Blog | Subscribe | Free Trial | Contact Us | Cart | Donate | Planned Giving
Log In | Search
facebook
rss
twitter
  • CURRENT
    • Fall 2022 PDF
    • SUMMER 2022 ARTICLES
    • NEWSworthy: What’s Happening and What It Means to You
    • Blog
    • INSISTING ON LIFE
    • Pastoral Reflections
    • About Us
    • HLF In The News
    • LIBERTY TO DO WHAT? Hadley Arkes and Rusty Reno join George McKenna June 1, 2022 in New York
  • DINNER
    • GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER 2022
    • HOST COMMITTEE Great Defender of Life Dinner 2022
    • Great Defender of Life 2022 Dinner Ticket
    • Great Defender of Life 2022 STUDENT or PREGNANCY CENTER STAFF Ticket
    • DINNER JOURNAL ADVERTISING 2022
  • ARCHIVE
    • Archive Spotlight
    • ISSUES IN HTML FORMAT
  • LEGACY
    • Planned Giving: Wills, Trusts, and Gifts of Stock
  • SHOP
    • Cart

Pastoral Reflections

4 Comments

Free Will, Faith, and . . . Abortion?

03 Oct 2021
Fr. Gerald E. Murray
abortion, Archbishop Cordileone, Catholics and abortion, Nancy Pelosi
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

 

We live in a world of contradictions when it comes to many things of great importance in life. Whether we realize it or not, faith in God is the most important aspect of our lives. Since God put us on planet Earth, and God will call us back to himself when our life here comes to an end, the most important thing we can do is recognize our dependence on Him and seek to know what, if anything, He expects of us.

Yet how many there are of us who think we get to tell God what we will and will not accept when it comes to his law and our willingness to obey it. Recently, I watched as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked during a press conference what she thought of San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s claim that her Women’s Health Protection Act—passed by the House on September 24 to codify abortion on demand in federal law—was “nothing short of child sacrifice.”

“You’re a Catholic,” the reporter reminded her. “Your response?”

“Yeah, I’m Catholic,” Pelosi replied,

I come from a pro-life family . . . different in their view of a woman’s right to choose than I am. In my right to choose, I have five children in six years and one week, and I keep saying to people who say things like [what Cordileone said]: When you have five children in six years and one day (sic), we can talk about what business is any of us (sic) to tell anyone else to do (sic). It’s none of our business how other people choose the size and timing of their families . . . the archbishop of the city of that area, of San Francisco, and I have a disagreement about who should decide this. I believe that God has given us a free will to honor our responsibilities.

Pelosi treats God’s law as something discardable by an act of her free will. She fumes that it is not hers or anyone else’s business “how” people choose the “size” or “timing” of their families. But she and her bishop do not have a “disagreement” about who should decide the size and timing of hers or anyone else’s family. That is up to the husband and wife. What she and Cordileone disagree about is the morality of using abortion to achieve the desired size and timing. He is being a good shepherd to a wayward sheep in reminding her that killing an unborn child is never an acceptable way to act in pursuit of a goal—any goal.

To violate the fundamental right to life of the innocent unborn child is against God’s law. What Pelosi calls a disagreement, as if it were a matter for legitimate debate, is better described as her rejection of what she is obliged to profess in order to be a faithful Catholic. She is free of course to make her rejection clear. But in doing so she ceases to follow God’s law and, in her role as Speaker, becomes not only a proponent but an engine of what is in fact child sacrifice. (Only one member of Pelosi’s Democratic flock, Henry Cuellar of Texas, voted against her bill.)

Pelosi’s appeal to God’s gift of free will as a justification for keeping abortion legal (and funded by taxpayers) contradicts Church teaching on the proper and just use of one’s free will. The choice to do wrong is in fact a type of enslavement to evil. Her claim to be “honoring her responsibilities” by rejecting her responsibility to follow the law of the God who made her and gave her the gift of faith when she was baptized, is completely contradictory. In fact, she is using her free will in a way that dishonors her duties before God, and she is plainly not happy to be reminded of that.

Pelosi’s reference to the fact that she is the mother of five children is another contradiction. How can a mother of five children claim abortion could be a good thing for other women? So here we have the multiple contradictions of a woman who tells us she is a believer, but a believer who does not believe in many of the things her religion requires her to believe in.

The moral of this sad story is that spiritual blindness, often rooted in human pride, is a constant obstacle to obedience. Shepherds such as Archbishop Cordileone do Nancy Pelosi a great service by reminding her, and anyone else who is paying attention, that free will does not have veto power over God’s law. Passing legislation to protect a specious right to kill unborn children is not a morally acceptable expression of free will simply because Pelosi asserts that it is. Yes, contradicting God is within our power; but it is always wrong, and in this matter, it is deadly.

 

 

 

 

544 people have visited this page. 1 have visited this page today.
About the Author
Fr. Gerald E. Murray

Fr. Gerald Murray is Pastor of the Church of the Holy Family in New York City.

Social Share

  • google-share

4 Comments

  1. Mary October 7, 2021 at 9:38 am Reply

    Beautiful, Fr. Murray. Thank you.
    I am so grateful my parents were adamantly pro-life. (They birthed 11 full-term children, 4 of which were stillborn.) Otherwise, I’m not certain my daughter would be here. She will be ’30’ Nov. 5th and I haven’t seen her in over 11 years. But being canceled is better than the guilt and reality of having killed her. She deserved and deserves life.

  2. Charlotte October 7, 2021 at 3:49 pm Reply

    Sending prayers.

  3. Janet Abraham October 11, 2021 at 2:02 pm Reply

    Thank you Fr. Murray!

  4. Nicolás A. May 2, 2022 at 10:23 pm Reply

    Hello FR. GERALD E. MURRAY,

    I need to describe myself a little bit to make sure that my ideas are comprehensible. I am morally and culturally conservative, so I agree with you about the truth of these horrendous acts-that they are aganst God’s law. But I am also a classical liberal, and I think It is fine as long as we do not have private-law societies that people can do whatever immensely moral things they want to do. I am not quite sure this aligns with the Lord Acton Institute’s ideas either. Then my question is, would be wrong according to the Church to think something like “Abortion is murder, and as such horrendous, but people under the current state of affairs should be allowed to let themselves doomed if that is what thet pretend to do.” “The current state of affairs” here means living under a democratic state which I would want to secess from to live with people who share my values.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Comments will not be posted until approved by a moderator in an effort to prevent spam and off-topic responses.

*
*

captcha *

Get the Human Life Review

subscribe to HLR

Recent Posts

State Constitutions and Abortion Rights

08 Feb 2023

Minnesota passes one of nation’s most permissive abortion laws

01 Feb 2023

Hit and run violence after Roe: Can't we talk about the morality of abortion?

28 Jan 2023

CURRENT ISSUE

Anne Conlon Anne Hendershott B G Carter Brian Caulfield Christopher White Clarke Forsythe Colleen O’Hara Connie Marshner David Mills David Poecking David Quinn Diane Moriarty Dr. Donald DeMarco Edward Mechmann Edward Short Ellen Wilson Fielding Fr. Gerald E. Murray George McKenna Helen Alvaré Jane Sarah Jason Morgan Joe Bissonnette John Grondelski Kristan Hawkins Laura Echevarria Madeline Fry Schultz Maria McFadden Maffucci Mary Meehan Mary Rose Somarriba Meaghan Bond Nat Hentoff Nicholas Frankovich Patrick J. Flood Peter Pavia Rev. George G. Brooks Rev. Paul T. Stallsworth Stephen Vincent Tara Jernigan Ursula Hennessey Victor Lee Austin Vincenzina Santoro W. Ross Blackburn Wesley J. Smith William Doino Jr. William Murchison

Pages

  • Issues
  • Human Life Foundation Blog
  • About Us
  • Free Trial Issue
  • Contact Us
  • Shop
  • Planned Giving
  • TOPICS
  • GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER

Follow Us On Twitter

Tweets by @HumanLifeReview

Find Us On Facebook

Human Life Review/Foundation

Search our Website

Contact Information

The Human Life Foundation, Inc.
The Human Life Review
271 Madison Avenue, Room 1005
New York, New York 10016
(212) 685-5210

Copyright (c) The Human Life Foundation.