November 14, 2008

Letters to the Editor

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The failure to protect the ‘least of these’ renders any other position meaningless

The election is over, and Catholics voted 54 percent for President-elect Barack Obama (according to an exit poll by Edison/Mitofsky reported in The Wall Street Journal), an avowed abortion supporter.

How in the world can the Catholic Church’s campaign against abortion possibly succeed if we continue to vote this way?

It is astounding to me that Catholics could write letters to the editor to The Criterion which absolve abortion-approving candidates of the 50 million deaths of innocent babies because of other social welfare conditions the writers consider of equal importance, such as universal health care, the economy and additional programs for the poor. There will be millions more abortions to come now that those candidates have been elected.

Can you even imagine such a departure from Catholic precepts, the commandments of God or the teaching of Jesus? The failure to protect the “least of these” renders any other position meaningless.

Summing up my feelings best is the statement of Tony Woodlief in the Nov. 1/8 issue of World Magazine: “Those other issues certainly affect a country’s safety, prosperity and greatness. But I’ve come to believe that a nation that tolerates destruction of innocents deserves neither safety nor prosperity nor greatness. We’ve descended into barbarism, and it poisons how we treat the elderly, the incapacitated, even ourselves. … But abortion is, in my view, the touchstone. Get this one wrong and your moral compass can guide you in nothing else.”

- Charles A. Pechette, Indianapolis

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