By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — In a full-page feature in his tabloid-size diocesan newspaper, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix strongly denounced the claim that “Protecting Abortion Access is a Catholic Value.”
“This is a lie. This is a damned lie,” Bishop Thomas Olmsted wrote in the March issue of The Catholic Sun, putting “damned lie” in italics. His column was headlined, “‘Damned Lies, and Living the Gospel of Life’.”
Olmsted said that “such a twisting of the truth, one of many produced by a culture of death, can only come from the pit of hell.”
He also denounced any Catholic political candidate who believes in this attitude as “a Judas of our day.”
Accompanying his monthly column was a photo of pro-abortion demonstrators outside the U.S. Supreme Court, some holding posters about abortion access being a Catholic value, as the court heard arguments on March 4 about a Louisiana law requiring abortion clinics to follow customary medical standards, June Medical Services v. Russo.
However, as is frequently the case with Catholic prelates, Olmsted failed to point out some pertinent political, but not ideological, considerations that voters need to know.
Although Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a left-wing New York Democrat, directly threatened two Supreme Court justices who were appointed by pro-life Republican President Donald Trump, Olmsted only referred to “a prominent politician (who) threatened two sitting justices.”
Olmsted wrote, “Access to homicide for our most innocent brothers and sisters is a Catholic value? Nothing could be further from the truth. Any candidate for office believing or asserting such a twisted lie is malevolent and/or confused on a fundamental level; any Catholic candidate doing the same is a Judas of our day.”
March 25 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of St. John Paul II’s pro-life encyclical whose title translates as The Gospel of Life. Olmsted said it “has proven to be prophetic” and “is full of both charity and clarity.”
The bishop went on to point out that as of March 25, “we begin as Catholics a national year of service entitled ‘Walking with Moms in Need’.” He said he was communicating with leaders in the diocese “regarding a fruitful approach to this call to service in our time.”
(Olmsted’s column may be accessed by searching online for catholicsun.org damned lies and living the gospel of life.)
Asked for a comment, northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson told The Wanderer:
“What a terrific statement of his belief and that of the Church regarding basic Catholic values. It’s refreshing to read Bishop Olmsted calling abortion what it is, the homicide of innocents, and that any candidate for office who supports it is, in fact, a modern-day Judas, and so are those who support them.
“Too often modern clergy don’t have the stones to call abortion what it is: the murder of innocent life,” she said. “They are too interested in being accepted by the mainstream and don’t want to ‘rock the boat.’ Well, the good bishop of Phoenix is rocking the boat and calling ‘abortion’ what it is: murder.
“That’s a ‘Catholic value’ that will never change,” Simpson said.
Longtime pro-life activist Albin Rhomberg told The Wanderer from northern California: “Bishop Thomas Olmsted, a longtime champion of the right to life of prenatal human beings, should receive strong approval, praise, and support from every Catholic bishop, priest, religious, and lay person for denouncing the demonic lie that approval of prenatal murder by abortion is a ‘Catholic value’!”
Rhomberg, also a physicist, is director of the pro-life Center for Documentation of the American Holocaust. He added:
“If Catholic bishops and priests in the USA and worldwide had followed the example of Bishop Olmsted for the past several decades, the abortion/infanticide extremism of the Democratic Party bosses and public office holders, led by Planned Parenthood and their media allies, would not have been able to seize control of many federal, state, and local judicial, legislative, and executive offices, and medical and legal and educational organizations and the resulting American holocaust of the prenatal murder of over 60 million innocent human beings in the USA!
“Our Lord Jesus Christ said (Matthew 25) that when He comes in glory to judge all the nations, including bishops and each of us,” Rhomberg said, “He will separate the sheep and the goats, the blessed and the accursed, according to how each of us cared for or failed to care for ‘the least of our brothers,’ which especially includes vulnerable, innocent, human beings, hidden in their mothers’ wombs.”
Olmsted already was known as a strong pro-lifer when Pope John Paul II appointed him to lead the Diocese of Phoenix in late 2003. Phoenix-area pro-lifers hoped that the new bishop would put local pro-abortion politicians on notice that they had to change their ways.
However, even if Olmsted did so privately, this didn’t produce any apparent public changes.
For instance, longtime prominent congressional pro-abortion and “social liberal” Democrat Ed Pastor, who died of a heart attack at age 75, was honored with a December 2018 funeral at the large Jesuit St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, located on one of Phoenix’s major streets, Central Avenue. It was attended by political luminaries including U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.).
The politically powerful Pastor had announced his retirement from Congress in 2014.
The year after Olmsted became bishop of Phoenix, even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement, Catholics in Political Life, that spoke of bishops’ “obligation…to teach clearly” to politicians about abortion.
“It is with pastoral solicitude for everyone involved in the political process that we will also counsel Catholic public officials that their acting consistently to support abortion on demand risks making them cooperators in evil in a public manner,” the USCCB statement said.
“We will persist in this duty to counsel, in the hope that the scandal of their cooperating in evil can be resolved by the proper formation of their consciences,” the statement said.
An Easy One
The Wanderer asked veteran conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard if he’d ever heard of Olmsted specifically telling a pro-abortion Catholic politician that he was out of line and had to change. Querard replied that bishops aren’t strong in this area.
“I’d love to hear it and see it, but for whatever reason it just isn’t an area they want to hold the line on,” Querard said.
“It is frustrating, because the Church leadership seems eager to scold politicians if they’re not in line with other Church policies on immigration or social-welfare spending, so why not ‘Stop Killing Babies!’? That would seem to be an easy one for the Church to show strength on.”
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