Apparently there are rumblings that Obama’s so-called Freedom of Choice Act (which is the first thing he’ll enact as president) will force Catholic hospitals out of business.  Not to mention pro-life Ob/Gyn practices, Christian hospitals in general, and so on.  From the Philadelphia Bulletin:

It is clear the FOCA raises abortion to what it calls a “fundamental right.” Yet it is not clear if Catholics realize the threat that Mr. Obama poses to the unborn, to believing Catholics in the medical profession, and to Catholic hospitals across the nation.

Michael Moses, legal analyst of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops called it a “radical measure” that will “go way beyond Roe [vs. Wade].” The language is so sweeping that it will wipe out any state’s “conscience” clause, which is the law that allows hospitals, doctors and nurses to abstain from taking part in abortion for reasons of conscience. If abortion is a “fundamental right”, according to FOCA, then every hospital must provide it.

The net result, as one writer noted, is “President Obama and his congressional supermajority would force every Christian hospital, doctor or nurse to abandon their faith or go out of business.” Under FOCA, believing Christians could be banned from the hospital industry (and apostolate) by federal law.

Of course this fits the template very nicely.  In Obama’s worldview, government is the source of all things good.  So, he can eliminate competition with this mindset by eliminating private hospitals, many if not most of which are run by one church or another…and most churches that run hospitals are pro-life.  Get rid of the private hospitals, and the government-run ones become more popular by default…they grow, more are built, and government’s stanglehold on our lives grows even more.

How’s that for your spooky Halloween news?

The Catholic News Service has a story up today about how the plethora of available voters’ guides may actually confuse Catholic voters.  Fortunately, most of the guides referenced rely heavily on the Bishops’ “Faithful Citizenship” document, but of course one of those referenced is from Catholics United.

The thing is, other than the mention of the direct-mail propaganda from Catholics United, the voters’ guides basically all agree with each other, according to the article.  Since most Catholics whose faith impacts their vote know that  Catholics United is really just a front group for cafeteria Catholics who are voting for Obama and like to hang out together to make themselves feel less guilty for it, they won’t be fooled by Catholics United’s mailing…rather they’ll look at the proven consistency of voters’ guides from Catholic Answers, the CCB, etc.  The article does a poor job showing where the confusions is.

I saw a reference to a great post by Fr. Philip…it’s a list of points about the Church.  Among my favorites:

3). The doctrine and dogma of the Catholic Church are not consumer products that the Church’s employees sell to those who want them; Catholic doctrine and dogma express the unchanging truth of the faith.

6). Leaving the Catholic Church because a priest was mean to you, or because sister whacked you with a ruler, or because the church secretary looked at you funny is as stupid as giving up on the truths of math because you hate your high school algebra teacher.

9). The Catholic Church owes no one a revision of her doctrine or dogma. She didn’t change to save most of Europe from becoming Protestant, why would you imagine that she would change just to get you in one of her parishes?

You better go read the whole list!

A commenter at AmP mentioned this video clip of a long form interview by a young Mike Wallace of an aging Margaret Sanger.  Up until now, I have read some quotes, some accounts, and the like, but this is a chance to hear her in her own words.  Of particular interest is when Wallace mentions her comments to his reporter that religions should not prohibit the dissemination of birth control even among their own members.  He asks her if she actually means that the government should legislatively prevent religions from prohibiting certain activities to their members.  She dances around nicely and doesn’t answer.  Then he asks her if she believes in God, and she responds that she believes in the divine in all of us, and that if we live out the good part of our lives, we increase the amount of divinity in us (my, how new age of her, eh?  New age isn’t so new, is it?)

One of the best though is when Wallace asks her if she believes that sin exists.  She says

I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world-that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born.

Which is to say that humans have no ability to self-improve. It’s that whole quality of life issue that gets beaten over and over – creating a life which has no quality in Sanger’s eyes is a sin. I question…if more people knew of the mentality of the people pushing birth control from the beginning, would they want to be anywhere near it?

Watch the video!

Of all the posts I have written on this blog, the one that has consistently gotten comments over the nearly a year since I wrote it regards Fr. Francis Mary Stone, of EWTN’s Life on the Rock fame.  At that time, we simply had a statement that was read on air, from Father Francis telling his public that he had gotten involved with a widow and her family and was now taking time off to discern his true calling, etc.

At that time, I voiced a concern about this idea that you can just decide to stop and discern your vocation after you’ve already committed yourself to it.  I likened it to marriage…the idea that you, dear reader, would absolutely and rightly skewer me if I revealed on my blog that I had grown fond of an eligible young lady at my place of work, and that I was going to take a sabbatical from being a husband and father to my wife and kids while I discerned my vocation in life, and whether or not they were indeed a part of it.  You’d tell me that this was unacceptable because I had already taken solemn and sacramental vows to my wife, and taken on the vocation of pastoring the Domestic Church, and it would in fact be impossible for me to just abandon those vows.  Some commenters agreed with me, but many of them said things like this:

We need to give Father Francis the benefit of the doubt here. We all know, as viewers, that he is going to do everything to the best of his ability to do God’s Ordaining Will.

To them I always simply ask the question: would you say the same thing if I told you I was discerning my vocation of marriage and family?  I can’t get a straight answer from anyone who made such comments.  Most of the commenters just expressed sadness at the situation, and one troll suggested this was an example of why a celibate priesthood makes no sense.  Got to love the trolls.

Over the months there’ve been comments asking if there’s any new information on Fr. Francis.  Well, this morning, a commenter in fact gave us a piece of news that apparently Fr. Francis went through laicization or is just AWOL from the priesthood, as he has now opened up his website for his new company, “Dave Stone, Inc.”  The WHOIS Lookup on the domain name doesn’t reveal any information about who really registered the domain name, but the information on the website is commensurate with what we know about Mr. Stone.  Naturally, anyone who wants to could build such a site, complete with photos and biographical information which are correct about Mr. Stone, but of note is that on the home page, an audio clip plays welcoming visitors to the site, and the audio is pretty clearly the voice we know as that of (former?) Fr. Stone.

The website indicates that Dave Stone Inc. offers 3 services: motivational speaking, home health care provision, and a nutritional beverage being sold under an Amway-esque pyramid multi-level-marketing scheme.  According to the site, Stone will do speaking engagements for free (except travel expenses and a small retainer fee.)  The primary focus is the home healthcare stuff, and the nutritional drink is just plain disturbing because it has a new-agey, eastern religious, medicine show quality to it (rejuvenate yourself, unlock your full potential, standard buzzwords you hear on midnight infomercials.)

One blogger said it sounds like Stone is facing the cold, hard reality that a husband and father must provide for his family.  Adjectives like cold and hard make it sound like a negative, and I am confident that that blogger didn’t mean it to come across that way, rather just that now that he’s abandoned his first set of vows, he’s having to make good on the second set by getting up, leaving the cave, killing something, and dragging it back (props to Dave Ramsey for this analogy.)

To be clear, I don’t wish Mr. Stone any ill at all.  I am disappointed as I would be if someone I look to as a marriage champion were to come to me and tell me that they had decided to split up with their spouse, because unlike so many commenters, I still see it as Stone divorced his first love and has moved on to a second one.  I don’t wish Mr. Stone bad luck in his business or in his family life.  For the sake of his family, I hope that he does a better job keeping this set of vows than he did keeping his first set, in spite of the fact that the two are supposed to be mutually exclusive and both binding until death.

I’ve already expressed my feelings on his apparent exit from the priesthood, but now I have 3 new problems with Mr. Stone.  First, he’s using the “Life on the Rock” slogan throughout his website – this was the name of his EWTN show, and he’s clearly trying to use the reputation from what is now his past life to further a commercial venture.  Right on the home page it says “Living Life on the Rock.”  Now it’s not exactly the same but it’s close enough to just sound like he’s trying to make hay out of his previous life and cash in on it.  Secondly, he refers to his EWTN experience saying he was the host of the “then popular” show Life on the Rock.  The implication? Since I am not the host anymore, it’s not popular anymore.  That comes across as just kind of scummy.  Fact is, the show has continued in the year or so since he left, with continued success.

The third problem I have is the marketing campaign apparently launched to use the Catholic blogosphere to promote his new website and new company.  According to the site, he launched the website on October 4.  Interestingly, though, no one seems to have known about the website until early this morning.  A commenter posted a link to Mr. Stone’s website at 5:41 AM today; seems the same thing happened to Curt Jester, American Papist, Father Joe, Abbey Roads 2, Threshing Grain, and the list goes on.  Since I don’t blog for a living, I couldn’t break the story (I think Father Joe and Thomas at AmP win that award) but I was aware of it first thing this morning.  Now it’s unclear whether it was some well-meaning commenter who tipped us all off, or if in fact it was a plan to get all us Catholic bloggers to post about the site, then all our readers (not mine, but the readers of the serious Catholic blogs) would click through to the site and drive the traffic through the roof on Mr. Stone’s site.  Call me a conspiracy theorist but the IP address of the commenter who posted on this blog belongs to AT&T internet services, and they do provide internet service throughout Alabama; they also provide it to about half the country, so that’s not really any proof at all.  It just smells bad, that we’d all get hit with this at once.  And, seeing as my blog is much lower on the totem pole than are some of the others mentioned, it makes little sense to “tip” me off, unless it were a concerted marketing effort. Maybe I am making too much of it.  In any event, just to keep from being used this way, I won’t post a link to the site.  You can find it if you want to.

Since the story broke, Mr. Stone has added some information to his website, including a “newsletter” item in which he addresses a few things.  First of all, he has a statement up on his “hire me to speak” page where he says he’s in full communion with the Catholic Church.  Second, he says:

Yes, there are difficulties – obstacles, things that went wrong, flailing bullets, regrets, call them what you will – before me. Yet, by God’s merciful Providence, I have a family to care for now, a child who deserves nothing but the very best I can give him. And, I plan to do exactly that – to do what I ought to do – as natural law, the moral law, divine law, basic human decency, and common sense all dictate. Or, as someone told me not all that long ago, to do as any real Pro-Lifer would and should do. Having long reconciled with the Church and, frankly, beyond, I look forward to giving every fiber of my being to this new endeavor…

…

I urge you all to help, not hinder me in this righteous and necessary, albeit most difficult work. I am nothing but hopeful, aware but not disheartened by those who, oddly, go to at times great lengths to try and diminish and destroy. Mother Angelica often spoke in our long-gone “Wednesday Audiences” about those who continually look to destroy…

One last thing I just noticed that makes it start to really stink…a book deal is in the works! Imagine that…

At the urging of many trusted and capable individuals, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, I am in the middle of writing my autobiography and editing a short book containing many of the letters I’ve received over the past year or so. I believe the former will provide much needed context, while the latter will provide a most inspiring and encouraging resource for anyone having to work through a difficult but far from hopeless time in their life.

I am fighting my cynical tendencies at this point.  Again using a part of your life which you have essentially forsaken and divorced yourself from toam make money.  I guess it’s just my fallen nature seeing this, but it just looks too much like the typical template.  God help us, let’s hope this isn’t a repeat of former Fr. Chiniquy’s work (50 years in the Church of Rome or something like that.)

To reiterate I wish him no ill, he has a life to live and a family to support, but before you proceed to skewer me yet again, just ask yourself…if Mr. Stone had been married with children and went through the same thing, would you be so quick to defend him?

The MSM doesn’t like Archbishop Burke’s recent promotion.

Vatican officials seldom single out political leaders who differ with the Church on issues like abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research. But now that the Vatican’s highest court is led by an American, the former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, we can expect things to get more explicit in Vatican City — at least when when it comes to U.S. politics.

Burke, who was named prefect of the Vatican’s Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature in June, told the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire that the U.S. Democratic Party risked “transforming itself definitively into a party of death for its decisions on bioethical issues.” He then attacked two of the party’s most high profile Catholics — vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — for misrepresenting Church teaching on abortion.

He said Biden and Pelosi, “while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.”

Naturally the tone of the article continues…

Read it.

Interesting developments today in the world of Catholic morality.  For some time, a theologian who I have heard mentioned a few times, Doug Kmiec, has been working on mental gymnastics to somehow come out with the notion that it is possible to maintain one’s Communion with the Catholic Church while at the same time supporting the Obamessiah for President.  Of course, the Catholic blogosphere, largely inhabited by orthodox, faithful Catholics (as opposed to “progressive” or more accurately heterodox Catholics, or even more accurately, “protestants”) has kept my heart from being too troubled on the matter, since their response has been uniformly critical of Kmiec’s position.  However, now there’s a website…prolifeproobama.com, with Kmiec as the poster boy for a staunchly pro-life Catholic who has come up with a rationalization for being pro-Obama.  Now Kmiec runs a serious risk to his eternal destiny here, because it’s one thing to choose a morally bankrupt position for yourself, but there’s something about millstones involving people who willingly convince others to choose the same morally bankrupt position.

Basically, Kmiec’s thesis is that Obama will do more to reduce abortion than McCain will, presumably by eliminating poverty and providing free health care (not to mention providing large amounts of free contraception, which is an entirely additional problem with Kmiec’s argument).  Something along the lines of, if you take away peoples’ “need” to abort, they won’t do it.  Of course this is fallacious…the democrat party has actually removed wording relating to making abortion rare (because to do so, they would be admitting there was a reason to make it rare, like maybe it had negative effects on people or something.)

Proving that satire is a great way to combat such insanity, the Curt Jester has written a great piece on why a good, moral person could support Stephen Douglas for President in 1860.  An excerpt…then you can go read the rest of it here:

Though Senator Douglas does not regard a slaveholding society as one whit inferior to a free society I think he is the best choice to reduce slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 proves that he is pro-choice on the issue of slavery since the act allowed these new states coming into the union to make up their own mind as to whether slavery should be allowed in their territory. He lets the people in the state decide as to whether slavery is moral or immoral. Surely this will limit slavery and as we work for a more just society more and more slaveowners will decide to reduce the number of slaves they own. Just because Sen. Douglas has invoked racist rhetoric and accused Lincoln of supporting black equality which he believes the authors of the Declaration of Independence did not intend, does not mean that he is pro-slavery. Even supporters of slavery can be conflicted about slavery and whether blacks are equal to us or not and we should move to a society where slavery is safe, legal, and rare. Plus it is not true to call him pro-slavery. He is for the choice of slavery and people can decide on their own whether they want to become slaveowners or not. Shouldn’t we let people make their own choices on this issue? Do we really want to legislate morality? Now as a Catholic I personally believe that slavery is wrong, but lawmakers need to represent the people.