By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Vice-President Mike Pence addressed the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington on June 5, and received a resounding welcome from over a thousand Catholic leaders from across the country. The audience cheered as he reiterated President Trump’s defense of religious liberty, Christian victims of Muslim terrorism, and especially the helpless targets of the Culture of Death.
“President Donald Trump stands with the most vulnerable — the aged, the infirm, and the unborn,” he told the gathering, to thundering applause. “I couldn’t be more proud to serve as vice president to a president who stands without apology for the sanctity of human life. . . . Since day one of this administration, President Donald Trump has been keeping his promise to stand for life, and life is winning in America again.”
Pence was remarkably candid about his own faith. “I’m the son of two devout American Catholics,” he said, adding that he was named after his Irish grandfather. “As a young boy growing up in a small town in southern Indiana, my Catholic faith poured an eternal foundation in my life.” Pence went to a Catholic grade school for eight years and his three brothers often joined him to serve Mass. His Confirmation name is Christopher.
He loves the Church. And yet he left. Vice-President Pence is now an Evangelical — “My own faith journey has taken me and my family in a different direction,” he told the gathering. And there arises an interesting question: Why?
These days, we live in a pastoral time zone. Have any of our bishops or priests who regularly lambaste Pence and Trump ever “reached out to the peripheries” and offered to “accompany the vice president in his journey” back to the one true Church? Did Fr. Jenkins at Notre Dame last month, where a few dozen LGBT graduates staged a made-for-media-hype walkout? In Washington, he was surrounded by active, engaged Catholics. Has anyone asked him why this grateful former altar boy left the Church?
The Bishops, Obamacare,
Taxes
Four leading members of the USCCB have written the Senate to oppose the legislation passed by the House of Representatives to replace the rapidly collapsing Obamacare disaster which the Supreme Court found to be constitutional only because it was the most massive tax hike in history.
America’s bishops often proudly remind us that they and their predecessors have supported nationalized health care for almost a century, invoking what they call the “fundamental right to health care” of every person (and not only Americans), whether they can pay for it or not.
Citing Pope Francis’ indictment of private-sector health care for its “profiteering on other people’s misfortunes” the letter’s signers insisted that Obamacare’s welfare-state provisions be left essentially intact.
Curiously, they also urged senators to adopt their two “non-negotiable” issues that the Democrat Congress had rejected in 2010: first, the protection of life (where Obama had promised the bishops his support, before betraying them); and second, free taxpayer-funded health coverage for illegal immigrants.
The Republican Senate majority is not expected to act soon on the measure, even though President Trump was elected on a platform that included replacing Obamacare.
Who Supports The Paris Agreement?
The Most Rev. Oscar Cantú, USCCB official and bishop of Las Cruces, N.M., blasted the decision by President Trump to withdraw from the “Paris Accords,” a document requiring the creation of a huge worldwide super-national bureaucracy funded by the United States and any other countries that might actually contribute.
“President Trump’s decision will harm the people of the United States and the world,” the bishop said, citing “the poorest, most vulnerable communities,” rather than the thousands of well-paid bureaucrats who will suffer most, since they won’t be getting paid by the U.S. taxpayer. (In fact, the Accords would harm the poor greatly by raising the price of energy they require for their basic well-being, including fuel for heating and cooking.)
Catholic bishops, Pope Francis, “and the entire Catholic Church have consistently upheld the Paris agreement,” Bishop Cantu said.
He was not alone. Speaking from the Vatican, papal adviser and Argentine Peronist-Marxist Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, called Trump’s decision “a huge slap in the face for us. It will be a disaster for everyone.”
And premier abortion advocate and Vatican adviser Jeffrey Sachs, a self-styled “expert” who was influential in the writing of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si, pouted out loud, saying what many of the Pope’s advisers will only say quietly: Donald Trump “is an old, sleazy, lazy and ignorant man,” Sachs wrote. “He knows nothing about climate science. Perhaps he is also suffering from dementia.”
The Wanderer could not reach Bishop Sanchez Sorondo or Mr. Sachs, but we did ask Bishop Cantu to comment on his claim that “the entire Catholic Church [has] consistently upheld the Paris agreement.”
We asked Bishop Cantu whether all Catholics “are bound to adhere with religious submission of mind” to the Paris Accords because they are now part of “the authentic Magisterium” of the Church (viz. Code of Canon Law, nn. 750-753).
As we go to press, Bishop Cantu has not yet been able to respond.
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