By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The officially strongly pro-abortion Democratic Party took advantage of the Catholic Church once again, but two communications specialists at the headquarters of the Diocese of Phoenix didn’t reply to questions from The Wanderer.
It’s nothing new when Democrat pro-abortionists try to cuddle up with Catholic imagery and Catholics to gain their votes — just as long as no one calls the Dems to account for championing grave violations of fundamental moral law, like slaughtering tens of millions of preborn babies.
If the Church won’t care about such violations, why should it be surprised when its credibility fails?
Two incidents occurred here recently. Radically pro-abortion and far-leftist Democrat Kyrsten Sinema got national publicity when she campaigned for a U.S. Senate seat at a festival at St. Mary’s Basilica, just to the west of the headquarters building of the Diocese of Phoenix.
Then, upon the death of a longtime Arizona Democrat congressman, Church officials scheduled him for a Catholic funeral and burial — even though his pro-abortion voting record had been so bad that the official newspaper of the Diocese of Phoenix once called on him either to change his voting or “to disavow his Catholic faith.”
On November 6, midterm elections day, the first “National” page of The New York Times carried a photo that covered nearly half of the broadsheet page, from left to right. It showed the bisexual Sinema, a proclaimed advocate of permissive abortion and sexual disorientation, campaigning two days earlier, at a weekend Dia de los Muertos festival at the Catholic basilica.
Sinema was pictured holding the hands of a man wearing a sombrero and face paint while surrounded by other Latinos. The accompanying story about several Democratic campaigns said Sinema “spent part of Sunday hugging her way through the crowd.”
More than 2.3 million votes were cast for the Senate seat, with Sinema beating Republican Martha McSally by nearly 56,000 votes. Assisted by the dominant media, Sinema portrayed herself as a bipartisan moderate, while McSally sometimes seemed to think she could just phone in her campaign and avoid debates.
St. Mary’s Basilica, located downtown, is staffed by Franciscans. It’s the oldest Catholic parish in Phoenix and was visited by then-Pope John Paul II during his U.S. trip in 1987. The spot where he knelt there to pray is marked.
In late November retired Arizona Democratic Cong. Ed Pastor died at age 75 after having served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 23 years. Like Sinema, Pastor was a well-known face in the Arizona establishment. He lay in state at the Arizona Capitol’s rotunda, the same place where deceased Sen. John McCain reposed at the end of August.
News reports said “hundreds” of people paid their respects to Pastor at the rotunda.
Unfortunately, Pastor was a longtime pro-abortion political extremist. Back in 1998 the newspaper of the Diocese of Phoenix, The Catholic Sun, carried an editorial, representing the newspaper’s official view, that Pastor was a — to quote the headline on the editorial — “Shameful representative.”
The editorial said that Pastor had voted to sustain Democratic President Bill Clinton’s veto of a bill against partial-birth abortion, and, recalling Pastor’s record, it added: “While there are people of good will in the (Democratic) party, unfortunately it has consistently been the party of death when it comes to abortion.”
The Sun said Pastor “supports the availability of any abortion, every abortion. . . . It is time for Pastor to change his heart — and his voting record — on abortion. If not, he ought to disavow his Catholic faith. He cannot possibly, in good conscience, reconcile his faith and his stance.”
After plans for Pastor’s funeral at a major Catholic church were announced, The Wanderer asked two conservative activists and a longtime pro-life official if Pastor had publicly repudiated or repented of his pro-abortion record. They didn’t know of such a change. A spokesman for the Diocese of Phoenix didn’t reply to the question.
A visitation and rosary for Pastor at the Jesuit St. Francis Xavier Church on Phoenix’s North Central Avenue was announced for the evening of December 6, after this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press. The following day a funeral Mass was to be celebrated there, followed by entombment at the diocesan St. Francis Cemetery.
In one of three emails sent over two days, The Wanderer asked diocesan communications director Rob DeFrancesco, “How does Bishop (Thomas) Olmsted view such Catholic recognition for a politician whose votes separated himself from the Church? Had Mr. Pastor repented?”
Olmsted is regarded as providing orthodox Catholic guidance to the diocese.
Another Wanderer email cited the Catholic Sun editorial noted above and asked, “Unless Mr. Pastor repented, how is it possible that he will be allowed a Catholic funeral and burial now?”
In a separate email, The Wanderer also asked DeFrancesco about Kyrsten Sinema’s campaigning at the St. Mary’s Basilica’s festival and said, “1) Is it accurate to say that Bishop Olmsted would not have approved of her presence there? 2) What has Bishop Olmsted done to ensure that something of this nature will not recur?”
The Wanderer also emailed diocesan communications specialist Katie Burke to ask if DeFrancesco would reply. Neither of them responded.
This newspaper also emailed Ron Johnson, executive director of the Arizona Catholic Conference, the Arizona bishops’ lobbying arm, to call to his attention the 1998 Catholic Sun editorial criticizing Pastor, and to ask if Johnson or any other diocesan official planned to attend the upcoming Catholic recognitions for Pastor.
Johnson replied later the same day, “I am not going to the funeral and do not believe there will be any diocesan representative going, either. I will, however, be praying for his soul.”
As a matter of interest, St. Francis Xavier Church also was the site of the funeral in 2015 for the liberal former Time magazine correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser, who eventually retired to Phoenix after covering the Second Vatican Council in Rome so as to encourage dissent and uncertainty in the Church.
Attending Kaiser’s funeral, I thought of how all his journalistic labors had come down to the little container of human ashes in front of us, as must we all eventually be stilled before God.
As to Pastor, The Wanderer called the strong 1998 Sun editorial against him to the attention of John Jakubczyk, a Phoenix attorney and former president of Arizona Right to Life.
Jakubczyk replied that he hadn’t heard of Pastor changing his stand “one way or the other.” But, he said, he didn’t expect the Phoenix bishop to act against the funeral, given that politicians like pro-abortion Sen. Edward Kennedy received a Catholic funeral.
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard was baptized Russian Orthodox but attends a Catholic church in a Phoenix suburb. Querard told The Wanderer:
“It feels like we’re commenting on the same stories over and over again. The Catholic Church is failing to hold the line on so many abuses and crimes that burying a pro-choice congressman would seem to be a very minor offense, relatively speaking. It would be wonderful for the Church to take strong positions in defense of what is right, but this Church at this point in time seems unwilling to do it.
“That said, we don’t know if Pastor ever shifted to a pro-life position in his personal life or if he repented for fighting for the ‘right’ to murder babies,” Querard added. ”I for one hope that he saw the light before his time expired in this life, and that his soul was cleansed and ready for the afterlife.”
The Seamless Garment
Rob Haney, a Catholic and retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer that he wasn’t surprised by the diocese’s allowing recognition for Pastor, commenting, “They would have done the same thing for Sen. Edward Kennedy.
“But,” Haney added, “I do not accept the premise that this or any American diocese is orthodox in that the bishop believes in and practices all the traditional tenets of the Roman Catholic Church. Long ago the leaders of the Church discarded fundamental beliefs for the prudential practices of social Democrats.
“They became Democrat Party activists rather than religious leaders,” he said. “The promulgation of the ‘seamless garment’ doctrine by the hierarchy is but one example.
“The conflation of the fundamental religious doctrine of pro-life with the social doctrine of open borders (disguised as welcoming the migrant) exposed the leftist ideology that has dominated the Church for decades and has led to the latest scandal of homoheresy by the episcopacy,” Haney said.
“Welcoming the migrant has given us the anti-Judeo-Christian state of California. May God save us from that orthodoxy which usually begins with driver’s licenses for illegals, which the Catholic bishops support wholeheartedly,” he said.
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