Abp. Dolan: 'Most Pressing Life Issue Today is Abortion'

'When our critics criticize us for being passionate, stubborn, almost obsessed with protecting the human rights of the baby in the womb,they intend it as an insult. I take it as a compliment'.

NEW YORK, NY (Catholic Online) - At his installation Mass Archbishop Timothy Dolan signaled his intention to defend human life with these words: "As the Servant of God Terrence Cardinal Cooke wrote, 'Human life is no less sacred or worthy of respect because it is tiny, pre-born, poor, sick, fragile, or handicapped.' Yes, the Church is a loving mother who has a zest for life and serves life everywhere, but she can become a protective 'mamma bear' when the life of her innocent, helpless cubs is threatened... Everyone in this mega-community is a somebody with an extraordinary destiny.... Everyone is a somebody in whom God has invested an infinite love. That is why the Church reaches out to the unborn, the suffering, the poor, our elders, the physically and emotionally challenged, those caught in the web of addictions."

Archbishop Timothy Dolan loves the Lord and the Church with an infectious enthusiasm borne of a sincere, living faith. He is filled with the joy of the Lord. He is also an evangelizer, to the bone. He has quickly become a significant personality on the Catholic Channel of the Sirius Radio Network. He is a man comfortable in his own skin, at ease with the use of the media, filled with the Holy Spirit, and eager to share the Gospel, as found in its fullness within the Catholic Church. In fact, without any fanfare, he recently launched his own weblog called "the Gospel in the Digital Age" (http://www.archny.org/news-events/columns-and-blogs/blog---the-gospel-in-the-digital-age/) Visitors are welcomed to the blog with these words: "Welcome to my new blog, The Gospel In The Digital Age. I'm very excited about this new way of communicating, and I hope that it will prove to be an effective way for me to not only share what's on my mind, but also to hear back from you - Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan."

In his October 22, 2009 column for the Catholic New York "Lord, To Whom Shall We Go?" this champion of Life recently reminded all of us of our duty to defend our smallest neighbors in the first home of the whole human race, their mother's womb. He did so with the kind of clarity which is desperately needed in an age where people who fail to hear their cry actually have the audacity to claim they are champions of social justice. His article, entitled" On the Front Lines for Life", can be found on the Diocesan web site. (http://www.cny.org/) We present it for our readers below - in its entirety - because it is simply too good to excerpt. Archbishop Dolan is on the front lines for life and we are privileged to have him as the leader of this important Archdiocese and an increasingly important and prophetic voice in the Catholic Church in the United States:

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"On the Front Lines for Life": Archbishop Timothy Dolan

"I wish I could tell you that Church leaders were brave, countercultural and prophetic," I can still hear him say, "but that would not be the truth."

"With very few exceptions," he went on, "Catholics in the United States did little or nothing to condemn the dramatically moral evil of slavery, and demand its end. And that is to our shame to this day."

Those words came from my mentor, friend and teacher, Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, the legendary professor of the history of the Catholic Church in the United States, during his sobering lecture on the Church and slavery, when I was a graduate student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Perhaps we have learned our lesson, for Catholic leaders--committed laity, religious sisters and brothers, clergy, bishops--have been on the front lines of the premier civil rights issue today, the right to life. And that is to our credit. And that's good to ponder during October, Respect Life Month.

The comparison of abortion to slavery is an apt one. The right of a citizen to "own" another human being as property--to control him/her, use him/her, sell him or decide her fate--was, prior to 1865, constitutional, sad to say. That "right" to own a slave was even upheld by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (whose Chief Justice at the time, Roger Brooke Taney, was a Catholic, "personally opposed" to slavery!) in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Decision, declaring that a slave who had escaped and claimed freedom had to be returned to his "master," because he had no rights at all.

Tragically, in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court also strangely found in the constitution the right to abortion, thus declaring an entire class of human beings-- now not African-Americans, but pre-born infants--to be slaves, whose futures, whose destinies, whose very right to life --can be decided by another "master." These fragile, frail babies have no civil rights at all. Our faces blush with shame as we Catholics admit we did so little to end slavery; but we can smile and thank God that the Church has indeed been prophetic, courageous and counter cultural in the right to life movement....

Many issues and concerns in addition to protecting the baby in the womb fall under the rubric of the right to life--child care, poverty, racism, war and peace, capital punishment, health care, the environment, euthanasia--in what has come to be called the consistent ethic of life. All those issues, and even more, demand our careful attention and promotion.

But the most pressing life issue today is abortion. If we're wrong on that one, we're just plain wrong.

When our critics--and their name is legion--criticize us for being passionate, stubborn, almost obsessed with protecting the human rights of the baby in the womb, they intend it as an insult. I take it as a compliment.

I'd give anything if I could claim that Catholics in America prior to the Civil War were "passionate, stubborn, almost obsessed" with protecting the human rights of the slave. To claim such would be a fib. But, decades from now, at least our children and grandchildren can look back with pride and gratitude for the conviction of those who courageously defend the life of the pre-born baby.

I well remember being in Baltimore two years ago for the installation of their new archbishop, Edwin F. O'Brien, a native son of this archdiocese in whom we are very proud. He gave a stirring homily, recounting how his predecessors had often been on the forefront of promoting issues of justice in our country: Cardinal James Gibbons came up, of course, for his defense of the rights of labor back in the 1880s; Cardinal Lawrence Sheehan, who was jeered at a City Council meeting in 1965 for speaking on behalf of open housing for African-Americans; Cardinal William Keeler, criticized for advocating the rights of immigrants. And now, the new archbishop concluded, the tradition has to continue, as the Church must be on the front lines of the premier justice issue of the day: the protection of the right to life of the baby in the womb."

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