Dear Editor: Roseanne Cleary, in her letter (Feb. 18), quotes Sister Joan Chittister about abortion. Sister Chittister’s words are addressing some unnamed person (or group) that is apparently pro-life. Sister said that the one she is addressing is in effect not pro-life because they are not in favor of tax money going to support food, education and housing for children.
Specifics are lacking here, as well as any defense of why it must be the government that supplies the money for this food, education and housing.
It would help to know who is this entity that Sister Chittister is addressing. It would also help to know why Ms. Cleary is distressed. The takeaway on her letter is that pro-life people are against using taxes to provide the necessities of life to people. And this comes across as a criticism of those who are against abortion.
In New York City, we have a strong governmental opposition to groups that provide for the necessities of life for women who are pregnant and in need of the necessities of life. Would New York City provide tax money for the crisis pregnancy centers in our country?
FRANK DROLLINGER
Woodhaven
Dear Editor: The question about the dawn of the new millennia for future Catholic historians will be why so many Catholics were willing to believe what the Catholicism-hating media told them to believe about Catholicism and pro-lifers, and why did they fervently repeat the fabrications while avoiding alternative sources of information.
The letters (Feb. 18) repeat media fictions that the Women’s March did not exclude openly pro-life women, that it was the largest demonstration in history, that men are the “face” of the pro-life movement, and the monotonous slander that pro-lifers do nothing for children after they are born proven by nothing more than endlessly repeating the accusation.
It is difficult to understand the accommodation necessary for anyone to believe that all the pro-life parents, doctors, nurses, teachers, priests, religious, and people from every human vocation have never cared about children or the well-being of anyone else. The pro-life movement, including our own Bridge to Life, is led almost entirely by women whom radical feminists don’t treat as worthy of respect as women, and have been at the forefront in providing pre-natal care, material support for young mothers and their families, and continuing support for the healing of women who are abortion victims. “Pro-choicers” do not have one single facility in the entire world that does anything similar.
Since the God-given human rights of women are no different than men, the term “women’s rights” is never anything but a euphemism for promoting abortion that some Catholics carelessly support. The recent pro-abortion “Women’s March,” touted as the largest in history, but actually smaller than most “March for Life” events, refused permission for self-identified pro-life women from marching. Pro-life groups nonetheless attended and courageously unfurled banners expressing pro-life values, only to experience vehement insults from other marchers. An obviously pregnant pro-life activist Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood worker who has converted, was taunted by marchers whose contempt for the real dignity of women was reflected by the consciously vulgar expression of their thematic hats. The media cover up such episodes with the same zeal they suppress any coverage of peaceful and prayerful pro-life events.
It is an unworthy dismissal to diminish pro-lifers to a stereotype on social policies. Many Catholic pro-life politicians, knowing that Catholicism teaches both doctrines of subsidiarity and solidarity, are concerned that state and local administration of social aid and private charitable initiatives are damaged under the autocracy of the federal government evidenced by frequent correlations to increases of dependency, poverty, and family stability whenever they are implemented.
If anyone desires to act in accord with real concerns for women, you are welcome to help Bridge to Life as we put our social doctrines into practice every day.
CATHERINE DONOHOE, MS, RN
Flushing
Editor’s Note: Mrs. Donohoe is president of the Board of Directors of The Bridge to Life.
Pope John XXIII’s demand for the updating of the language in which Catholic doctrine is expressed in his opening speech of Vatican II reflected a subtle retreat from the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
The concrete effects of this retreat from Thomism has had incalculable consequences for the life of the Catholic Church, transforming overnight the Catholic Mass from the objective metaphysical certitudes and hierarchical trappings such immutable truths imply to an inter-subjective New Mass reflecting the environmental nakedness of an Existentialist outlook.
Indeed the current crisis of Roman Catholicism reflects the general crisis of Western Philosophy since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason raised its epistomological challenge to the Aristotelean world view upon which Catholic dogmas were reasoned via Aquinas.
Evidence Catholicism’s struggle against the modern critical spirit introduced by Kant:
• Vatican I’s assertion that God’s existence could be proven solely through natural reason;
• Leo XIII’s 1879 imposition of Thomisitic learning;
• Pius X’s 1903 condemnation of Modernism in Pascendi; and
• Pius XII’s 1950 condemnation in Humani Generis of any attempts by the New Theology to extricate
Catholicism from its commitment to Scholasticism.
Transcendental Thomism which some view as an attempt by the Vatican II church to free itself from this philosophical dilemma, inteprets Aquinas’s metaphysics in the light of British Empricisim (Bernard Longran, S.J.) or a modified Hegelean philosophical “metaphysics of the mind” (Karl Rahner, S.J.)
However, even this attenuated survival of Thomism has abandoned the philosophical certitude which made the pre-Vatican II Church possible.
Without this means of support any attempted revival of “orthodoxy” by the Vatican II church will be doomed to failure.