Abp. Dolan Writes Strongly Worded Letter to President Obama Defending Marriage

By Deacon Keith Fournier
9/23/2011
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Mr. President, I respectfully urge you to push the reset button on your Administration's approach to DOMA

Our profound regard for marriage as the complementary and fruitful union of a man and a woman does not negate our concern for the well-being of all people but reinforces it. While all persons merit our full respect, no other relationships provide for the common good what marriage between husband and wife provides. The law should reflect this reality.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (Catholic Online) - Archbishop Timothy Dolan is a heroic servant of the Lord and His Catholic Church. When he was elected to the office of President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic faithful of America received a tremendous gift. His leadership of the Catholic Church in the United States at this critical time in history is vitally important for the future of the Nation and the defense of the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI has connected the moral collapse of the west to what he termed a "Dictatorship of Relativism." The threats to marriage and the family founded and society founded upon it increase every day. On September 20, 2011 the Archbishop wrote the letter we have published below to the President of the United States. We can all learn from his masterful way of defending both marriage and religious freedom.

This well written letter demonstrates the kind of courage and clarity necessary in this hour. Archbishop Dolan affirms that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. He asks the President to do the same. He strenuously objects to the Justice Department's references to those who support marriage as between a man and a woman as somehow prejudiced. He calls out the Administration for their failure to defend marriage under the Defense of Marriage Act. He calls upon the President to "push the reset button." He warns of the threats to religious freedom which have been unleashed by the Administration's actions.

We ask of our readers to consider the strength of leadership displayed in these words and to pray for Archsbishop Dolan and for all of our Bishops. We also ask that you pray for our President, our Church and for our Nation. The letter was accompanied by a well written USCCB Staff Analysis of Recent Federal Threats to Marriage and religious freedom which can be read on the Bishops web site here.

*****

Letter from Archbishop Timothy Dolan to President Barack Obama

Dear Mr. President:

I write with a growing sense of urgency about recent actions taken by your Administration that both escalate the threat to marriage and imperil the religious freedom of those who promote and defend marriage. This past spring the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court, a decision strongly opposed by the Catholic Bishops of the United States and many others.

Now the Justice Department has shifted from not defending DOMA-which is problem enough, given the duty of the executive branch to enforce even laws it disfavors-to actively attacking DOMA‟s constitutionality. My predecessor, Cardinal Francis George, OMI, and I have expressed to you in the past our strong disappointment about the direction your Administration has been moving regarding DOMA. Unfortunately the only response to date has been the intensification of efforts to undermine DOMA and the institution of marriage.

The Justice Department's move, in addition to other troubling federal decisions occurring recently, prompts me yet again to register my grave concerns. The content of this letter reflects the strong sentiment expressed at a recent meeting by more than thirty of my brother Bishops who serve on the Administrative Committee of our episcopal conference. I know they are joined by hundreds of additional Catholic bishops throughout our nation. My observations are offered in the spirit of respectful, but frank dialogue.

The Catholic Bishops stand ready to affirm every positive measure taken by you and your Administration to strengthen marriage and the family. We cannot be silent, however, when federal steps harmful to marriage, the laws defending it, and religious freedom continue apace. Attached you will find an analysis prepared by my staff detailing the various executive activities of late that warrant our increasing apprehension.

Mr. President, your Administration's actions against DOMA and the values it stands for contrast sharply with your excellent Mother's Day and Father's Day proclamations issued earlier this year, which are also referenced in the attached analysis. In these perceptive and heartening statements, you correctly emphasize the critical role played by both a mom and a dad in a child's life, and you rightly call upon society to do all it can to uphold both mothers and fathers.

I know that you treasure the importance that you and the First Lady, separately and as a couple, share in the lives of your children. The Mother's Day and Father's Day proclamations display a welcome conviction on your part that neither a mom nor a dad is expendable. I believe therefore that you would agree that every child has the right to be loved by both a mother and a father.

The institution of marriage is built on this truth, which ...

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1 - 10 of 67 Comments

vance
1 year ago
Well, there are New developments to this article. Obama is recorded at his latest fund raising rally as Bragging about HHS's directives that mandate Abortion and Contraceptives at Catholic Health Services. So much for the letter from Archbishop Dolan. I hope this is a wake-up call to the USCCB to get loud and active against the Liberal Establishment and the Marxist Democrat Party because both have long ago declared the Catholic Church as the Enemy. The sooner they wake up and smell the coffee the better.
JeanCatherine
1 year ago
Rob

Humbly speaking do you study your faith? Do you study the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Bible? Do you learn from Jesus Christ and what He taught? If you do great but we can just do so much on Sunday morning. We have to constantly learn from Christ because ignorance of Scriptures is ignorance of Christ--St. Jerome.
Do you study the encyclicals of the church etc. as well and follow Holy Father when he speaks about the teachings of the church?

Are you in the world or of it? Were all sinners but we all have to learn to change in Christ and its not easy to follow Him. What more can the church do? Holy Father teaches. Here is a blog which is extremely humble in its teachings and understanding of our faith: Jean'sBistro2010's. God Bless and Im not attacking just asking humbly.
Rob
1 year ago
Hey JoAnn. I agree with you somewhat. Unfortunately for us the CINO's far outnumber those who take their faith seriously. And the statistics prove it. When you look at the divorce rate, the rates of contraception use, tithing etc, it's pretty clear how few take these teachings seriously. But I think where the church fails is that they aren't teaching these areas enough. Touching on it once a year isn't going to do it. And the church needs to do a better job at supporting those who do want to raise strong families. It's great the Bishop is out their writing letters, but I want to know what the USCCB is going to do for people at the parish level? Because until our Church get's really serious about the state of affairs at the parish level, this tide isn't turning.
JeanCatherine
1 year ago
JoAnn

Thank you for your input regarding the modern article on Sodom and Gomorah. I also included the Biblical evidence by Christ and the Old Testment where the Prophets speak about this place. If they spoke of this faithfully we can say it occurred historically.

After all Christ is a historical figure as well. I dont doubt our Lord for one minute regarding any of this. That is called faith.
Pete Brady
1 year ago
Juneau Alaska: You ask for "evidence." So what is the predominant and overwhelming "evidence" concerning marriage? Across cultures, across time, the evidence demonstrates unequivocally that marriage is predominately a monogamous, exclusive social contract between "a man and a woman." That is the "evidence." To ask for "evidence" of a same-sex union harming any single marriage or the institution of marriage is to ask for what does not exist. Marriage has simply not existed as a "state" between two people of the same sex. We, individually and as a society, do not live our lives or make determinations solely on the basis of experience. To do that would diminish us as human beings. We are capable of "reason" and through that capacity to think things through, to exercise right reason. So properly the onus is not on society to defend what has been the rule through the millennia but for those who want a different construct to prove why it should be so. The sole common trait of the homosexual, one shared with each "partner," is simply that of a caving into the sensitive appetite. It is the debasement of the human person. It says that a person is no better than passion uncontrolled, that a person is incapable of self-restraint, of self-control. To yield to this makes us little better than the lowest of animals. But we are above this, we are capable of knowing "why" we do things, why society approves of certain things and disapproves of others. Man knows this through the natural law. And it is a "law" known for thousands of years. Evidence? Here is what Aristotle said in his "Social Contract" about marriage: "Between man and wife friendship seems to exist by nature; for man is naturally inclined to form couples - even more than to form cities, inasmuch as the household is earlier and more necessary than the city... but human beings live together not only for the sake of reproduction but also for the various purposes of life; from the start the functions are divided, and those of man and woman are different; so they help each other by throwing their peculiar gifts into the common stock. It is for these reasons that both utility and pleasure seem to be found in this kind of friendship. But this friendship may be based also on virtue; if the parties are good; for each has its own virtue and they will delight in the fact. And children seem to be a bond of union; for children are a common good for both and what is common holds them together." A few centuries later St. Thomas Aquinas would expand on Aristotle, writing: "That is said to be natural to which natures inclines,... thus acts of virtue and the virtues themselves are called natural; and in this way matrimony is natural, because natural reason inclines thereto in two ways. First, in relation to the principal end of matrimony, namely the good of the offspring. For nature intends not only the begetting of offspring, but also its education and development until it reach the perfect state of man as man, and that is the state of virtue. ... Now a child cannot be brought up and instructed unless it have certain and definite parents, and this would not be the case unless there were a tie between a man and a definite woman, and it is in this way that matrimony consists. Secondly, in relation to the secondary end of matrimony, which is the mutual services which married persons render one another in household matters... so too among those works that are necessary for human life some are becoming to men, others to women. Wherefore nature inculcated that society of man and woman which consists in matrimony." Marriage is the cornerstone. It is the foundational genesis of the family and the greater society of families that form a defined society; it is the bedrock upon which the social fabric endures. It exists to propagate and sustain the human race. It does this because it is defined in and by nature to be just so. The institution of marriage is harmed when an attempt is made to say that that which is different is the same. It just ain't so. The one, that of man and woman, is fecund. Society draws its protective embrace around it. The other, that of a man on man or a woman on woman, is sterile. Society has been repugnant to endorse that which bears no fruit. To say that matrimony should now embrace both is to say that the one is the equal of the other when they clearly are not; it is to forsake the "virtue" that Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas said was the aim of man, the virtue they saw as a necessary element of marriage. There is no virtue in homosexuality; having none, it would debase and harm the institution of marriage to bestow what is absent by nature, what is refuted by nature.
JoAnn
1 year ago
Juineau Alaska: Re. Sodom & Gomorrah go to: www.aish.com/ci/sam/48931527,html. Just one if many sources. God bless.
JeanCatherine
1 year ago
Juineau Alaska

See Catholic Bible.

Sodom (Twin city of Gomorah) in the valley of Sidam in the Dead Sea

Judgment Confirmed in: Jer 49:18, Am 4:11, Zep 2:9, Mt. 10:15 (You dont believe Jesus through His Apostles?) Lk 17:29
Sorry Christ is the best one I can come up with to make a case for Sodom and Gomorah through His disciples. Of course through the Old Testament.
JeanCatherine
1 year ago
Juineau Alaska

We have no evidence of God yet I believe its called faith. We havent seen Him yet either. With the exception of course of Jesus Christ claiming He and the Father are the same.
JoAnn
1 year ago
ROB: I disagree with you. The Church does an excellent job teaching the dogmas/doctrines of the Church. It is the CINO's (Catholic in name only) who choose to go their own ways. There is such a thing as the Cathechism of the Catholic Church also which should be in every Catholic home. Do not lump all Christians in the same category in not practicing their Faith. (Maybe I misunderstood you.) Catholics are taught what they need to know to lead a holy life. What SOME of them do with that teaching is entirely up to them. If they have any questions, there is a brethora of Catholic resources out here to explain the meanings of the teachings. If they choose to walk on the dark side, that is something they will have to take up with God at judgement day. Plus the fact, there is Catholic media out here too. No, my friend. the Church is not to blame. It is some of her children who are to blame. The Holy Spirit speaks through the Church. Her children hear it but not all will "listen." God bless.
Juineau Alaska
1 year ago
JeanCatherine,

Thank you for the clarification. Regarding Sodom and Gomorrah, we disagree. I don't find any evidence for the claim that such events literally happened. And that's ok, I just put it in the faith-claim department, not the evidence-based department. I don't think it's a good idea to believe things with no evidence.

Pete Brady,

I simply wanted an example of how gays getting married threatens marriage. I am married and don't feel my marriage is threatened if a gay couple marries. So far these claims of the institution of marriage being "harmed" are faith claims, not evidence claims. Do you have evidence that a gay couple getting married will harm my marriage? If not, shouldn't we perhaps suspend these charges?

vance,

Anyone can sue for anything, or claim harassment for anything. Nothing new. The courts will decide if the claims have legal merit, not forums.

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