, has said abortion is “always a personal tragedy”. She and many like her, however, would say it is sometimes the lesser of two evils. I have heard her liken a woman who seeks an abortion to a hunted animal caught
in a trap, which gnaws off its own foot in terror in order to escape.

The argument that the criminal law must in all respects mirror the moral law – and specifically the moral law as interpreted by the Catholic Church – is surely not tenable. Almost nobody thinks adultery, for instance, should be a crime. And while it is characteristic of the Catholic way of thinking about morality to say that ends can never justify means, there are instances where the “lesser of two evils” – killing an enemy in war, for instance – is regarded as acceptable.

Nor can we ignore the political reality. The present UK abortion law is supported by a large majority of public opinion and a large majority of MPs. The absolutist position – that every abortion from the moment of conception onwards should be punished as a crime – has minimal support. As far as I am aware, no attempt has ever been made in the House of Commons to repeal the Abortion Act, and the probability of such an attempt succeeding is zero.

Were such a law by some undemocratic means ever to be passed, with public opinion in its present state, the difficulties would be insuperable. Would juries ever convict anyone under a law they so strongly disagreed with? Would
judges, similarly ill-disposed, ever pass deterrent sentences? If not, where would be the law’s protection of the unborn? And what would this do for respect for the law, not to mention democracy?

This picture presents real dilemmas for a conscientious Catholic MP. He or she cannot simply advocate repeal of the Abortion Act without saying what should be put in its place. Repealing it would simply make all abortion legal. Yet the only option the Catholic Church would approve of on the basis of its teaching cited above, complete criminalisation, is in practice unrealistic. Are any Catholic MPs who would not support complete criminalisation for such reasons as these, therefore, to be deemed “pro-choice”?

This is the heart of the problem. Anything less than complete criminalisation would involve someone having to decide which abortions to allow and which to prohibit. The “choice” of the pregnant woman would necessarily figure in that decision. MPs in this situation would naturally prefer them to be as few as possible – or “rare”, to use one of Mr Cruddas’ terms. They would be bound to prefer them to be “safe”, to use another, rather than unsafe; and “legal”, to use the third, rather than illegal.

Would it not be reasonable for Catholic MPs to want to take into account the damage to respect for democracy and the rule of law that would follow if the criminalisation of all abortion had somehow been forced through Parliament in defiance of public opinion? Is that course of action really “the Church’s position” with which Mr Cruddas is said to be “significantly at variance”? Catholic MPs are not the only ones with a moral dilemma – it seems the bishops face one too.

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John Henry Newman cause website censures Blair and Tablet on conscience

Placing "Newman and conscience in the company of Tony Blair amounts to a provocative juxtaposition", says the official website of the cause for the canonisation of Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman in response to this weekend's Tablet editorial.

"However many times it is refuted as an interpretation of Newman, the idea that he is the patron of ‘conscientious’ dissent shows a stubborn tendency to resurface.

"It is in this context that The Tablet’s having placed Newman and conscience in the company of Tony Blair amounts to a provocative juxtaposition."

The Newman cause website continues:

"Since becoming a Catholic, Mr Blair has refused every invitation to disown and repent of these things. Although they are simply incompatible with the Catholic Faith and were pursued by him, before he was a Catholic, with every appearance of conviction, Mr Blair has refused since entering the Church to say whether in these respects he has undergone a change of mind and heart. In refusing to clarify his position, he implies that he still believes that they were the right things to do.

"If this implication is correct, some commentators, including Catholics, have sought to justify it by saying that Mr Blair’s silence is because his support for abortion, embryo experimentation, civil partnerships and gay adoption has always been for him, and remains now, a matter of conscience. Now this is the danger in The Tablet’s association of Newman and conscience with the case of Tony Blair. If as a Catholic Mr Blair thinks that his conscience directs him to support such positions, to invoke Newman in defence of his stance would be a travesty. For Newman, no Catholic can be in good conscience in supporting the positions Mr Blair espoused. The impossibility of conscience, enlightened by Faith, justifying adherence to evil is one of the most important of Newman’s lessons for our times."

What is The Tablet trying to achieve by exalting Tony Blair into Newman's company? Not only has Tony Blair refused to repudiate his anti-life and anti-family political record, since being received into the Catholic Church, he has extended it with open attacks on Catholic teaching on sexual ethics.

Remember: This is the man favoured by the British government to become president of the European Union (EU). An Obama-Blair alliance imposing its so-called pro-choice culture of death worldwide has been described thus by Monsignor Michel Schooyans, a leading Vatican scholar :

“What the analysis of Barack Obama's decisions and Tony Blair's project reveals is that an alliance is coming between two converging intentions, one aimed at subjugating law and the other at subjugating religion. This is the new version of the two-headed eagle. Law and religion are exploited to 'legitimize' anything at all.”

Is this what The Tablet wants?  Surely rather than using their editorial to promote Tony Blair, who remains one of the world's leading anti-life/anti-family politicians, The Tablet should be briefing its readers to oppose the Brown government's anti-life legislative push expected in November - promoting access to abortion for schoolchildren without parental knowledge and consent?

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Archbishop Longley owes faithful pro-life/pro-family Catholics an apology

Bernard Longley (pictured), archbishop of Birmingham, has given an interview to The Tablet, in which he criticises (in similar terms to Vincent Nichols, archbishop of Westminster) those Catholics who oppose the Soho Masses for homosexuals*. He goes on to contradict himself somewhat by disagreeing - rather weakly - with Archbishop Nichols and Bishop Malcolm McMahon on civil partnerships. (Readers will recall that Archbishop Nichols said that the Catholic bishops' conference of England and Wales was not opposed to gay civil partnerships; and Bishop McMahon said that he had no problem with headteachers of Catholic schools being in civil partnerships). You can read the relevant part of the interview at the end of this blog-post.

Daphne McLeod, chairman of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, which organises a regular prayer vigil outside the Soho Masses, has written a letter (see below) to The Tablet in response to Archbishop Longley's interview comments. Daphne has kindly given permission for her letter to be blogged.

To Daphne's excellent letter, I would add: what on earth is an archbishop doing giving an interview to The Tablet, the de facto house journal of British liberal Catholic dissent, including on pro-life/pro-family issues? Archbishop Longley owes faithful pro-life/pro-family Catholics an unreserved apology.

* The late Pope John Paul II, the great pro-life champion, taught in paragraph 97 of his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae that it is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection.

Letter from Daphne McLeod, chairman, Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice

The Editor, “The Tablet”
1, King Street Cloisters,
London. W6 OGY

11th December 2010

Dear Editor,

I am surprised to read Archbishop Longley’s attack on those of us who pray outside the Church of Our Lady and St Gregory during the five o’clock Masses for ‘lesbian and gay Catholics’ every first and third Sunday. His remarks include some inaccuracies which need correcting.

First, this is not a protest though that may be the way the homosexuals who organise these Masses describe it to the Archbishop. If he had spoken to any of us we would have explained that we are not protesting but praying in reparation for any sacrileges that might be taking place.

As it is we pray the fifteen mysteries of the Holy Rosary, and the Divine Praises in reparation, the Divine Mercy Chaplet for all sinners and, at six o’clock, before we end, the Angelus. Although small in number we know we are joined by many who cannot reach London but who pray with us in churches, in homes and in convents.

Second, the Archbishop says he doesn’t know whether any of us “have made attempts to meet the people who are going to these Masses”. If he had asked us we would have assured him that we have met many of them and I would like to put it on record here that most of them are very friendly and perfectly honest about their homosexual lifestyles, introducing us to their partners and emphasising that they are in sexual relationships. So we are not ‘making any assumptions’ about them.

Some of us have been down to the Social Hour which follows every Mass where we have received kind hospitality enabling us to spend some time eating and drinking and talking to them and examining the books they have on sale. No-one, apart from the Archbishop, tries to pretend they are living or striving to live chaste lives.

Of course there are chaste homosexuals in the Church who do live chaste lives and they demand our real respect, but they would never ask for or attend any Mass arranged especially for homosexuals. They go to Mass in their own parish and only receive Holy Communion if they are in a state of Grace, like the rest of us. I know from phone calls I have received that many of them are very concerned about the Soho Masses where everyone receives Holy Communion in spite of openly admitting they are and intend to stay in homosexual relationships.

If Archbishop Longley really thinks we are so misguided, why didn’t he approach us and put us right when he was an Auxiliary in Westminster? He had plenty of opportunity. Indeed, once when we had both attended a talk in Westminster Hall I started to approach him to discuss this problem only to see him turn and run out of the hall and disappear. I pursued him but, as I can’t run as fast as I used to now I am 82, I lost him.

We know he has spent a lot of time with ex-Carmelite priest Martin Pendergast, his long term partner Julian Filochowski and the other organisers. At the first Mass they thanked him publicly from the altar for not insisting they make any changes to their homosexual lifestyles. This was repeated later on their web-site and in the Pink Paper, the paper for practising homosexuals in London. This paper also celebrated Archbishop Longley’s elevation to Birmingham as ‘their’ bishop getting promotion.

I do feel this pretence and condoning is not in any sense compassionate or pastoral. These Catholics need and deserve proper guidance, especially the young ones who have not received good religious instruction. I cannot forget the poor young man who said to me, “There is no need to worry about us Daphne, if it were still wrong these Masses would not have been especially arranged for us.”

Of course it is still wrong. St Paul among others makes that very clear and so does the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church and they both also stress that anyone practising this life style must not receive Holy Communion without repentance, Confession and a desire to amend their lives. Who is Archbishop Longley to change this age-old universal teaching?

Perhaps after reading this, the Archbishop might like to revise his own judgemental stance about us.

Daphne McLeod
Chairman
Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice

From the interview with Bernard Longley, archbishop of Birmingham, The Tablet, 11 December 2010:

"...Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor selected him to negotiate with a group of lesbian and gay Catholics who wanted a regular Mass celebrated for them, their families and friends. For some years the Mass had been celebrated in an Anglican church in London’s Soho and the cardinal felt it should be in a Catholic church instead. It was settled in 2007 that the Soho Masses Pastoral Council should be formed and would be responsible for organising a monthly Mass at the Church of the Assumption in Warwick Street. Conservative Catholics opposed to the Mass regularly gather outside to protest but Archbishop Longley has stern words for them. 'The Church does not, as it were, have a moral means-testing of people before they come to receive the sacraments and it is very easy to jump to and come to the wrong conclusions about people when you don’t know them. I don’t know whether the people outside have made attempts to meet the people who are going to the Masses in Soho,' he says. I question whether those protesting are making assumptions about those people’s lifestyles, to which the archbishop replies: 'I would assume that is the case, and so it isn’t for any of us to make those judgements which, in conscience, people make before God and also within the sacraments, particularly the Sacrament of Reconciliation assisted by priests and other pastors within the Church. I think, at the end of the day, those sorts of protests are counterproductive and usually have the effect of hardening attitudes and polarising rather than fundamentally changing people’s minds.'

"Given his reluctance to make assumptions about the lifestyles of gay Catholics, it might be reasonable to assume that he would have no objection to civil partnerships. After all, the Archbishop of Westminster and president of the bishops’ conference, Vincent Nichols, does not oppose them. But Archbishop Longley thinks differently. 'I am not in favour of it because it establishes a legally and publicly recognised relationship which is too easily confused with the sacrament of marriage. Obviously it’s not marriage, because a marriage is between a man and a woman, but I do think it is very easy for people to be confused about civil partnerships and marriage as if they were the same thing.'

"Another of his fellow bishops, Malcolm McMahon, chairman of the Catholic Education Service, has said that a head teacher could be in a civil partnership and still live according to the Church’s teaching. But Archbishop Longley is doubtful about this. 'In those circumstances, a practising Catholic would not enter into a civil partnership in good standing with the Church. It would be a matter of concern, I think, in a school if a teacher were to enter into a civil partnership, but that would be something that would be the concern of the governing body of the school and clearly of the trustees.'"

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Right response to pro-abortion policies is strong condemnation and resistance

Who could possibly take issue with The Tablet's editorial this weekend and its appreciative reference to Obama's speech at Notre Dame University calling for "respectful mutual comprehension" in relation to his anti-life policies?

I do.

The Tablet* writes:

Archbishop Nichols' words [at his installation sermon at Westminster Cathedral] might be construed as calling for the Catholic Church to be given a fair hearing, whereas Mr Obama was implicitly addressing his critics within the Catholic Church in America who condemn him as pro-abortion (and therefore condemn Notre Dame for honouring him). But Archbishop Nichols goes on to say: 'In these matters we ourselves in the Churches have so much to learn and do.' This sounds more like an appeal to his fellow Catholics to consider how they themselves engage in public controversy, in which case he is implicitly reinfor­cing Mr Obama's plea for respectful mutual comprehension."

I completely disagree with The Tablet. The right response to Barack Obama and his unprecedented execution of pro-abortion policies since being elected President is strong condemnation and peaceful resistance. As Father Frank Pavone (pictured), the national director of the US's Priests for Life puts it: "We have to stop trivialising abortion". Speaking about the students protesting against Notre Dame's honouring of Obama, Fr Frank writes:

"Everyone can imagine people they would protest speaking at a commencement: an avowed racist, anti-Semite, or advocate of terrorism. So the failure to object to one who is unwilling to call for an end to abortion is the failure to see that abortion is as bad or worse than those other evils. We have to stop trivializing abortion.

"Moreover, the university gave the President an honorary law degree. Law exists to protect human rights; but this president has admitted that he doesn’t know when a child receives human rights. How can he defend human rights when he doesn’t know who has them? ...

" ... Now dialogue with our opponents on this issue is something we at Priests for Life specialize in. I maintain friendships with abortion advocates and practicing abortionists. The clarity of our own convictions never means we despise, demonize, or shut out other people. And yes, we are willing to collaborate with others in morally legitimate ways to reduce the numbers of abortions.

"But the President’s remarks had a glaring omission. While willing to dialogue and to promote adoption, he gave no indication of any willingness to protect the children in the womb. And that’s the crux of the issue. In his remarks, he referred to the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation. Certainly, his call for open minds does not include openness to reconsider the segregation issue. There’s a right answer to it, period.

"So it is with the protection of the unborn."

The latter part of 20th century history shows again and again that the appropriate response to fundamental human rights abuses on the part of the State is organized peaceful resistance on the part of citizens - and strong condemnation on the part of the Church, as Pope John Paul II reminded us in Evangelium Vitae:

"The Second Vatican Council, in a passage which retains all its relevance today, forcefully condemned a number of crimes and attacks against human life. Thirty years later, taking up the words of the Council and with the same forcefulness I repeat that condemnation in the name of the whole Church, certain that I am interpreting the genuine sentiment of every upright conscience: 'Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or wilful 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 disgraceful working conditions, where people are treated as mere instruments of gain rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others like them are infamies indeed. They poison human society, and they do more harm to those who practise them than to those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonour to the Creator'." (EV, 3)

*The Tablet describes itself as an international Catholic weekly but, editorially, it opposes Church teaching on fundamental issues relating to the sanctity of human life.

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More evidence for why Fr Timothy Radcliffe should be cancelled by Dublin's Divine Mercy conference

Fr Timothy Radcliffe O.P.

Fr Timothy Radcliffe O.P. has issued a statement in response to calls by concerned Catholics, including myself, for this weekend's Divine Mercy Conference in Dublin to cancel his appearance due to his dissent from Catholic teaching on sexual ethics. Deacon Nick Donnelly of the excellent Protect the Pope blog has already detailed Fr Radcliffe's unorthodox contribution to the Church of England's Pilling review on homosexuality, and Kathy Sinnott and Fr Dominic Allain have taken apart that contribution in an edition of Kathy's Celtic Connections radio programme on EWTN.

In his statement on the Divine Mercy Conference website, Fr Radcliffe admits that:

"I have presided occasionally at Masses which were intended to be especially welcoming to gay people."

The Masses in question are the infamous Soho gay Masses. Fr Radcliffe goes on to claim that:

"There are no grounds at all for regarding these Masses as gatherings of dissenters from the Church’s teaching."

Fr Radcliffe's claim is demonstrably false - there is a mountain of evidence that those Masses were precisely "gatherings of dissenters from the Church’s teaching" - see my blog-posts of 25 Aug. 2010,  9 Sep. 2010, 13 Dec. 2010 and 7 Jan. 2012 ) Fr Radcliffe himself gave words of succour to those dissenters in his sermons to them. On 7 May 2004, The Catholic Herald reported that Fr Radcliffe "has presided over a Mass for London's gay Catholics." The paper also reported that Fr Radcliffe told a recent convert that he "must understand that he has joined with all sorts of people whose opinions on homosexuality may differ widely." The paper quoted Fr Radcliffe saying that:

"You are becoming one with all sorts of people with whom you may profoundly disagree, and who may appear to reject your sexual orientation and much that you may hold dear ... [such as] Cardinal Ratzinger".

And in a sermon on 18 August  2010 at the Soho Mass, Fr Radcliffe complained that:

"Every statement that comes from the Vatican seems to provoke more misunderstanding, more embarrassment, more frustration. My indignation with what the Vatican says is only exceeded by my indignation at its wilful misrepresentation by the press."

In a 10 March 2012 article in The Tablet entitled "Can marriage ever change", Fr Radcliffe wrote:

"This is not to denigrate committed love of people of the same sex. This too should be cherished and supported, which is why church leaders are slowly coming to support samesex civil unions. The God of love can be present in every true love."

In a 26 November 2005 article in The Tablet entitled "Can gays be priests?" Fr Radcliffe interpreted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's document on "Persons with homosexual tendencies and the priesthood". Criticising Fr Radcliffe's interpretation, Fr Alphonsus de Valk wrote that:

"The article has done a disservice to the Church...by attempting to deconstruct the Vatican warnings ... In unjustly deriding the Vatican warnings, Fr. Radcliffe has given succor to other detractors."

In 2006, Fr Radcliffe joined Britain's leading dissenting Catholics in contributing an essay to "Opening up: Speaking out in the Church", a book of essays produced as a tribute to Martin Pendergast, one of Britain's leading Christian homosexual activists and one of the organisers of the Soho gay Masses. The book was co-edited by Julian Filochowski, Pendergast's civil partner, and Peter Stanford, another notorious dissenter from Catholic sexual ethics.

On 10 July 2009, Fr Radcliffe gave a talk to a Catholic parish in Mashpee, Massachusetts, in which he said:

"It's not that sexual ethics are particularly important. I don't think they are" (video at 8min40sec)

and

"We have to find ways of promoting our vision of the Christian family so as we can have a context within which to raise children, another generation; but we have to do it in a way which doesn't trash the relationships that people actually have" (video at 1min)

This echoes Fr Radcliffe's words in:

• a 28 January 2006 article in The Tablet ("How to discover what we believe") in which he wrote:

"[S]hould the Church accommodate her teaching to the experience of our contemporaries or should we stick by our traditional sexual ethics and risk becoming a fortress Church, a small minority out of step with people’s lives? Neither option seems right ... I confess that I do not know the answer."

• a  keynote address to a US religious education conference, in which he was reported as saying:

“We accompany people in friendship as they become moral agents. Let’s look at the gays. For some reason--I don’t actually understand why--it’s become a very hot topic in all the churches at the moment. It’s tearing the Church of England apart. It’s the cause of great dissension in our own church. Usually when we think about it, we ask, ‘What is forbidden or permitted?’ But I’m afraid I’m an old-fashioned and traditional Catholic, and I believe that’s the wrong place to start. We begin by standing by gay people as they hear the voice of the Lord that summons them to life and happiness. We accompany them as they wrestle with discovering what this means and how they must walk. And this means letting our imaginations be stretched open to watching Brokeback Mountain, reading gay novels, having gay friends, making that leap of the heart and the mind, delighting in their being, listening with them as they listen to the Lord.”

In March 2012, Stephen Hough, a concert pianist who is openly practising homosexual Catholic, argued in favour of same-sex marriage in a blogpost on The Telegraph website, in which he said:

"I am heartened by Father Timothy Radcliffe's article in The Tablet which tries to place marriage and partnerships from a Catholic viewpoint in a clearer perspective. As the former head of the Dominican Order worldwide, he is the most senior churchman to offer a revisionist view on this issue ... If Fr. Radcliffe's lone voice were a united choir from the bishops worldwide the Church might be in a better position to discuss this issue and make a valuable contribution."

Fr Radcliffe has a problem understanding and accepting the concept of obedience, both to the truth and to the Magisterium which proclaims that truth:

• During his 2009 Mashpee talk, he said that the Catholic Church "tends to be addicted to the culture of control" (video at 3min40sec).
• In an article in The Catholic Herald on 2 December 2005, ("A wound to the Body of Christ"), Fr Radcliffe complained that Catholics during the Counter-Reformation "had to toe the party line, to stick to precise formulations of dogmatic positions".
• In an article in The Catholic Herald on 10 December 2006, writer Raymond Edwards described Fr Radcliffe as the "darling of English progressives" and criticised what he described as Fr Radcliffe's "misunderstanding of the role of the Church's Magisterium" and his "agnosticism" regarding sexual ethics.

Again, during his 2009 Mashpee talk, Fr Radcliffe was asked about relations between the Catholic Church and the newly-elected President Barack Obama. He replied (video at 9mins28secs) that:

"I think that the most important thing is to have a mutually-respectful dialogue with President Obama. He is a very bright man. I have to say that when he was elected, in England you cannot believe the excitement we had. And I believe that he is a man with whom the Church can be in dialogue, on all sorts of issues."

Fr Radcliffe then called to the stage Professor Thomas Groome to speak as an expert on the Church's "dialogue" with Mr Obama. As LifeSiteNews.com has detailed, Professor Groome is a leading dissenter from Catholic teaching within the world of Catholic education. Cardinal George Pell has banned his books within the Archdiocese of Sydney. Professor Groome said (video at 0mins40secs)  that:

• Obama "on many, many issues, really embraces Catholic social teaching"
• "many Catholics would not be in favour" of banning all abortions
• banning all abortions would be "to send abortions back to the back-alleys of our country"
• Obama is "deeply committed to reducing the numbers of abortions"
• Catholics "can work with" Obama on the abortion issue.

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