Kudos to my neighbor, Mary Ann Bentz, for reminding all of us that we must treat each and every human being with absolute dignity and respect.
With John Galloway as our state representative, Chuck McIlhinney as our state senator, Mike Fitzpatrick as our congressman, Bob Casey and Pat Toomey as our U.S. senators, Jim Cawley as our lieutenant governor, and Tom Corbett as our governor, Ms. Bentz’s family and my family have a rather full lineup of men representing us, who identify themselves as Catholic. As these individuals make no secret of their religious affiliations, it certainly seems appropriate for Ms. Bentz to ask how their positions and records reconcile with Catholic Social Teaching.
Yet in asking how positions reconcile with Catholic Social Teaching, Ms. Bentz only chose to focus on Fitzpatrick and Toomey. In addition to this arbitrary choice, Ms. Bentz’s yardsticks for gauging adherence to Catholic Social Teaching are inadequate and arbitrary….
- Are we to infer that Senator Casey’s support of WIC funds somehow cancels out his support for Planned Parenthood, our nation’s premier abortion provider?
- Are Catholics and others not rightfully outraged at their tax dollars being used for immoral purposes in the name of “health care”? Are they not rightfully outraged that Senator Casey did not insist on abortion being kept out of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?
- Are Catholics and others not rightfully outraged when, in the name of foreign aid, population control methods and philosophies are subsidized with their tax dollars? Senator Casey’s former bishop took him to task for failing to support efforts to restrict abortion providers from receiving keep foreign aid “family planning” funds.
Many non-Catholics might be surprised that there is a history of inadequate or misleading representation of Catholic Social Teaching. Some Catholics – of conservative, moderate, and liberal political persuasions – have erroneously concluded that Catholic Social Teaching is tantamount to political progressivism and an alternative to Catholic teaching on human life and marriage/family. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, proclamation of the absolute dignity of human life from the very first moment of conception, insistence on the family as the basic unit of society, and the interesting notion of “subsidiarity” are at the core of Catholic Social Teaching. I encourage Ms. Bentz to familiarize herself with the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.
In his Apostolic Letter on the Vocation & Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church & in the World, I believe that the late, great Pope John Paul II best explained the Church's Social Teaching at this juncture of history: “the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights-for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination."
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