Sheperds showing Spine!

The Virgina Catholic Conference has election issues!

They're presenting authentic Catholic Social Teaching, starting off with the right priorities:

On Nov. 8, Virginia’s registered voters will have the opportunity to select their choices for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and house of delegates seats. (For voter registration information, go to the Virginia Catholic Conference Web site, www.vacatholic.org.) To help Catholics preparing to vote connect our Church’s social teaching to contemporary issues and then apply that understanding to specific measures being discussed by Virginia lawmakers and debated by candidates, the Virginia Catholic Conference has devised a five-part educational series. The first part, which addresses abortion, appears below. Subsequent editions of the HERALD will include similar pieces on the death penalty, marriage and education, economic and social justice and stem-cell research.

Abortion

Catholic social teaching proclaims that human life is sacred from the moment of conception. Because all human beings are created by God, all possess an inherent dignity and therefore have certain basic rights, including the right to life and to those things that make life truly human (e.g., food, shelter, clothing, religious freedom, health care, education and a safe environment). The right-to-life is the foundation of all others. Without it, no other rights are possible.

Abortion, then, is a preeminent threat to human dignity, because it directly attacks the most fundamental human good (life itself) and the condition for all others. Abortion is "always a grave act of violence," and laws permitting it are "profoundly unjust" because they fail to recognize equal rights for every child, born and unborn. ("Living the Gospel of Life," a statement by the U.S. Catholic Bishops (1998).) In addition, just as all children merit legal protection and care as members of our human family, so too do all women facing unexpected and difficult pregnancies. Laws and programs that provide the support they need are an essential element of a just and compassionate society.

Compare this presentation of election issues and the Church's witness with the muddled efforts of the USCCB's Faithful Citizenship. Here, the right to life is given its proper pride of place. Addressing social justice before confronting the absence of justice found in abortion denies the importance of the right-to-life. Granted, denying the importance of social justice while exclusively pursuing an end to abortion likewise compromises the fullness of the same right. However, this does not mean that social justice carries the same weight as the struggle for the rights of the unborn. That moral equivalence simply undermines the equality of life that social justice seeks to address. If the innocent do not enjoy the basic protection of the state, how is any social justice possible?

The fact is that abortion is the pre-iminent civil rights issue of our time. The meaning of human rights itself depends on how our societies resolve this issue. If they acknowledge the human personhood of the unborn and work to end abortion, then they've at last begun to consistently enforce human rights for all. If they fail to do this, they forever live the orwellian reality in which the powerful enjoy the human rights protections that are denied the powerless.

The Virginia Catholic Conference, in honoring the constant teaching of the Catholic Church, recognizes this. May God be praised for inspiring Virginia's bishops to stand and witness the Truth. More like them, please.