Mark the date. And celebrate.

My friend, Paul Zummo, writing at Letters from Cato, takes on some of the putative "pro-lifers" who now make their living attacking actual pro-lifers in exchange for the approval of their new-found followers among the leftist mob.

Paul begins by noting that the overturning of Roe and Casey are by no means a done deal. There is no final decision at this point, and the Justices are still free to change their minds. We've been down this road before in both Webster and Casey itself:

I don’t have much to add on the substance of the leaked decision that may spell the end of Roe. Pro-lifers have had too many Lucy pulling the football away moments to feel comfortable until the decision is actually handed down.

He then notes that IF the decision stands, it's a pretty big deal:

... many conservatives have been quite happy to laud the draft opinion. Personally, I refuse to read it until Dobbs is formally and officially decided, but those who have read it, at least among actual conservatives (more on that in a moment), have universally and unapologetically praised it...

Then Paul gets to the crux of his post:

What I would like to discuss are the erstwhile conservatives and Catholics who have either thrown cold water on the decision or else have actively derided it. I won’t even bring up the folks at the Grifter Project. Everyone already knows their principles are subject to being changed by the highest bidder, so I will go on ignoring them as every good and decent person should.

No, I would like to talk about the more “enlightened,” principled conservatives, especially those whose mission is to conserve conservatism.

Paul follows with a discussion of the various weasel-word responses to the leaked draft of Justice Alito's opinion from such formerly "principled" pro-life conservatives as Evan McMullin (some of y'all voted for this fraud), Bill Kristol (who once wrote a piece for the Weakly Substandard titled (in all caps) "ROE MUST GO"), Jonathan Last (who "was once a staunch pro-life advocate and author of books like What to Expect When No One’s Expecting" and who once wrote “I’m one of those anti-abortion nut jobs who thinks that every embryo is sacred life and abortion is killing an innocent.”), and last, but not least, Mark Shea (who once actually thought with the Church instead of just pretending to while actually aligning himself with the DNC platform).
  
This one, in particular, rankles:

[Mark] Shea calls the evident reversal of Roe a pyrrhic victory, but perhaps he is upset because it’s a victory he has assured us for decades was never coming because the GOP has been playing us. Now that two decades of doomcasting have been proven to be bogus, Shea wants to pretend it is utterly meaningless...

These people have shown that they would rather “own the right” than rejoice at what *may* turn out to be the greatest pro-life victory of our lifetime … a result for which they ALL once openly advocated. Back when they at least pretended to be pro-life. BUT they’ve all been frauds all along. 

“It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, but for [‘likes’ from rabid pro-infanticide leftists]?”

For quite a while now, I have been contemplating briefly -- for just one post -- coming out of blog retirement to explain why I no longer refer to myself as being "pro-life". I had it all written in my head, and had only to actually sit down, revisit my old blogger interface, and start typing.

Fortunately, Eric Sammons, writing at CatholicVote, has saved me the trouble by writing, essentially, the very apologia I had planned:

... No matter the reason, by calling every issue a “pro-life” issue, we dilute and fracture the brand. We make other, less important issues as important as the abortion issue. We needlessly divide pro-lifers over prudential issues about which we should be able to respectfully disagree.

As for me, I’ve come to realize that I’m no longer pro-life. Just call me anti-abortion. It’s accurate, specific, and tells the whole world that I’m unabashedly opposed to child-killing.

So, no longer refer to me as "pro-life" -- not if being "pro-life" means I also have to accept a hodgepodge of DNC platform positions pushed by lefty Catholics and the USCCB bureaucracy. I want to oppose abortion on MY terms ... not the terms of people who, in the end, don't really give two squirts about ending abortion.

Call me "anti-abortion".

(And with that, I sign off.)

Alternate title for David Mills' piece at Crux today:  Crux STILL Telling Converts "Shut Up!"

David Mills admonishes that "Newcomers to the Church should speak less, listen more." And here's the thing. On one level I DO agree with what Mills writes about converts needing a period of reflection, adjustment, and additional mystagogy -- of getting our feet wet, so to speak, before pronouncing on any and all things Catholic. In retrospect, I wish I had waited before i began to blog about Catholicism shortly after I converted almost a decade-and-a-half ago (I only had been Catholic for 9 months when I "took up the pen" in the Catholic blogosphere.)

But then Mills completely goes off the rails:

"... He may be full of book-learning. But of the real Catholic mind or imagination - the Catholic paradigm, the way Catholics see the world - he knows little. The new Catholic **must work for many years** to get that, and **never will get it fully**. (emphasis added)

"Most converts, as I wrote in The New Oxford Review, will never think and feel exactly as do cradle Catholics. They do by instinct what we will always do by analysis followed by choice.

"For a long time, and perhaps a very long time, the convert will see the Catholic Thing as you see a garden through a bay window, not as you see it when you’re standing amidst the flowers. He sees its design and beauty, but doesn’t feel the sun or smell the flowers or enjoy walking barefoot on the grass. Nor does he know what it is like to get caught in the rain or stung by a bee, or to spend hours weeding. He has to spend many years outside to know what life in the garden is really like..."

What a crock! This is fetishizing the cradle Catholic experience as being the *REAL* Catholic experience, and holding up any alternative to that as somehow less than. I used to do this exact same thing that Mills is doing when I was a new Catholic. I used to lament that I would never be able to experience the Faith with the instinct and the ethos of a cradle Catholic. That I would somehow always be an "incomplete" or not "REAL" Catholic like all my brethren born into the Faith and that I had somehow been "deprived" of my "birthright" as a "true" Catholic.

Now I recognize that for the utter horseshit that it is. It is nothing more than fetishizing cradle Catholicism ... in the same way many people fetishize the conversion experiences of the new Catholic. Converts are no less or no more "REAL" Catholics than are cradle Catholics. We all have our gifts that we bring to how we live our Faith and we all have our shortcomings. And NONE of those gifts or shortcoming are inherent, innate, ingrained, implicit, instinctive, distinctive, or integral (or whatever other word or clinical diagnosis you choose to plug in) to being either a cradle Catholic or a convert. And they are most definitely NOT fixed or inalienable based upon such status.

St. Paul was no more or no less competent to speak out against St. Peter for his having been a convert than were any of the other Apostles who had been with Peter all along. It is high time we stop criticizing and / or fetishizing the experiences of our fellow Catholics based on whether or not they are cradle, convert, or revert Catholics. How 'bout we all just be CATHOLICS?

UPDATE
Upon further reflection, this piece (and it's "speak less, listen more" headline) is actually far more condescending than "Shut Up!"

It's more like "Shhhhh."

UPDATE #2
For more background on the anti-convert dustup taking place at Crux (funded by your Knight of Columbus dues) and elsewhere, read Paul Zummo's excellent post at The American Catholic.

UPDATE #3 
Deal Hudson has written an excellent response to Mills' piece ... also published at Crux.

Labels: Converts

Catholics can't agree on whether violence is an appropriate response to heresy

Labels: Humor

In case you're wondering, the "middle ages dictatorship" that is the Catholic Church and her Bishops is right there in the middle of Hillary Clinton's so-called "basket of deplorables". And the Clinton team had a plan to rid themselves of these troublesome priests by "plant[ing] the seeds of the revolution" against the Catholic hierarchy and its teachings via infiltration and subversion.

Some of us caught on to this plan a decade ago...

Vindication. Yes, an opportunity to gloat. To say "I told you so."

Not a very pretty sentiment, but that's about the only thing that could bring me out of blogging retirement (but only for this one post) in the electoral Annus Horribilis that is 2016.

So it turns out that what we knew ALL ALONG about the Soros-funded DemoCatholic front groups Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and its sister organization Catholics United was, in fact, 100% on the money. We have an admission right out of the horse's mouth (or, rather, out of the horse's leaked emails). I haven't the time nor the inclination to get into a long retrospective detailing the war of words that I and other like-minded bloggers waged over several years -- beginning a decade ago -- against Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United. Instead, I will direct you to the links below, which will more than fill you in and give you a taste of what was being said and what was at stake.

In short, my part in this drama began a decade ago during the 2006 elections, when Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good published a Catholic voter guide that played down the priority given by the Church to traditional life issues in favor of a hodge-podge of issues straight out of the Democrat Party platform. At first, I began by just blogging about and linking to what others were saying about this mysterious group who had suddenly appeared on the scene in the midst of a mid-term election. As the evidence poured in, especially evidence that linked the group to funding provided by none other than George Soros, it soon became clear that Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good was little more than a front group for the Democrat Party and its efforts to blur the lines on life issues with Catholic voters.

And then, the week before the November 2006 elections, our own Catholic Chronicle -- the usually fairly orthodox newspaper of the Diocese of Toledo, Ohio -- published a front-page puff piece on the efforts of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good in our own diocese to promote their vision and their voter guide (the story reported the efforts in a straightforward manner, without questioning the problematic aspects of the group and its voter guide).. The proverbial you-know-what must've hit the fan in the Chancery offices once the very orthodox then-Toledo Bishop Leonard Blair (now Archbishop of Hartford, CT) caught wind of it, because the article was gone from the Chronicle's website within a matter of hours after it was published. Alas, it was too late to remove the article from the print editions, which went out the weekend before the elections on the following Tuesday to parishes Diocese-wide. So, in response to the Chronicle's article, I penned a letter to the editor taking the Chronicle and the main protagonist of the article, Prof. Richard Gaillardetz, to task for the misrepresentation and manipulation of Catholic teaching. The Chronicle eventually published my letter, along with a few others disagreeing with the article and its timing, a couple of months later. Following the letter's publication, the response from the Catholics in Alliance crowd was swift and predictably unpleasant. You can read the comments here for a taste. This war of words against Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United (and various offshoots like Catholic Democrats, etc.) went on for several years and took many twists and turns, which you can read about in the links at the bottom of this post.

In the end, it is my belief that, ultimately, those of us leading the charge against these groups lost that war (at least in the short term covering 2006, 2008, and 2012). Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United accomplished their aims of convincing Catholics that voting for a party that views government-funded abortion on demand as a sacrament, and that views the destruction of the traditional family as a prerequisite to achieving its policy goals and destroying the institutions -- such as the Church and other religious people and organizations -- that might stand in that party's way of achieving said policy goals, was not only morally acceptable, but was, in fact, the MOST Catholic way to vote. See, e.g., Doug Kmiec.  "These groups are merely drawing attention to long-ignored issues of importance to Catholics," some said. "These groups are doing the Church a service by focusing on the need for a 'consistent ethic of life'," they said (never mind that these groups NEVER talked about such life issues as abortion, euthanasia, or the sanctity of the family). Entire blogs were established for the purpose of propagandizing the issues that the DemoCath groups argued were being ignored because of Catholic voters' allegedly "obsessive" focus on "a narrow spectrum of issues regarding family and sexuality" (i.e. the sanctity of life and the family). Sometimes, these blogs had well-meaning founders who definitely raised important issues for Catholics to consider when they were deciding how to vote, but these blogs often quickly devolved into DemoCath propaganda organs as certain bloggers and frequent combox commentators used those fora to press forward the agitprop that ultimately undermined the good of the Catholic Church and her teachings in favor of the pursuit of Democrat Party policy goals. Far too many Catholics who should have known better allowed themselves to be swayed by the arguments of those whose only purpose was to weaken the resolve of Catholic voters to stand for the Catholic Church's teachings on the primacy of life and family issues, and instead were duped by these malefactors to trade that birthright for a mess of feel-good leftist policy pottage. And that party repaid them by, among many other things, suing nuns to force them to provide birth control in their medical policies. And, in response, Catholic voters had so weakened their resolve to stand for traditional life issues, that they re-elected the guy who has consistently attacked their Church. Which was the goal of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United all along. Today, there is no identifiable "Catholic Vote" left to speak of thanks to the likes of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United.

So, it turns out to be a rather bittersweet bit of gloating, at best, when I read the latest WikiLeaks email dump, which includes a 2012 email exchange in which HilLIARy Clinton's current campaign chairman, John Podesta, openly brags about being involved in efforts to infiltrate the Catholic Church and foment a "Catholic Spring" (i.e. a bottom-up rebellion against the Church hierarchy and its teaching authority akin to the "Arab Spring" -- albeit without the violence, one hopes -- that led to revolutions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria). The means of fomenting this takeover of the Church? Why, none other than Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United:

Hi, John, 
This whole controversy with the bishops opposing contraceptive coverage even though 98% of Catholic women (and their conjugal partners) have used contraception has me thinking . . . There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church. Is contraceptive coverage an issue around which that could happen. The Bishops will undoubtedly continue the fight. Does the Catholic Hospital Association support of the Administration's new policy, together with "the 98%" create an opportunity? 

Of course, this idea may just reveal my total lack of understanding of the Catholic church, the economic power it can bring to bear against nuns and priests who count on it for their maintenance, etc. Even if the idea isn't crazy, I don't qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would "plant the seeds of the revolution," or who would plant them.

Just wondering . . .

Hoping you're well, and getting to focus your time in the ways you want. 
Sandy 

Sandy Newman, President 
Voices for Progress 
202.669.8754 
voicesforprogress.org

_________________________________


From:john.podesta@gmail.com
To: sandynewman@gmail.com
Date: 2012-02-11 11:45
Subject: Re: opening for a Catholic Spring? just musing . . .

We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up. I'll discuss with Tara. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the other person to consult. (emphasis added)

That there is what we call a "smoking gun". Again, we knew ALL ALONG what these groups were up to, but they always had some plausible deniability along with their apologists making the case that they were honest-to-goodness "Faithful Catholics"™️ just arguing for a "consistent ethic of life" (again, albeit one that never ever quite mentioned abortion). But this Podesta email is a validation and vindication of the efforts of myself and like-minded bloggers such as, for example, Rich Leonardi, to expose this infiltration of the Catholic Church by political subversives bent on "plant[ing] the seeds of ... revolution".

If you have the time, I encourage you to read as many of the links below as you can to get some indication of what these subversive groups were up to and the efforts to which bloggers were going to expose them. You might find of particular interest the links detailing how former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (a Democrat who is now challenging U.S. Sen. Rob Portman for his Senate seat) had a man at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good whom he also appointed to head up the Ohio Faith-Based Initiatives office and who was, at the same time, running a prostitution ring. Yep.

Others commenting on this story:

• Don McClarey at The American Catholic: Democrat Attempts to Control the Church 
• Steve Skojek at OnePeterFive: The Leftist Conspiracy Against Orthodox Catholicism 
• Rod Dreher at The American Conservative: Democratic Conspiracy Against Catholic Church 
• CatholicVote: [Ongoing Updates] Clinton Campaign Anti-Catholic WikiLeaks Scandal
• The Catholic Herald: Clinton Campaign Chief Helped Start Catholic Organisations to Create "Revolution" in the Church
• Archbishop Charles J. Chaput at National Catholic Register: About Those Unthinking, Backward Catholics ... 
• The Wall Street Journal: Anti-Catholics for Clinton 

Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Prominent Catholic Professor Claims IRS Audited Her After Speaking Out Against Obama and Demanded to Know Who Was Paying Her

Soros-Funded Pro-Obama Catholics to Launch News Service?
 
Catholic Key Blog Asks "Is Catholics in Alliance Kaput?"

Soros-Funded "Catholic" Groups Still Running Cover for Pro-Aborts (Of Course, That's the Sole Reason They Exist)

"Nonpartisan" Catholics United to “Set the Record Straight” by Trying to Convince Catholics That New Healthcare Law is "Pro-Life"

Archbishop Chaput: A Bad Bill and How We Got It

Archbishop Chaput: Those Confusing the Catholic Stance on Health Care Will Bear the Blame for Anti-Life Effects of Heath Care Bill

CatholicVote Takes on Soros-Funded Catholics in Alliance and Catholics United

Sebelius and Kmiec Catholicism - the Catholic Left Declares War on Pro-Lifers

Apologists for Abortion-Loving Catholics Attack Archbishop ... Again

Catholic News Agency: Catholics in Alliance "Abortion Reduction" Study Found to be Faulty - Social Welfare Policies Have Little Effect on Abortion

What Did Gov. Strickland Know, and When Did He Know It (re: Eric McFadden)? [UPDATED]

Breaking: Catholic Democrat Who Once Headed Up Ohio's Faith-Based Initiatives Arrested for Running Prostitution Ring [UPDATED]

"Seamless Garment Has Lost a Thread"

Catholics in Alliance Voter Survey of "Little Value," Archdiocese of Denver Says

"Nonpartisan" Catholics United Attacks the Knights of Columbus

"Nonpartisan" Catholics United Hits McCain with Ad Questioning His Pro-Life Credentials

"Non-Partisan" Group of Catholic Obama Supporters Calling Itself "Catholics United" Gets Divisive

The Catholic Left Meets in Philadelphia

Convention for the "Common Good"

Bill Donohue: "How the Catholic Left Is Boxed in by Abortion"

"Catholic Democrats" Attack "Registered Republican Archbishop of Kansas City" for "Using Communion" to "Take Down" Sebelius

I Missed the Seminar [UPDATED]

Deal Hudson: "Catholics Organize to Elect Barack Obama"

Democrat Front Group Posing as Catholic Org Calls for End to "Christmas Culture War"

Fidelis Dismisses Religious Left Media "Report"

Democrats Set Their Sights on Winning Back Catholics

Mark Shea in National Catholic Register: "Richard Rich Lives"

Edwards Blogger Flap Discomforts Religious Left

Mark Shea: "Whores for Edwards Swings into Action"

Catholics in Alliance Respond With Letter to Editor

Continue to Raise Our Voices on Issue of Voting

In January's Catholic Chronicle - "Vote Your Values" Revisited

Vote Your Values

"NOT An Approved Catholic Voter Guide"

What's Missing?

Toledo Blade: "Catholic Voting Guide Gives Church Perspective"

Catholics Find Voting Guides a Test of Allegiance

Weigel: "An Electoral Battle of the Booklets?

More From Amy Welborn on the "Dueling Catholic Voter Guides"

Columnist: "Christian Right Driving Wedge Into U.S."

More on Catholic Voter Guides

Dueling Catholic Voter Guides

Labels: Anti-Catholicism, Catholic Social Teaching, Democrats, Dissident Catholics, Elections, Hilliary, Religious Left, Religious Persecution, Social Justice, The Catholic Vote, Voting Your Values