And she’s “studied” the issue of abortion “for a long time.” That’s how she answered Tom Brokaw’s question last week on Meet the Press. He wanted to know how she can call herself Catholic and be pro-abortion. I was waiting to read that she’s prayed about it too. Can you imagine this woman, our Speaker of the House, searching for the truth about whether or not it’s all right to kill one’s pre-born baby? Anguishing over the — “issue.” Thumbing through the writings of the doctors of the Church, as she told Brokaw she did, looking for answers. We all know what she was looking for. She was looking for saints who held that abortion wasn’t murder. She certainly wasn’t looking for Catholic authorities who taught that it was murder. Someone told her that the Church only recently pronounced against abortion and that certain doctors held that the fetus wasn’t a human until about the third month of gestation. What did she find? She found that indeed there were doctors of the Church who held the rational soul was not infused until about the third month. The succession of souls, vegetative to animal to rational, was the common belief until more modern advances in embryology provided knowledge of fetal development previously unknown. Even the Catechism of the Council of Trent contains this error regarding succession of souls. Perhaps this is why it took so many centuries to define the Immaculate Conception. If there was no “who” at conception, how could there be the Immaculate Conception? Our Lady would still be the sinless Immaculata, only not from conception, but rather from the infusion of the rational soul at the third month. That is why the definition of Pius IX in 1854 settled not only the dogmatic issue but the biological one as well. Human life begins at conception. The human embryo is a person from conception on.
What Pelosi did not find was any Catholic authority, certainly not papal, that tolerated abortion as anything less than gravely sinful at any stage of the pre-born’s development. From apostolic times on abortion was a grave sin. But Pelosi was not interested in that; she was on an unholy mission to find contradiction in the Church’s moral teaching, so that she could flaunt it before any bishop that called her to account. This “ardent” Catholic was out to discredit the Church. But she does not need the Church (whose teaching she does not want) to know that abortion is sinful. It is part of the natural law written on the heart. Everyone knows it is an evil act even if they are confused about when the baby is a person. Honest people, who have common sense and reason, now know that human life (personhood) begins at conception. To argue otherwise is to do violence to one’s own conscience, the law of the heart. That law can be corrupted, but never destroyed.
The full article is found here.
