Good news, your efforts paid off and the Stupek amendment passed by a vote of 240- 194. This was a huge win on a vote that was expected to much closer. The good news is we won. But as always we will have to fight another day. Beyond the passage of the amendment itself there was another victory in that the possibility of a pro-life bipartisan coalition in the House is greater than it has been in a long time. The Senate on the other hand is a whole other story and much bleaker. It is likely if not certain that the Senate bill will attempt to strip away all pro-life language and that we will be back to square one. The Senate is where our next call to action will be, but not likely for a while.

Disappointingly today the President called for the stripping of the Pro-Life language from the bill. Hopefully the voices of the voiceless will be heard and the Senate will keep the Stupek wording.


Earlier today Representative Lynne Woosley declared:

I expect political hardball on any legislation as important as the health care bill.


I just didn’t expect it from the United States Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).


Who elected them to Congress?

Rep. Woosley went on to declare that Church's tax exempt status should be stripped because of their role in advocating for life.

It is a crazy world we live in where elected officials desire to attack the Church because it defends the dignity of life. I think it is funny that Representative Woosley does not even know that it is that it is the "Conference" of Catholic Bishops not the Council. If you are going to slam someone at least get their name right. However, it is scary that Representative Woosley seeks to muzzle/threaten/punish the Church for preaching the Gospel message. I suppose, under that logic, the Church should not lobby for the poor, the immigrants, the elderly, for children, and for all. It is clear now in a way greater than ever before that there is a concerted effort to drive the faith out of the public square. It is disturbing and the consequences are unimaginable!Representative Woosley's comment remind me of a Archbishop Dolan's observations on Anti-Catholicism in America.

- by the way Congresswoman Woosley's office numbers are:

Washington Office - (202)225-5161
Sonoma County Office - (707)542-7182
Marin County Office - (415)507-9554

Keep Calling! (not sure for what, see Yesterday's post)!

The lines at the capital are jammed. Keep calling in! It will be close. Spread the word!

Urgent!

Below is an urgent plea that a group of guys and myself put together, in the Seminary, involving an upcoming vote in the House. Please read it and consider taking action TODAY! Please excuse the wording as it specific to the handouts we made in the seminary (It is 12:25am- still have work to do- too late to change it for the blog).

If you do not know your representative, look him or her up click here:

Note- With this directory you can local up local congressional offices too. If you can take five minutes and call all the offices for your Representative.



Brothers,
As you know the Bishops have called upon Catholics across the country to speak up in defense of life and against the government funding of abortion (directly or indirectly) in the Healthcare proposals before Congress at this time.

As politics is politics there is going to be a lot of maneuvering in Congress over the next few weeks as everyone tries to gain the upper hand on the abortion issue. The first and critical vote involving abortion is expected to be Friday morning! The House leadership is expected to introduce a “closed rule amendment.” If passed the closed rule amendment would ban any future amendments from being added to the House Healthcare legislation. Translation= it would block pro-life amendments banning public funding of abortions from being included in the bill.

A coalition of Republicans and Pro-Life Democrats is working to block the “closed rule” and force a vote on a Pro-Life/Anti-Government Funding of Abortion amendment. Political analysts believe that the “closed rule” vote will be incredibly close and most likely will pass or fail by a margin of one.

Translation: We all need to call our congressman/women Thursday, November 5th (the vote is expected first thing Friday).

Every Congressional Office has people paid to take down your thoughts on issues they are considering. They use a check system and mark each call in favor or against an amendment, bill ,etc… and then use this in the final decision process. As many as 40 Democrats are considering crossing lines to support allowing amendments (pro-life ones) but need encouragements/reminders as such a vote will cost them dearly. Furthermore, some congressmen/women who support abortion might vote to allow amendments to be offered.

Earlier this week in response to Bishops’ statement to Catholics, Planned Parenthood released a statement calling on pro-choice Catholics to resist the Bishops’ instruction and calling on them to call Washington, DC en masse insisting on the public funding of Abortion.

Our Game Plan:

Attached is a list of everyone’s name matched to their congressman/woman and appropriate offices.

1. Set aside 5 minutes tomorrow (total) and call EACH of the numbers assigned to your name. (generally 2-4 offices for the same congressman- note: it is best to call the Washington office & each of the local offices as they keep separate totals and tallies of calls and combine them together at the end of each day)
2. When you call introduce yourself as
a. Hello my name is ______________, and I am a registered voter in Congressman _______ district.


3. Tell them you would like your representative
a. to vote NO on the closed rule amendment to HR 3962
b. And that you want them to allow a vote on the Stupak Amendment (it is the pro-life one--note it is important to mention this amendment by name )

4. Ask them if they would like your name and address because this shows you really live in their district, be prepared to offer it.

Happy Halloween

This weekend the Seminary kept with tradition and held its annual Halloween Party. As one of the House Infirmarians I decided to have a little fun with my costume. Since the outbreak of the Swine Flu last spring things hear have gotten a little crazy. We have purell dispensers every ten feet it seems and are constantly being reminded to use hand sanitizer. So after some consultation the other infirmarian and myself decided to go as the Swine Flu and Purell. With a little creative ingenuity we were able to pull it off. I had to rummage for boxes at Lowes, inhale way too much spray paint and spend hours stuck standing up in a box. In the end it was worth it as it brought great joy to the party.

The House Halloween Party was held in the Seminary Lounge. It included lots of great refreshments and most all of the seminarians and faculty. Of course being Halloween themed we had lots of fun decorations on the walls and fog machines as well. The pumpkin carving contest tested the artistic sides of many and the apple bobbing the athletic prowess. Although I did find it quite ironic that we purell every ten seconds, yet apple bob, but I digress. In the end it was a great chance to kick back and take a much needed break from exams, papers and class...

Another Form of Prejudice

Below you will find a column from New York Archbishop Dolan's blog. It is a fantastic piece about a subject that is often ignored, but certainly very real.
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The following article was submitted in a slightly shorter form to the New York Times as an op-ed article. The Times declined to publish it. I thought you might be interested in reading it.


FOUL BALL!
By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York

October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!

Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-catholicism.

It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”

If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:


On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”
Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.

On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.
Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.
Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.
True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday. Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally?

The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.

I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

Almost Halloween

As I am limping my way to the end of the week I figured I would post something fun to usher in the weekend. At the seminary we are gearing up for our annual Halloween party. It includes a pumpkin carving contest, pool tournament, poker tournament and lots of good food. I have a brilliant idea for a costume which I cannot post here until tomorrow night, lest one of my brother seminarians find out. I am excited it is pretty sweet. Here is to hoping I can pull it off and create it in time. In the mean time enjoy the following ten reasons why Dogs hate Halloween (courtesy of an email I was sent). . .

A Bad Combo

In priestly formation there are two major portions of classes, Philosophy and Theology. Luckily I was only required to do one year of Philosophy instead the usual two. Beginning Theology classes and entering the Theology program is considered an important milestone in priestly formation. At St. Mary's as at most seminaries this change is marked by the requirement of having to wear clerics to class each day. Not having worn much black before I am discovering many small practical things which can be challenging. On the base level it is much easier wearing the exact same thing every day. I never thought I would like it but wearing a "uniform" is easy. However, being the person I am I have discovered quickly that black is not always the best for a person like me. Case in point this morning I moved a nice grey wool fuzzy blanket in my room. I am no covered if fuzzy lint and I cannot get it off. AHHHHHHHHH. Unfortunately I am off to Mass, then to a parish meeting (I am assigned to one for the year) and then back to a boring meeting for accreditation and then homework. . .