Vatican Cardinal Burke: ‘We’re well on the way’ to Christian persecution in the U.S.

BY JOHN-HENRY WESTEN
Mon Nov 28, 2011

VATICAN, November 28, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – One of the highest ranking cardinals in the Vatican has said that the United States is “well on the way” to the persecution of Christians.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, former Archbishop of St. Louis and now the head of the Vatican’s highest court, told Catholic News Agency that he could envision a time when the Catholic Church in the U.S., “even by announcing her own teaching,” is accused of “engaging in illegal activity, for instance, in its teaching on human sexuality.”

Asked if the cardinal could even see American Catholics being arrested for their faith he replied, “I can see it happening, yes.”

In his remarks to several U.S. Bishops meeting with him Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI made similarly emphatic warnings about the U.S. The pope told the bishops that “the seriousness of the challenges which the Church in America, under your leadership, is called to confront in the near future cannot be underestimated.”

He added: “The obstacles to Christian faith and practice raised by a secularized culture also affect the lives of believers.”

In the interview published today, Cardinal Burke declared that “it is a war” and “critical at this time that Christians stand up for the natural moral law.” Should they not, he warned, “secularization will in fact predominate and it will destroy us.”

Pope Benedict too urged the bishops of the United States to speak out in defense of morality. “The present moment can thus be seen, in positive terms, as a summons to exercise the prophetic dimension of your episcopal ministry by speaking out, humbly yet insistently, in defense of moral truth, and offering a word of hope, capable of opening hearts and minds to the truth that sets us free,” he said.

Catholic League President Bill Donohue told LifeSiteNews that Cardinal Burke’s remarks were accurate and not exaggerations. “Secularism has become militant,” he said. “Many elites are taking an aggressive secular approach. They have lined up against the Catholic Church and other Christian churches particularly for their stand on moral values.”

Donohue pointed to New York where gay ‘marriage’ was passed without debate or exemptions for clerks who objected to having to grant such licenses. He also noted the closing of Catholic adoption and foster care agencies since they were unable to comply with laws forcing homosexual adoptions.

“The real big one,” he added, “is the HHS of the Obama Administration.” The forcing of abortifacient and contraceptive coverage in private health care plans under penalty of fines was described by the Catholic League President as the Obama Administration “on a full court press to shove its values down the throats of the Catholic Church.”

See the full interview with Cardinal Burke with Catholic News Agency

Link to story: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/vatican-cardinal-burke-were-well-on-the-way-to-christian-persecution-in-the

Unmasking the "Ella" Masquerade

ZE10082511 - 2010-08-25
Permalink: http://www.zenit.org/article-30157?l=english




Blurring the Line Between Contraception and Abortion



By E. Christian Brugger

WASHINGTON, D.C., AUG. 25, 2010 (Zenit.org).- On Aug. 13, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the approval of a new "emergency contraceptive" called "Ella." Its competitor, Plan B, is said to "prevent pregnancy" up to 72 hours (3 days) after intercourse. Ella boasts of 120 hours (5 days) of post-coital effectiveness. The drug is produced by the Paris-based pharmaceutical company HRA Pharma and will be marketed by Watson Pharmaceuticals based out of Morristown, New Jersey. The FDA advisors voted unanimously to approve the drug.

Pro-lifers are no strangers to the euphemistic tactics of abortion activists. But the new depths to which the FDA has sunk with its recent approval will test their patience. The secret that the Ella establishment doesn't want you to know is this: from a pharmacological perspective, Ella is not an emergency contraceptive (EC). It is an abortion drug.

Chemical contraceptives, both long-term and emergency, use a synthetic version of the hormone progestin. Progestin has effects similar to the hormone progesterone, which is necessary for regulating the female menstrual cycle and supporting pregnancy. Progestin (alone, or in combination with estrogen) also can prevent ovulation, which is its primary contraceptive quality. The most common progestin drug in ECs is levonorgestrel, the active ingredient in several familiar brands, such as Plan B, Escapelle, Levonelle, NorLevo, and Next Choice.[1] The FDA refers to Ella as an emergency contraceptive, even comparing it in its literature to levonorgestrel.[2]

But Ella (generic name ulipristal acetate) is not a synthetic progestin that mimics the action of progesterone. The FDA press release states forthrightly that Ella is what is known as a "progesterone antagonist."[3] Unlike progestins, progesterone antagonists block the action of progesterone. The drug binds to the progesterone receptor sites excluding progesterone from binding and hence eliminating its activity. Since progesterone is necessary for promoting and preserving a uterine lining hospitable to a nesting embryo, its suppression results in an environment hostile to embryonic life. The other common progesterone-blocking drug on the market is the abortion pill RU-486 (generic name mifepristone).

The FDA description insists that Ella's mode of action is contraceptive, not abortive. It states flatly: "Ella is not indicated for termination of an existing pregnancy."[4] While it is true that a progesterone antagonist can prevent ovulation, the drug's principal value to the family planning industry is and has been as an abortion drug. Literature going back to the 1980s makes this very clear.[5] Deprived of a nutritive uterine lining, the embryo starves to death. Dress them up as "contraceptives" all you want, progesterone antagonists are abortion drugs.

By "pregnancy," the FDA obviously means to include only the post-implantation period, employing the definition of pregnancy supported by the American College (now "Congress") of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, The Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood (ACOG: "A pregnancy is considered to be established only after implantation is complete").[6] A "termination of pregnancy" then does not include killing an embryo before implantation.

Are you starting to see the picture? If the killing is not a "termination of pregnancy," then likely it will not be excluded from federal funding under the Hyde Amendment. Ella, then, unlike RU-486, will evade the federal restrictions on abortion funding.

Moreover, though most provisions of President Barack Obama's health care plan will take years to go into effect, a handful take effect this September. Among them is the requirement that all new private plans (i.e., only those created or changed after Sept. 22, 2010) must cover certain "preventative" care and screenings for women and children. The final rules on what will be considered "preventative" are being written right now, to be unveiled next month. But "family planning services" are already listed among them. If Ella continues to be categorized as an EC, there is a strong likelihood that it will be included under mandatory coverage for preventative services for women.

In other words, federal funds would be allowed to cover Ella abortions, and private insurance plans will be forced to pay for them.[7]

Birth defects

Does Ella cause birth defects in children who survive their mother's ingestion of the drug? We don't know. Remarkably, the FDA while knowing its pharmacological kinship with RU-486, has performed no controlled human studies on the effects of Ella on an implanted embryo and fetus. One of the members of the FDA advisory committee even recommended against controlled studies arguing that pregnancy studies would be "biased" because women who experience negative outcomes are more likely to report than women experiencing no problems.[8] (So much for trusting women to report accurately.)

In animal studies, however, the FDA reported that 100% of confirmed pregnant rats and 50% of pregnant rabbits suffered miscarriage as a result of Ella ingestion.[9] Accordingly, the product labeling seriously cautions women with confirmed pregnancies to avoid the drug. Although no malformations were observed in the newborn rabbits that survived the drug's effects, nobody doubts that Ella would be gravely dangerous to gestating fetuses.

The empirical question of whether or not progestin-based ECs such as Plan-B sometime act as abortifacients is still hotly debated; hence so too is the ethical conversation in Catholic bioethics whether or not they rightly can be used to treat victims of sexual assault.[10] But the evidence of the abortive effects of progesterone antagonist drugs such as Ella is conclusive. The empirical question is settled; and thus so too is the ethical question.

Notes

[1] Levonogestrel is also the active ingredient in the Intra-uterine contraceptive Mirena and the contraceptive implants Norplant and Jadelle.

[3] www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm222428.htm

[4] www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2010/022474s000lbl.pdf; see sec. 5.1.

[5] Nieman, et al., "The Progesterone Antagonist RU 486," New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 316, no. 4 (January 22, 1987), 187-191; see also Marie Hilliard, "Ulipristal and Catholic Hospitals," Ethics & Medics, vol. 35, no. 9 (Sept. 2010), p. 2, especially footnotes 13-15.

[6] Quoted in Rachel B. Gold, "The Implications of Defining When a Woman Is Pregnant," The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, vol. 8, no. 2 (May 2005), 8; see also www.plannedparenthood.org/health-topics/pregnancy/how-pregnancy-happens-4252.htm

[7] I Thank J. Margaret Datiles, Esq, for supplying this information on Ella and President Barack Obama's plan for health care reform.

[8] www.cwfa.org/printerfriendly.asp?id=19109&department=cwa&categoryid=life

[9] www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2010/022474s000lbl.pdf; see sec. 8.1

[10] Those interested in the scholarly conversation among Catholic bioethicists might be interested to read chapter eleven dedicated to the debate in the 2009 Catholic Health Care Ethics Manual, published by the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

* * *

E. Christian Brugger is a Senior Fellow of Ethics at the Culture of Life Foundation and is an associate professor of moral theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado. He received his Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford in 2000.

The Obama Spell Is Broken

Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique.

Wall Street Journal Online

By FOUAD AJAMI

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural "cool" and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama's campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people "clinging to their guns and religion," but they had forgiven him.

Mr. Obama himself authored the tale of his own political crisis. He had won an election, but he took it as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic.

Mr. Obama's self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.

Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.

And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.

Americans don't deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.

We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the "remoteness and detachment" of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.

In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America.

It was the way in Paris and Berlin (not to forget Oslo of course) of rebuking all that played out in America since 9/11—the vigilance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sense that America's interests and ways were threatened by a vengeful Islamism. But while the Europeans and Muslim crowds hailed him, they damned his country all the same. For his part, Mr. Obama played along, and in Ankara, Cairo, Paris and Berlin he offered penance aplenty for American ways.

But no sooner had the country recovered its poise, it drew a line for Mr. Obama. The "bluest" of states, Massachusetts, sent to Washington a senator who had behind him three decades of service in the National Guard, who proclaimed his pride in his "army values" and was unapologetic in his assertion that it was more urgent to hunt down terrorists than to provide for their legal defense.

Then the close call on Christmas Day at the hands of the Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab demonstrated that the terrorist threat had not receded. The president did his best to recover: We are at war, he suddenly proclaimed. Nor were we in need of penance abroad. Rumors of our decline had been exaggerated. The generosity of the American response to Haiti, when compared to what India and China had provided, was a stark reminder that this remains an exceptional nation that needs no apologies in distant lands.

***

A historical hallmark of "isms" and charismatic movements is to dig deeper when they falter—to insist that the "thing" itself, whether it be Peronism, or socialism, etc., had not been tried but that the leader had been undone by forces that hemmed him in.

It is true to this history that countless voices on the left now want Obama to be Obama. The economic stimulus, the true believers say, had not gone astray, it only needed to be larger; the popular revolt against ObamaCare would subside if and when a new system was put in place.

There had been that magical moment—the campaign of 2008—and the true believers want to return to it. But reality is merciless. The spell is broken.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

John McCain on the Health Care Bill

an important snippet from an email he sent to his supporters on 12/21/09

Early this morning at 1am, the Senate voted 60 to 40 in favor of moving the Democrats' health care bill forward. The final vote to pass the bill is scheduled for Christmas Eve, and I pledge to you that I will not only continue to cast my vote against this bill, but will actively fight it every step along the way.

Democrats have used Bernie Madoff-style accounting to assess the cost of health care reform. And when this bill becomes law, the reality of higher taxes and Medicare cuts for seniors will settle in on the American public.

President Obama made a promise when he campaigned for president to sit down and negotiate health care reform with Republicans and Democrats. He also promised C-SPAN cameras would be in the room. But, that was all campaign rhetoric. This disastrous health care bill was negotiated behind closed doors and Republicans were never brought into the negotiations.

The result is a health care bill supported by 60 Democratic Senators, but opposed by 60% of the American public.

transmitted via email.

Right or Wrong? A Review of Constitution 101

Charles E. Rice | October 6, 2009

http://ignatiusinsight.com/features2009/rice_rightorwrong_oct09.asp

The health care debate makes sense only in the context of the transformation of our constitutional system. So let's do a quick review of Constitution 101.

The Constitution of the United States was the first creation in history of a national government with only limited, delegated powers. Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights and other documents involved only limitations on the otherwise unlimited power of government. The Articles of Confederation, under which the United States functioned from 1781 until the Constitution took effect in 1789, created essentially a confederation of semi-autonomous states. The Constitution created a real government of the nation, but a government limited to specified powers.

Under the Constitution, neither Congress, nor the Executive nor the Judiciary, had unlimited jurisdiction. Article I, Sec. 8, specified that "The Congress shall have Power" to legislate only on specified subjects. Incidentally, no power was granted to Congress to regulate health care as such. Nor was Congress granted a power over education, apart from special situations such as land-grant schools. The states retained all powers not delegated by the Constitution.

That constitutional system has gone the way of the bronze axe and the spinning wheel. One transformative event was the Supreme Court's definition in U.S. v. Butler (1936), that Congress' power to tax and spend for the "general welfare of the United States" was not limited to spending on the subjects on which Article I, Section 8, authorized Congress to legislate. But Congress' spending had to be for the "general welfare." Congress, however, has wide latitude to determine what is the "general welfare." While the Court said that the spending power was not a general power to regulate for public purposes, the Court has held that Congress can impose conditions on the subsidies it grants (South Dakota v. Dole [1987]). That power to regulate recipients of federal money is, to put it mildly, very broad, as General Motors, banks and other recipients of bailout money have learned. And as all of us will learn when the likely terms of Obamacare go into effect in 2013 (after Obama's reelection). There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you take the money, you take the controls.

Many factors contributed over the years to the centralization of power in Washington. But in the past eight months, Congress' use of its spending power, and President Obama's unprecedented executive edicts, have so expanded federal power that it amounts to an extra-constitutional coup. The federal takeover of health care, one-sixth of the economy, is essential to the success of that coup. It would open the door to federal controls not only on what medical care you can receive but potentially also on what you eat, how much you weigh, your exercise regime, the level of heat and noise in your home and whatever else might affect your health and therefore the cost of your health care to the taxpayers. The framers of the Constitution would be surprised, to say the least.

Health care, however, is not the only centralizing initiative in Congress. Another example is H.R. 3221, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 (SAFRA). It advanced under the radar while everyone was talking about health care. SAFRA reduces the financial options of students seeking higher education. It passed the House and now is in the Senate Health and Education Committee.

The federal government now subsidizes student loans through the Federal Family Education Loan program (FFEL), which offers subsidized loans to students from private lenders at low interest rates, and through the Direct Loan program (DL), in which the Department of Education is the lender and the funds come from the U.S. Treasury. The Higher Education Act sets the terms and conditions on FFEL and DL loans. FFEL was created in 1966. Over 2,000 lenders participate in FFEL, serving 4,400 institutions, with $70 billion in loans this year. The DL program, established in 1993, serves 1,700 institutions, with $22 billion in loans this year.

SAFRA would terminate FFEL and shift all federal student loans, including Federal Direct Perkins Loans, to the DL program. SAFRA would also create nine new programs and otherwise increase federal involvement in early education, school construction, etc. On September 10th, 40 current and former presidents of state, regional and national financial aid associations alerted House and Senate committees to problems involved in implementing SAFRA as early as the 2010-11 school year.

Beyond those implementation issues, SAFRA would be a huge expansion of the DL program. It would dismantle a system that has worked fairly well for four decades. It would eliminate private sector jobs as well as consumer choice, competition among lenders, and existing programs to reduce defaults. For non-wealthy high school seniors, SAFRA would make their potential for federal student loans depend entirely on approval by government bureaucrats or contractors retained by government. One concern is that the predictably voluminous SAFRA regulations could provide openings for covert political or other illicit discrimination against borrowers or recipient schools. A more obvious concern is that "Congress," in the words of Representative Paul C. Broun (R-GA), "has no business putting taxpayers on the hook for defaulted student loans when the private sector would gladly bear this risk."

The objections to federal takeovers of the private sector do not arise from constitutional archeologism. Those takeovers violate the social principle of subsidiarity: "Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and commit to the community at large what private enterprise and industry can accomplish, so too, it is an injustice, a grave evil, and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies. This is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, unshaken and unchangeable, and it retains its full truth today. ... The true aim of all social activity should be to help individual members of the social body, but never to destroy or absorb them" (Pius XI, "Quadragesimo Anno" no. 79).

"Subsidiarity," said Benedict XVI, "is the most effective antidote against any form of all-encompassing welfare state" ("Love in Truth," no. 57).

When they elected Notre Dame's most obsequiously honored alumnus, the American people voted for both hope and change. They are, indeed, getting one of those. Congressman Broun asked the question about the change that, so far, has no answer: "When will the massive spending and Federal takeover end?"