'I AM A PROCHOICE CATHOLIC'
The Five Most Pathetic Words

October 2009By Patrick Madrid

Patrick Madrid is the director of the Envoy Institute of Belmont Abbey College. His personal website is www.patrickmadrid.com.

How does a formerly prolife Catholic college girl morph into a pro-abortion zealot who identifies the roots of her transformation as including attending the National March for Life? You read that right. As implausible as it might sound, Kate Childs Graham says that this happened to her, and the results are not pretty. In her article "I Am a Prochoice Catholic," which appears in that notorious bastion of contumacy, the National Catholic Reporter, Ms. Childs Graham reveals:
I wasn't always a prochoice Catholic. During college I attended the annual March for Life on more than one occasion. The first time my friends and I traveled to the event from Indianapolis, Ind., was with a bus full of high school students -- most, seemingly, only going for the trip to Washington, D.C., with their friends, sans parental supervision. Needless to say, it was a noisy bus ride. After I transferred to Catholic University, I volunteered for the Mass for Life two years in a row, helping to herd all of those high school students into every crevice of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
One must wonder if Ms. Childs Graham herself was one of those young people who made the journey to Washington, not to protest the evil of legalized abortion, but simply because she wanted the freedom of a little road trip, "sans parental supervision."


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It is not Catholic teaching that freedom of conscience gives a Catholic permission not to have one. We're talking informed consciences here in accord with the Magisterium of Holy Mother Church on faith and morals.

The conscience is (the voice of God within) and why Catholics, who have a well formed conscience and a healthy understanding of what the Church is (the Bride of Christ, guided by the Holy Ghost), should be very willing to embrace the Church's teachings!

Aquinas tells us that while a conscience always binds, it does not necessarily excuse. There is such a thing as an “informed conscience” since one’s conscience may be badly formed and one may be culpable for that. The binding nature of conscience comes from judging that something should be done or not done. By conscience we judge that something done is well done or ill done, and in this sense conscience is said to excuse, accuse, or torment.

The practical judgment of conscience imposes on the person the obligation to perform a given act making the link between freedom and truth clear. Conscience expresses itself in acts of judgment, which reflect the truth and the good, and not in arbitrary decisions of a situational ethics nature which makes truth relative. One needs to be guided by an insistent search for truth in regard to actions performed, not on an alleged autonomy in personal decisions where man is reduced to freedom with no soul.

And that Truth is a Someone, not a something!

In this era of apologies we must never forget that the only apology that the world ultimately wants, moreover, demands of Holy Mother Church is that she apologize for her claim to be the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” the True Church founded by Jesus Christ upon the Rock that is Peter. She must apologize for, and renounce the Nicene Creed that she professes at every Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. With that apology the Catholic Church will have been removed as the last bastion of truth in a world with no concept of responsibility, accountability, i.e., sin, a world gone mad with a “green light” for everyone to be comfortable with their vices portrayed as virtues, a spiritually anarchistic world where civilization as we know it will cease to exist and history condemned to repeat itself.

Freedom separated from Truth becomes license with anarchy the inevitable result. Consider just what happens when A’s rights conflict with B’s in the absence of universal, immutable, absolute truths. Just how is this situation resolved?

It is not because: 1) it ignores the existence of the natural law written on the hearts of mankind; 2) it ignores the fact that authentic freedom is a function of informed consciences which subordinate man and his activity to God Who is Perfect Truth; 3) it exalts freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute which would then be the source of values as opposed to the Creator; 4) it promotes doctrines that have lost the sense of the transcendent, which are explicitly atheist; 5) it recognizes the rights of these doctrines to grant to individuals or social groups the ability to determine what is good or evil in a purely moral relativistic sense; 6) it is a denial of the fact that the natural moral law has God as its author, and that man, by the use of reason, participates in the eternal law, which is not for him to establish; 7) it embraces a false concept of the autonomy of earthly realities, one which would maintain that created things are independent of God with man using them without reference to his Creator - a bogus concept of autonomy producing baneful effects leading to atheism; 8) it ignores that human freedom and God’s law meet and are called to intersect, in the sense of man’s free obedience to God and of God’s completely gratuitous benevolence towards man; 9) it prevents man from having the ability to distinguish between good and evil, as students today are taught that there is no such thing as right and wrong with freedom made self-defining, a phenomenon creative of itself with its values taking nature away from man who becomes his own personal life-project defined as nothing more than his own freedom.



Posted by: stlouisix
October 20, 2009 12:41 PM EDT
For all the rationalization of those fallen from grace, the one thing that always amazes me is that one can claim to be a Catholic while at the same time rejecting the tenets of that faith. God gave them free will so they can disagree with Church Teachings but surely they know that you cannot be a "Catholic" and reject Church Teachings. Posted by: awunsch
November 16, 2009 09:59 PM EST
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