Two years ago, New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s website touted her signature on a “nation-leading legislative package to protect abortion and reproductive rights for all.”
Her legislation has been repeatedly used by New York’s notorious criminal prosecutors to harass and intimidate pregnancy centers in New York City for saving New York babies. Her ultimate goal: shut them down.
A month ago, Hochul welcomed Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to Syracuse University, her alma mater, to thank them for $6.1 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds for a project in upstate New York.
There she stood, between two of the most aggressive mass killers in American history, beaming with pride at maybe being number three.
Yet, just two weeks later, Hochul’s official website promoted a “major address” that she delivered at a three-day summit, ‘From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience,’ held in Rome.
In the Vatican.
Sponsored by Pope Francis.
“The Most Catholic Administration in History”
According to her Wikipedia bio, Hochul is “the second of six children in a family of Irish Catholic descent. Hochul graduated from Syracuse University in 1980 and received a Juris Doctor from the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C. in 1984.”
Among Joe Biden’s many claims to fame, we know that at least one of them is true: he is Catholic, as verified by Cardinal Wilton Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, who confirmed that fact last month. However, the cardinal added that Biden is a “cafeteria Catholic,” because he “picks and chooses” what teachings of the Church he will follow.
Well, His Eminence is wielding what we might call the “light touch.” Because the Biden Administration is the most anti-Catholic, anti-family, and murderously anti-life regime in American history.
And yet, “there never has been a more Catholic administration in U.S. history,” said Steven Millies three years ago. Mr. Milles ought to know – he’s the director of the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and he warmly sings the praises of Biden’s Catholic cabinet members. Two brothers of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough are priests, he writes. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would often go to Mass with Biden’s son Beau when they served together in Iraq.
What a triumph for our country, where only two hundred years ago, anti-Catholicism raged throughout our young republic.
But consider: Catholic Xavier Becerra, Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, tries to defundpregnancy centers that offer an alternative to abortion for young mothers. Lloyd Austin oversees the military’s program for “abortion vacations” for young, pregnant service members, apparently to preserve“unit cohesion.”
In fact, wherever they are, Catholics in senior positions in Biden’s White House seem to go out of their way to support the murder of the unborn. Catholic Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo, who should be promoting population growth to prevent the economic collapse that the population dearth has caused in countries like Spain and Italy, chooses instead to view fewer babies and more abortions as a boon to state economies.
Biden’s latest strike at the unborn was delivered last Wednesday, when, as the Daily Signal reports, “ Pro-life activist Heather Idoni received a sentence of 24 months in prison on Wednesday, convicted of federal conspiracy against rights and Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act charges brought by the Justice Department.
Idoni, 59, will spend two years in prison for trying to stop abortions from taking place at a Washington, D.C., area abortion clinic on Oct. 20, 2020. She is mother to 15 children, according to LifeSite news, five of whom are her biological children and 10 of whom she and her husband reportedly adopted from Ukraine.”
Mrs. Idoni “expects to die in prison,” she told The Epoch Times.
Mrs. Idoni’s tragic circumstances are only the latest chapter in the pro-abortion aggression of Catholic Democrats like Biden, his cabinet, and Governor Hochul at every level of government.
Hochul’s attack on the unborn in New York City parallels the FBI pre-dawn raid in full riot gear on a Catholic home with a married couple and eight sleeping children inside, and the FBI’s spying on Catholic churches in my rural Virginia county on the Shenandoah River.
“Personally Opposed”? Not Any More
Why is “the most Catholic administration in U.S. history” telling them, “full speed ahead”?
In 1984, the year Mrs. Hochul graduated from law school at Catholic University, Mario Cuomo, her predecessor in the New York Governor’s mansion, gave an address at Notre Dame which has since been widely credited as the origin of the pro-abortion mantra of Democrats of his generation: “I’m personally opposed to abortion but…”
Cuomo pulled it off by relegating abortion to the category of just another “political issue,” and relegating the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to the sidelines because of its members’ apparent pledge not to take “political positions” or align themselves with a particular political party.
Abortion was, after all, a “religious” issue.
“Manipulative invoking of religion to advance a politician or a party is frightening and divisive,” he said.
Memo to Notre Dame Students for Life: “Be afraid, be very afraid.”
But he pressed on: “A good part of this Nation understands – if only instinctively – that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church, is wrong and dangerous,” he said.
“Frightening.” “Divisive.” “Wrong.” “Dangerous.”
Got the message yet?
Cuomo was spinning a myth, of course – not the Platonic kind, which was told to articulate a truth in pre-philosophical terms, but the modern kind, which is woven to get away with telling a lie.
“A heresy is always a half-truth turned into a whole falsehood,” said G. K. Chesterton, and Mario Cuomo’s should go down with Arianism as one of the most successful heresies in history.
A generation before Cuomo’s appearance, most states considered abortion a capital crime, to be sure: not because it was a “political issue,” but because, like murder and rape, it was wrong, whatever the character of the regime.
Case closed.
That abortion is punished by human law does not make it a “political issue” that is the fancy of some faction or party, as Cuomo would have it. Abortion violates what Jefferson called “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
But like Chesterton’s heretic, Cuomo was half-right: by 1984, eleven years after Roe v. Wade, abortion advocates had hammered it into the public consciousness that abortion was merely a matter of “choice.” It was pro-lifers who had made it a “political issue,” and that was Cuomo’s view as well: abortion was a matter of personal opinion; when it comes to politics, Catholics should treat it merely a subjective opinion on which good people could disagree – you know, like tax rates and zoning laws.
But wait. In 1984, like every year before and since, abortion was also murder, the killing of an unborn child. That is a pre-political truth, a “detail” that Cuomo hoped no one would notice.
Oh, Cuomo assured his audience at the most prestigious Catholic university in the country, he was a good Catholic. He had five children. “My church and my conscience require me to believe certain things about divorce, birth control and abortion,” he said – and he implied with studied inflection that he embraced those teachings.
But his views are “personal.” However strongly he might embrace them, in his public capacity his “prudential political judgment” would rule.
And he got away with it.
After “Cuomo at Notre Dame,” a generation and more of politicians – and not only Catholics – invoked his mantra: “I’m personally opposed to abortion, but…”
But Democrats have “grown.” Today, when every Catholic Democrat save Henry Cuellar (D-TX) supports laws that permit abortion until birth, they’ve made it perfectly clear.
Biden, Hochul, & Co. might wave their Rosaries and promenade in Saint Peter’s Square, but they don’t have to say they’re “personally opposed” anymore – they can finally come clean:
They aren’t.
