By DEXTER DUGGAN
Presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has an entire political-party structure behind him that is pro-life, so it’s not a matter of simply having to hope that Trump will follow pro-life principles, Fr. Frank Pavone told The Wanderer after attending an important Trump speech for social and religious conservatives.
Pavone, national director of the New York-based Priests for Life (priestsforlife.org), added, “The man shapes the office, but the office also shapes the man.”
As Trump began his June 10 talk to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C., he acknowledged the presence of religious leaders including Pavone.
The real-estate mogul hit exactly the points that the religious leaders themselves would have made if they had written his speech, Pavone said.
Coincidentally, Pavone had an opinion column posted on June 5 at The Wall Street Journal site about religious nonprofit groups like his own not having to burden their consciences by submitting to Obamacare mandates. It was headlined, “Waiting for Obama on Religious Liberty; Priests for Life is ready to reach a solution, as the Supreme Court directed.”
In mid-May the High Court wiped out lower-court decisions against organizations defending their consciences and said the organizations should be able to arrive at arrangements to protect their religious liberty.
The Supreme Court action erroneously was reported by some media as “punting” or “ducking” on the conscience issue.
The Wanderer asked Pavone at the end of a June 13 email interview why some Catholics still unquestioningly follow the Democrats’ Party of Death. Pavone pointed to those Catholic Church leaders “so deeply tied into alliances with some…(Democratic Party) leaders that they don’t want to offend their friends by teaching with the clarity that will help the Catholics in the pews.”
Trump dealt with a number of points in his 20-minute June 10, Friday, talk. Presciently, he again warned of the dangers of radical Islamism — which soon was to take a murderous toll of dozens of victims in Orlando in the early hours of Sunday, June 12, and leave dozens more injured.
The presumptive presidential nominee began by noting evangelicals’ support for his candidacy, then warned that “radical Islamic terrorism is just taking over….We cannot let that happen.”
Saying that he was with the pro-life audience “100 percent” and that he was speaking from his heart, Trump said, “We want to uphold the sanctity and dignity of life.”
He also cited the importance of religious liberty and the need to defend Israel’s security.
The Democratic Party increasingly holds Israel at arm’s length and tolerates practicing Christians only if they capitulate to a secularist agenda.
Coincidentally, radically pro-abortion Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee, also spoke in the nation’s capital on June 10, but Clinton paid her respects at a gathering of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
Planned Parenthood is the nation’s biggest abortionist, receives about a half-billion taxpayer dollars annually, and aborts about one million babies every three years.
Trump, speaking to the conservative conference, said that if Clinton is elected president, she’ll appoint radical judges to abolish the Second Amendment and “the will of the people will mean nothing, nothing.” She’ll keep Obamacare in place, he added.
Also, Trump said, Clinton would “crush working families,” wants to raise people’s taxes “tremendously,” and to promote open borders.
She’ll push for federal funding of abortion on demand until birth, Trump said.
Barack Obama’s former secretary of state imperiled national security by putting her emails on a private server in order to hide her corrupt dealings, he said.
In a June 13 news release, Pavone said:
“Mr. Trump was crystal clear about the need to defend and promote the sanctity of life, to preserve the institution of marriage, to appoint pro-life judges, and to protect religious liberty. In fact, he mentioned explicitly the efforts of some to ‘restrict religious liberty with government mandates.’ Priests for Life was among the first group to challenge the HHS mandate in court, and our case went all the way to the Supreme Court and is still unresolved.
“I also appreciate Mr. Trump’s assertion, ‘We will protect the right of churches to speak their minds on political matters, free from intimidation’,” Pavone added.
“This is the key message of my book Abolishing Abortion, in which I call on the Church to abandon the self-censorship that is so prevalent and so unnecessary, even within the current structure of the law.”
Mandates And Freedom
Here is the text of an edited email interview between The Wanderer and Pavone on June 13:
Q. Did the Trump campaign invite you to attend the June 10 talk as national director of Priests for Life, or did you reach out to them to attend? Had you been invited to attend any of his events before?
A. I was attending the conference — as an individual leader — at the invitation of the organizers and as an opportunity to both hear Mr. Trump and greet him personally, which I have also been able to do in the past and which has always been a positive experience. I have thanked him for being pro-life and for speaking out on marriage, judges, and religious freedom.
Q. What would you tell Wanderer readers that most impressed you about his talk?
A. As some of the other religious leaders there also said, if we had written the talk ourselves, we would not have hit more of the key points that he needs to make with Christians than he did on his own — and the content of the speech was from him, personally. I particularly like two specific references he made — the freedom of the Church to speak on politics, and the problem with government mandates that violate religious freedom.
Q. As you know, critics of Donald Trump doubt he will be faithful to what he says. What assurances do you feel about his being true to pro-life and religious liberty?
A. It is one thing to be flexible about specific policy proposals, which is actually a sign of strength in leadership; but here we are talking about principles, to which he is promising to remain faithful. But it’s not just a question of him as an individual.
He has an entire party behind him, which has a strong platform on these principles, and people in the House, the Senate, the administration, the states (as governors) and elsewhere who will be advising and assisting and encouraging him. The man shapes the office, but the office also shapes the man.
Q. I’d like to hear him tell a few personal stories about pro-life at a talk like this, like the story he previously told about being converted to pro-life by the example of the baby who wasn’t aborted and grew up impressively. Might you suggest his doing this?
A. Yes, and I think he will.
Q. Could you please make a comment about media bias, such as the media endlessly questioning other Republicans so as to have them repudiate him, but they dare not question other Democrats to ask them to repudiate Hillary Clinton’s pro-abortion extremism.
A. Media bias in the elections is clearly in favor of the Democrats; there is not equal treatment. However, the effect of such bias is muted in our day because of the power of social media, which equalizes everyone who has a message to share.
Q. Could there be a worse pro-abortion candidate than Hillary Clinton?
A. She will be about as bad as one can get regarding abortion policy, and she has had that extremism on public display for decades. She pushes for abortion not only to be legal, but to be declared a fundamental, international right.
Q. What can be done to enlighten voters including Democrats about the shocking full consequences of the Democrat Party’s chosen stand as the Party of Death? Any idea why we still have people who claim having a Catholic affiliation to be unquestioning Democrats? Dominant media numbed their consciences?
A. Part of the problem is that we have Church leaders voting for the Democratic candidates and so deeply tied into alliances with some of their leaders that they don’t want to offend their friends by teaching with the clarity that will help the Catholics in the pews — or those leaders themselves — to think clearly about the contradiction between embracing Catholicism and embracing the Culture of Death.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress