As I was reading the emails that I had received last Saturday, this email sent by EWTN via my email subscription got my attention…
American Bishops Respond to U.S. Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi’s Misrepresentation of Catholic Teaching on Abortion
If you’ve been paying attention to the news this week, you can’t have missed the justifiable furor by many U.S. bishops, Catholic leaders and laity, and EWTN television and radio program hosts, over U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s statements about the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion.
Pelosi made her comments in an Aug. 24 interview with Tom Brokow on “Meet the Press.” In case you somehow missed it, Brokow said that Democratic Presidental Candidate Barack Obama had said that the question of when life begins was “above his pay grade.” Brokow asked Pelosi if she had an answer to this question.
Pelosi, who told Brokow she was “an ardent, practicing Catholic,” incorrectly stated that the doctors of the Catholic Church had been unable to make that distinction; and that it shouldn’t impact on a woman’s right to choose. What follows are excerpts from some of the Bishop’s statements as well as a link to what our own Father Mitch Pacwa had to say. (For a complete transcript of the Bishop’s statements, and more, please click here.)
What I would like to comment on is the claim of the US Speaker of being “an ardent and practicing Catholic”, in which, in my humble opinion, had became a common claim of baptized Catholics. Most of the times when they wish to convey their own belief in regards to Catholic Teachings.
I really do not know and could not really comprehend what the US speaker really meant when she said this.
What I can do though is base her statement on her position regarding abortion in the US. Since the answer was given on a question involving abortion.
Basing from this and in my humble and honest opinion, there is a great doubt in my mind if she really knows what it really meant to be an ardent and practicing Catholic.
Sad to say but for most Catholics nowadays, whenever they start claiming to be an ardent and practicing Catholic, it simply meant that they go to Church in a “regular manner”. As if by simply attending mass and receiving the Holy Eucharist makes a baptized Catholic a “practicing Catholic”.
Well in truth, attending mass is indeed an important component of becoming a practicing Catholic. But sad to say that attending mass and receiving Holy Communion alone does not suffice, since practicing and reliving the truth that we discover in the Gospel of every mass that we attended is what matters most.
Simply put, every mass that we participated in must always result to a changing of our old selves to a new one. And believe it or not, these changes demands the opening of our selves to the Absolute Truth taught in the Gospel.
The Absolute Truth handed down and taught by Jesus to His Apostles, and kept by the very Church that He Himself has erected, the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.
And since this truth was handed down to the Church, what must we do then?
Adhere to it, what else? For how can we say that we are practicing our faith, if we could not even follow what our Church teaches? Worst, is to tell its leaders and charged its elders (doctors of the Catholic Church) who were given the task to safeguard the Truth, “not to have been unable to make the distinction on the question of when life begins, and that it shouldn’t impact on a woman’s right to choose”.
“To become a baptized a Catholic can be simple and easy at times, especially if you were born in a Catholic country like mine. But reliving the demands and becoming an ardent and practicing Catholic is more than what you believed to be.”
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