By DEXTER DUGGAN
Breaking bread together often is thought of as building ties of friendship, but two meals 22 years apart showed how division deepened.
At the National Prayer Breakfast in February 1994 in Washington, D.C., diminutive giant Mother Teresa peeped out through the microphones at the lectern to defend unborn children at length and to denounce abortion. She repeatedly was applauded by national powerbrokers there, and at her conclusion received a standing ovation lasting nearly a minute.
“Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion,” Mother Teresa said.
She added later: “Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.”
Seated near her at the prayer breakfast were radical pro-abortion Democrats President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton. In those days they knew better than to proclaim the extent of their brutishness and pretended they desired only “safe, legal, and rare abortion.”
But Peggy Noonan, a former White House speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, was in the audience and saw that the Clintons and also the vice-presidential couple weren’t pleased. Noonan wrote later:
“The president and first lady, seated within a few feet of Mother Teresa on the dais, were not applauding. Nor were the vice president and Mrs. Gore. They looked like seated statues at Madame Tussaud’s. They glistened in the lights and moved not a muscle, looking at the speaker in a determinedly semi-pleasant way.”
Mother Teresa had made as strong a pro-life plea as could be hoped for by a Catholic leader to a general audience, and far stronger than many prelates had undertaken. Seeing that Mother Teresa was the official Catholic exception rather than the rule, pro-death Democrat strategists continued pushing forward their envelope.
Twenty-two years passed before the second of the two meals in this tale, the Al Smith Dinner in New York City in 2016. The annual October dinner is held as a nonpartisan Catholic charitable fund-raiser and, in presidential election years, a meeting between the GOP and Democrat White House candidates shortly before the November vote.
Democrat extremists and their media chums had chomped away a lot at the margins during those years, and Catholic officialdom generally meekly swallowed the aggression. By now Hillary’s Democrats had dropped the pose that they wanted abortion to be rare.
In the 2016 campaign’s final presidential debate in Las Vegas, on October 19, Hillary said she wanted to put new justices on the Supreme Court who would protect the massive permissive abortion mandated by Roe v. Wade in 1973, as well as the court’s newly discovered constitutional right of homosexual “marriage equality” in 2015.
Late abortions were acceptable to her, too, an extreme stance that Donald Trump attacked on the spot in the debate while Hillary shot daggers with her eyes at him.
The very next night, October 20, Hillary sat in the Al Smith Dinner’s spotlight with New York’s jovial Timothy Cardinal Dolan and GOP opponent Trump.
The expiring eight years of Democrat radical Barack Obama’s presidency had demonstrated grim compulsion, suppression, and punishment against religious conscience and moral values, and a President Hillary would only push forward with the jihad. But high-profile Catholic leader Dolan seemed untroubled at honoring her mephitic presence and potential presidency.
Somehow, just somehow, one knew that Dolan would have reacted very differently if, during the previous night in Las Vegas, Hillary had proclaimed her dedication to, say, randomly shooting down illegal immigrants, or saying that the Ku Klux Klan had some pretty good ideas to put into practice after all.
But Dolan, a presumed Catholic exemplar, showed a passivity toward Democrat evils that the non-Catholic Trump, who wasn’t exactly Mr. Ten Commandments, wouldn’t tolerate.
Along the way from 1994 to 2016 a separate newsworthy event occurred in Florida, the judicially enforced death of Catholic Terri Schiavo in 2005, a disabled woman whose birth family pled to keep her alive so they could care for her.
Painfully starving and dehydrating born people was too much at the time even for Obama, recently arrived in the U.S. Senate as the new member from Illinois. He had a record back in the Land of Lincoln of voting against providing medical care to babies who survived abortion because that would, ahem, discourage abortion.
However, Obama joined his Senate colleagues in unanimous consent to ask that Terri Schiavo be given relief from the judicial death sentence — although by the time his 2008 presidential campaign would arrive, Obama wrote another page in his book of death and said he regretted his action on behalf of the woman who was deprived of her existence at age 41.
Schiavo was forbidden basic nutrition and fluids by the demand of her estranged husband, Michael, who was living with another woman, but he got judges to agree with him that she shouldn’t survive.
Terri, who became disabled under mysterious circumstances when she was 26, didn’t even require a respirator, but she couldn’t care for herself. There was no firm evidence she stated she wanted to die, but dominant left-wing media emphatically declared this to be a “right-to-die” case.
One might think alternative possibilities would have seemed persuasive to such media, including defense of “disability rights,” or “women’s rights,” but the culture of death proved alluring to how they framed the story as she cruelly was drained of her existence.
Even the Catholic bishop of her home diocese, Robert Lynch, did little in her defense, not even regarding her spiritual welfare. LifeSiteNews.com reported on March 2, 2005: “Inexplicable also is the apparent unconcern of the bishop for saving Terri’s life, an indifference that will outrage Catholics since he also took no action when Michael refused to allow Terri visits from a priest and to receive the sacraments.”
Upon her death, new Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told a “Gay and Lesbian Equality” event in West Hollywood that his party would be using this issue against Republicans in coming elections because the GOP supposedly had meddled in family matters.
Left-wing Democrat Dean was remarkable on two aspects here. 1) His own party meddles whenever possible with the nation’s families to impose leftists’ supposed superior wisdom on them. 2) Terri’s family had begged for political officeholders’ intervention to spare their daughter’s life from an unaccountable judiciary.
Even various liberals and Democrats defended Terri’s right to life, including Ralph Nader, but Dean realized how the publicity wind was blowing, assisted by big puffs from dominant media.
“This is going to be an issue in 2006, and it’s going to be an issue in 2008,” the Associated Press quoted Dean as saying, “because we’re going to have an ad with a picture” of the U.S. House’s GOP majority leader supposedly meddling with families.
For some reason Democrats didn’t press ahead with his plans to campaign as the official party of euthanasia. Just as, in its own way, the U.S. Supreme Court pulled away from mandating medicalized euthanasia after it mandated permissive abortion. But the High Court didn’t stand firm for defending innocent born lives, leaving states free to remove protections as they preferred.
Veteran Washington columnist Robert Novak wrote in March 2005 that at a recent dinner party, Washington journalists mostly a generation younger than he “were passionately opposed” to Congress intervening for Terri’s life. This was “at a level of intensity I had not seen since the bitter 1960s and ’70s. . . .
“I had not engaged in such a heated debate with colleagues since the Vietnam War,” added Novak, then in his 70s and fated to die from brain cancer a few years later.
Meanwhile, prominent Catholic Democrat politicians sullied themselves on intrinsically evil life issues but were allowed to prance free.
At key points in recent decades, including these, U.S. Catholic officialdom muted its moral voice while pushing leftist politics, allowing multitudes of consciences to be uninformed or misinformed.
When the U.S. House of Representatives returned to control by the Democrats of the Culture of Death upon the November 6 midterm elections, one needn’t puzzle at possible reasons.
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