David Ancell / Saturday June 05, 2004
I have found three reports (two of them are here and here) of Senator Dubin of Illinois trying to show John Kerry and himself as a faithful Catholic Senator despite having a pro-abortion voting record. He published a scorecard showing voting records. As you may have guessed, he wrote the scorecard himself.
He compared the voting record of various Catholic senators on multiple issues that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have taken positions on. In so doing, he has equated such things as the Partial Birth Abortion Act and Unborn Victims of Violence Act with such things as media ownership and reduction of the amount of mercury in thermometers. It’s just like having a police officer spending his time investigating petty larceny when a murder just took place with the killer still at large.
There are a number of issues on the scorecard that are not even matters of faith (including the media ownership and mercury poisoning issues). This just underscores one thing in my mind – that the USCCB really should stop wasting its time trying to decide issues that are not a matter of faith. Besides, it’s quite possible that the “positions” were really decided by bureaucrats, not bishops. While the bishops have a right as citizens to have their opinion on any matter, posting position statements on issues which can be morally decided more than one way confuses the faithful.
As long as we remain within the moral law, it is the duty of the laity to decide how best to resolve most issues. The bishops have no more business doing this than the laity have on the sanctuary. Per the Congregation for the Doctine of the Faith:
From the specificity of the task at hand and the variety of circumstances, a plurality of morally acceptable policies and solutions arises. It is not the Church’s task to set forth specific political solutions – and even less to propose a single solution as the acceptable one – to temporal questions that God has left to the free and responsible judgment of each person. It is, however, the Church’s right and duty to provide a moral judgment on temporal matters when this is required by faith or the moral law.
Category: Posts imported from Danger! Falling Brainwaves, Uncategorized
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