BISHOPS PRAISE TRUMP'S PRO LIFE POLICIES
US bishops’ conference: ‘Trump Administration deserves our praise’ for pro-life policies
‘The Trump Administration … promotes health and human rights, and doesn’t undermine them by promoting abortion.’
Fri Aug 21, 2020 - 6:34 pm EST
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) praised the Trump administration on Thursday for implementing pro-life policies in foreign affairs, specifically the so-called Mexico City Policy.
“The Trump Administration deserves our praise for ensuring that U.S. global health assistance funding actually promotes health and human rights, and doesn’t undermine them by promoting abortion,” said Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, who also serves as chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities.
“Killing innocent and defenseless unborn children through abortion is not health care,” he continued. “Abortion violates an unborn child’s most basic human right, the right to life, and it also can wound the mother emotionally and physically.”
“Americans recognize this injustice and an overwhelming majority of them oppose giving tax dollars to organizations that are more committed to promoting abortion than providing health services,” the archbishop emphasized.
Shorty after his inauguration in January 2017, President Donald Trump had expanded the so-called Mexico City Policy, renaming it “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA).”
Trump’s policy “requires foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive global health assistance from affected Federal Departments and Agencies to agree that they will not perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning or provide financial support to any other organization that conducts such activities.”
In its second review of the policy, released just days ago, the State Department wrote, “Notably, two of the largest and most-vocal organizations that have attempted to assert a global right to abortion on demand, International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International, declined to agree to PLGHA and therefore forfeited their eligibility for global health assistance funding from the U.S. Government.”
Archbishop Naumann also commented on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board’s recommendation to withhold federal funding from 13 of 14 research proposals involving the use of fetal tissue.
“We applaud the Administration for moving NIH in a direction that shows greater consideration for medical ethics in research, and greater respect for innocent human life,” he said. “It is neither ethical nor necessary to further violate the bodies of aborted babies by commodifying them for use in medical research.”
“The victims of abortion deserve the same respect as every other human person,” Naumann pointed out. “We are grateful that the Administration is following through on its commitment to end federal funding of research using aborted fetal tissue.”
Naumann’s praise for the Trump administration comes after a lower-level USCCB official expressed her enthusiasm for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s selection of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.
“I was so elated. We, the community, need good news, and this was just wonderful,” Donna Toliver Grimes, the USCCB’s assistant director of African American Affairs, told Catholic News Service.
A look at former Vice President Biden’s campaign platform reveals positions faithful Catholics cannot support in good conscience, even if they appreciate Biden’s approach to economics, climate change or other issues.
At the end of July, Biden dedicated one section of his Agenda for Women to “Reproductive Health,” which is generally a reference to abortion. The former vice president under President Barack Obama said he “will work to codify Roe v. Wade, and his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade.”
Roe v. Wade is the 1973 Supreme Court ruling essentially legalizing abortion across the country under the guise of a woman’s right to privacy. Many states passed legislation trying to limit the widespread killing of unborn babies. One piece of legislation is so-called heartbeat bills, which prohibit abortions as soon as the unborn baby’s heartbeat can be detected after roughly six weeks of pregnancy.
Biden said he wanted to repeal the Hyde Amendment by reissuing “guidance specifying that states cannot refuse Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood and other providers and reverse the Trump Administration’s rule preventing these organizations from obtaining Title X funds.”
Planned Parenthood provides more than 345,000 abortions annually, according to its most recent report. Additionally, the organization handed out more than 593,000 emergency contraception kits, commonly known as the morning-after pill, which can also cause abortions in many cases.
Biden’s plan would, accordingly, enable women to abort their babies using taxpayer money.
In fact, Biden had supported the Hyde Amendment for many years before reversing his position early during his campaign for president in 2019.
Biden had caused some controversy in June 2019 by saying he still supported the annual budget language that forbids taxpayer dollars from funding abortions except for cases of rape or incest or to save a mother’s life.
After a video showed him answering “yes” to an activist asking if he would “commit to abolishing” Hyde, the Biden campaign claimed he had misheard the question and still supported the amendment — while reserving the right to change his mind, depending on the progress of “draconian attempts to limit access to abortion.”
Pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood pounced on his remarks, leading him to announce just a day later that he was changing his position. “If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's ZIP code,” Biden said at the time.
The Democratic presidential candidate, in his Agenda for Women, also vowed to rescind the Mexico City Policy.
First introduced under Republican President Ronald Reagan, it was rescinded by Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, while Republican Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump kept it in place or reinstated it.
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There are many weak, cowardly ordained men and then there are ones like this whom we MUST listen to
Fr. James Altman, pastor of St. James the Less Catholic Church in La Crosse, Wisconsin, speaks the unvarnished truth in his amazing homilies.
Fri Aug 21, 2020 - 8:57 pm EST
August 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― The coronavirus pandemic has separated men and women like nothing I have ever experienced in my lifetime. Within the clergy, this has been especially pronounced. It has been incredible to watch how very few real men there now are in our time among the Catholic clergy.
It is like a bright light has suddenly been shone on and into them and most have gone scurrying away out of fear of this and that and left their congregations without their shepherds and without the precious sacraments. Many closed up the churches even before government demanded them to do so. Very few have fought these unjust deprivations of our natural right and need to worship Our Creator.
I presume the same pattern has been occurring in most non-Catholic Christian denominations. I could never have imagined how many total cowards there are among the clergy until this pandemic began. However, it has been very encouraging for us at LifeSite to report the heroic defiance of several Evangelical congregations in California.
But then, there are also a small number of especially heroic, prophetic, giant Catholic priests who take their ordained role very seriously, some of whom are associated with the Complicit Clergy YouTube channel. Go there to listen to homilies of such a high caliber that I suggest most of you have never heard in your life. They are God’s gift to us out of this pandemic.
Their masses and homilies would never have been filmed but for the occurrence of the pandemic with millions of Catholics forced to worship remotely via their computers. If it were not for this I would never have heard of these priests.
You will be inspired, emboldened and encouraged that God has not abandoned His people and has left us with these wonderful prophets to guide us through our dark times. These are the real deal – shepherds who follow Christ no matter how hard the road, no matter what the consequences, no matter how much they are ridiculed and chastised by others who don’t really know who Jesus Christ is and what he really asks of us and especially asks of his priests.
One of the priests associated with Complicit Clergy is Fr. James Altman, who is pastor of St. James the Less Catholic Church in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I am not going to say a lot about him other than you MUST try to listen to as many of his homilies as you can. My wife Bonnie and I have never heard a priest preach like this man does and those homilies are especially suitable for the frightening and tumultuous times that we live in today.
I include the video of just one of his homilies in this article. There are many more at Complicit Clergy and on the St. James the Less website. This video is titled, “Persecution for speaking the truth.” It is about the absolute necessity of courage and joyfully enduring persecution for telling the truth. He tells us about many saints who did and experienced just that and his efforts to emulate them.
If you demand short, sweet sermons, then don’t bother listening to this Catholic prophet. You won’t like him. He keeps you occupied for more time than most clergy because he sees his role as a much-needed preacher of hard truths as is especially needed today.
He is a teacher, a true follower of Christ and he gives EVERYTHING that he has to his flock so that they might one day enter Heaven because of the great work that he puts into his daily preaching. Each day’s homily is long and full of teaching about the faith and about things going on in the world today. They are very relevant to what we are all going through right now.
Fr. Altman is very well informed about the faith and the world. He is a true guide. He is not afraid of what his peers and what bishops might think of him.
He only cares about what Christ thinks about what he has done with the time given to him to save souls.
Fr. Altman is a late vocation priest. He sounds a lot younger than he looks and is. He was a lawyer in charge of a large firm, as far as I can gather. He had many people under him whom he directed and whom he was responsible for. He is a man who knows what the world is all about and knows what is important and what is not important at this time when our faith is under greater danger than it has been for a long time.
He gets right to the point and bluntly tells it like it is, but he also always preaches with genuine love for hose listening to him. He is humble, he is bold, because he knows Christ wants him to be bold. That is how to get people to take his message seriously. We are in deep, deep trouble right now, but the power of God’s grace overcomes all.
Ladies and gentleman, I give you Fr. James Altman -- a true, faithful, heroic, but still truly humble follower of Jesus Christ – a man very much in the world, but not of the world.
Listen to him.
Another priest we often listen to is Fr. Richard Heilman of Roman Catholic Man. His homilies are very different from those of Fr. Altman. They are much shorter, but they are also wonderfully inspiring. He too relates his homilies to what is going on in the world today in order to guide his listeners through the fear and disorientation. Fr. Heilman is another fearless teacher and a Catholic warrior for souls.
And lastly, there is also Fr. Altier, another great preacher.
And lastly, there is also Fr. Altier, another great preacher.
