| Politics

We must prepare ourselves for the real work of building a culture of life and civilization of love, a new society. The end of Roe is not the end of the struggle.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - It has been thirty five years since that infamous U.S. Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade.

With the stroke of a judicial pen, unelected Justices consigned an entire class of persons, children in the first home of the whole human race (their mothers womb), to the status of property.

Like millions, I have prayed, marched and worked tirelessly to overturn this horrid decision and end the killing. As a human rights lawyer I went to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend pro-life protestors. I still try to join the thousands annually who travel to Washington, D.C. to pray and stand in solidarity with children in the womb and the second victims, their mothers.

The right to life is the fundamental human rights issue of our age because without it there are no other rights. It is also the great freedom movement of our day because without the freedom to be born, there are no other freedoms.

After all these years of pro-life activity I am still labeled by some who seek to protect the so called "right" to take the lives of innocent children in the womb as "religious right." I tried to stop caring about labels a long time ago. After all, the old children’s jingo "sticks and stones…" does have some merit. Names should not hurt me.

However, they still do. I have never liked being called a "conservative." I am also NOT a "liberal" because of what that term has now come to mean. Finally, I deplore the theft of the term "progressive" by those who want to call a return to paganism or libertinism "progress".

I am simply a Catholic Christian.

I believe that what the Catholic Church teaches about the inviolability and sanctity of every human life, at every age and stage, is true. I try to inform all of my life, including my social, economic and political participation, by the teaching of the Catholic Church. Because of that teaching, I sometimes speak of myself as pro-life, pro-family, pro-freedom, pro-poor and pro-peace.

I am being a Catholic Christian when I insist upon an end to legalized abortion. I am ashamed of fellow Catholics, and other Christians, especially those in public life, who have failed to stay faithful to the truth about life, and in some instances, have become collaborators with the Culture of death.

We are called by our baptismal vocation to serve the common good. Legal Abortion does not serve the common good. As a part of our mission to building a truly just society where the polestar of all public policy is the recognition of the inherent dignity of every human person, at every age and stage, we simply have to end legal abortion in America and throughout the world.

We must not let up in our efforts to see Roe v. Wade vacated, overturned, or in any other feasible way eradicated from our jurisprudence. The decision is a heinous example of how bad science, worse history and nefarious judicial engineering disguised as "legal reasoning" can be used to unleash a horror on an entire class of persons.

I believe that we will see its reversal. We now need to plan beyond that reversal. Our work has always been about more than Roe; it is about building a culture of life and a civilization of love, a new society.

This new society we must build, in addition to protecting children, the elderly and the infirm against those who would kill them, must also promote and protect authentic marriage and the stable and healthy families that are built upon it. It must reach out in compassion to embrace all who have been wounded by the weakened state of the institution of marriage.

This new society, because it is genuinely concerned about justice, must proclaim the truth concerning human freedom and openly reject the relativist and libertine counterfeits that have sought to redefine the word and lead men and women into new forms of slavery.

It must hear the cry of the poor and promote public policy and legislation which is a response to our social obligations in solidarity. We are our brothers (and sisters) keeper. Such concern for the poor is not “left wing”, it is human and just.

It should promote a public policy which not only offers the poor compassion, but expands the embrace of economic participation by promoting true economic justice, insisting that the market first serve the person, the family and the common good.

Finally, this new society must work for authentic peace, rejecting militarism as a solution to international conflict. War is never the answer. It promotes the culture of death.

Concepts such as a “pre-emptive” war are inconsistent with the strict “Just War Analysis” which has served Western Civilization well in analyzing how principles of self defense work within Nations and in international conflicts. It must not be abandoned. To do so may lead us into the abyss of continual ...