Kennedys & friends

Tomorrow will also be an anniversary, which should not be forgotten....

On September 12, 1960, presidential candidate John Kennedy delivered an "Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association." History seems to have overlooked some of his comments that evening:

• "I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair....
• "I want a Chief Executive...whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation....
• "I ask you...to judge me on the basis of 14 years in the Congress, on my declared stands against an Ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools....
• "I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which deny their Presidency to Protestants, and those which deny it to Catholics [Note: Even to this day, "a Catholic (or even the spouse of a Catholic) cannot be, by British law,...king or queen."]....
• "I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views -- in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.
• "But if the time should ever come -- and I do not concede any conflict to be remotely possible -- when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do likewise."
  

Hyannnisport, 1964

• "At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a 'clear conscience.'
• "The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book 'The Birth of Bioethics' (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123086375678148323.html>
  

"The Strange Political Career of Father Drinan"

Many modern Catholics may be unaware that - from 1971 till 1981 - Father Robert Drinan, S.J. served in the United States House of Representatives. They may be absolutely shocked and scanalized to learn that this Jesuit priest / congressman was a zealous advocate for abortion & advocated for partial birth abortion after leaving congress!

• "Drinan's position has always been that he fully accepted Catholic teaching on the subject [of abortion.]. However, even before the [1973 Roe v. Wade] Supreme Court decision he had supported, with increasing passionate intensity, every proposal to make the procedure legal and to fund it with tax money....Shortly after Roe v Wade, Drinan wrote a public defense of the decision, recognizing that it had flaws but finding it on the whole a beneficial judgment. He then proceeded, over the next several years, to compile an almost perfect pro-abortion voting record in Congress, often speaking passionately about a woman's 'constitutional right' to abort, even while stating that this right went completely contrary to his own conscience. If Drinan’s superiors, prior to l973, had found practically no one who criticized the priest’s presence in Congress, they now found themselves barraged with statements of outrage from all kinds of people, including other Catholic members of Congress" www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=21136>.

In 1984, Mario Cuomo delivered "Religious Belief and Publlic Morality: A Catholic Governor's Perspective" at Notre Dame. Many seem to see this speech as a scholarly heir to JFK's speech in Houston:

• "Catholic public officials take an oath to preserve the Constitution....And they do so gladly, not because they love what others do with their freedom, but because they realize that in guaranteeing freedom for all, they guarantee our right to be Catholics: our right to pray, our right to use the sacraments, to refuse birth control devices, to reject abortion, not to divorce and remarry if we believe it to be wrong....We know that the price of seeking to force our belief on others is that they might someday force their belief on us [This argument ignored the Natural Law & seemed to intimate that issues of human life & marriage/family were just peculiar Catholic peccadillos.]....
• "I can, if I am so inclined, demand some kind of law against abortion, not because my bishops say it is wrong, but because I think that the whole community, regardless of its religious beliefs, should agree on the importance of protecting life -- including life in the womb, which is at the very least potentially human & should not be extinguished casually [Take note of this "potentially human" heresy against science.]....
• "The values derived from religious belief will not -- and should not -- be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus. So that the fact that values happen to be religious values does not deny them acceptability as part of this consensus. But it does not require their acceptability, either [This seems to have become the game plan for so-called "pro-choice" Catholic politicians. Act as though questions about human life & marriage/family are just peculiar Catholic peccadillos. Ignore the existence of the Natural Law.]....
• "On divorce and birth control, without changing its moral teaching, the Church abides the civil law as it now stands, thereby accepting -- without making much of a point of it -- that in our pluralistic society we are not required to insist that all our religious values be the law of the land. The bishops are not demanding a constitutional amendment for birth control or on adultery" [Might Cuomo have been misled by errors of prudential judgment by some of the hierarchy? We have certainly come to learn that some of what was - & is still - passed off as "contraceptive" is actually abortifacient:

].

(In 1990, Cuomo's son married the daughter of the late Robert Kennedy.)

Continuing this Legacy of Nonsense: “We don't legislate at the orders of the Vatican....I'm reaching out to Patrick Kennedy”

The Absolute Obligation to the Truth: "I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingly power: proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching." (2 Timoty 4: 1, 2)