Monday, August 25, 2008

Koinonia covers Sen. Pelosi comments on abortion

Here is the head snippet from Koinonia's post covering Senator Pelosi's ridiculous comments on abortion. Here is the page. My better half, on hearing about this story, made quick mention of the Didache, which says, "... you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten." Rather explicit and almost two thousand years old.

As I've mentioned here, the number of Orthodox Christians who favor few or no restrictions on abortion is terribly high (just over 60%). Given that number, I found the following from Denver's Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles J Chaput, O.F.M. Cap on abortion worthy repeating here.

You can download the rest of Archbishop Chaput's statement as a PDF, "ON THE SEPARATION OF SENSE AND STATE: A CLARIFICATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH IN NORTHERN COLORADO" by clicking on the title.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Pelosi: "I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that def-inition . . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don't know. The point is, is that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose."

Chaput's response:

"Since Speaker Pelosi has, in her words, studied the issue "for a long time," she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery's Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977). Here's how Connery concludes his study:

"The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion."
...

Complete post here.

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