Fr. Frank Pavone on His Day at Notre Dame

Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, led a vigil at the Notre Dame commencement. He wrote about the experience which was published at LifeSiteNews.com:

Fr. Frank Pavone Writes "My Day at Notre Dame"

By Father Frank Pavone
National Director, Priests for Life

SOUTH BEND, Indiana, May 18, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - There was an eerie stillness and silence across the Notre Dame campus as my colleagues, a few of the seniors and I walked across the campus very early on the morning of Commencement Day. It was the calm before the storm of what we knew was an historic day.

I started with a national Foxnews interview along with Fr. Richard McBrien. We were asked our views of the Commencement. My message was: Everyone can imagine people they would protest speaking at a commencement: an avowed racist, anti-Semite, or advocate of terrorism. So the failure to object to one who is unwilling to call for an end to abortion is the failure to see that abortion is as bad or worse than those other evils. We have to stop trivializing abortion.

Moreover, the university gave the President an honorary law degree. Law exists to protect human rights; but this president has admitted that he doesn’t know when a child receives human rights. How can he defend human rights when he doesn’t know who has them?

After speaking to various media, I greeted people on campus who were coming from all over the country to stand with the courageous students who boycotted their own commencement and invited me to lead them in an alternate ceremony.

After I greeted and blessed the demonstrators who were at the campus entrance, and concelebrated a special Mass for Life, I led the Class of 2009 Vigil for Life. We meditated on the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, on the victory of life over death, and on the fact that Jesus is King over every nation, over the courts, the Congress, and the White House. As I gave the students and their families reflections on these truths, the current occupant of the White House was calling the graduates to have “open minds, open hearts” and a spirit of dialogue.

Now dialogue with our opponents on this issue is something we at Priests for Life specialize in. I maintain friendships with abortion advocates and practicing abortionists. The clarity of our own convictions never means we despise, demonize, or shut out other people. And yes, we are willing to collaborate with others in morally legitimate ways to reduce the numbers of abortions.

But the President’s remarks had a glaring omission. While willing to dialogue and to promote adoption, he gave no indication of any willingness to protect the children in the womb. And that’s the crux of the issue. In his remarks, he referred to the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation. Certainly, his call for open minds does not include openness to reconsider the segregation issue. There’s a right answer to it, period.

So it is with the protection of the unborn. And as quiet again descended on campus at the end of the day, I reflected…Open minds, yes, but for the purpose of eventually firmly closing upon the truth! And isn’t that supposed to be the purpose of Catholic universities?

Notre Dame and Barack Obama

I'm not Catholic and didn't attend Notre Dame but I am outraged that faithful pro-life Catholics who attended the university had to watch this farce unfold.

Notre Dame is supposed to still stand for faithful Catholicism but, alas, inviting a vehemently pro-abortion president and awarding him an honorary degree flies in the face of all of that.

Barack Obama talks about discussing abortion reasonably. When? Where? With whom? Has he invited pro-life groups to the White House? Has he reached out to them in various venues to discuss the issue? The closest he has come to rubbing elbows with pro-lifers is at events like the Notre Dame commencement. Being in the same room with pro-lifers does not a conversation make.

I won't believe anything he says about a "reasonable" discussion on abortion until I see the White House announcement of a summit at which legitimate pro-life groups are invited to discuss the abortion issue. I won't believe it until I see the White House take reasonable positions on abortion-related issues. I won't believe it until I see Barack Obama leave alone protective legislation and laws such as the Hyde Amendment.

Until then, Obama's promises are just smoke in the wind.

Tax-funded Abortions in D.C?

The following press release comes from National Right to Life:

National Right to Life Slams Obama White House for Urging Repeal of
Ban on Tax-Funded Abortion-on-Demand in Nation's Capital
The following statement was released by the nation's largest pro-life organization, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), soon after today's release by the White House of President Obama's first detailed budget recommendations to Congress. The White House document is intended to guide lawmakers as they craft spending bills for the new federal fiscal year that begins on October 1. NRLC is the federation of the right-to-life organizations in all 50 states.

"Some wide-eyed journalists and various political shills for the Obama Administration continue to write fairy tales about how President Obama wants to pursue policies that would reduce abortions," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC). "That is a political scam. In reality, President Obama is pursuing a step-by-step strategy to expand access to abortion, and today's step is to urge Congress to authorize the funding of abortion on demand in the nation's capital, with funds appropriated by Congress."

Today's White House budget submission explicitly urges the House and Senate -- which the President's party currently controls with nearly three-fifths majorities -- to repeal a law (sometimes called the Dornan Amendment) that has prevented tax-funded abortion in the District of Columbia for many years.

Article I of the U.S. Constitution says that Congress holds complete legislative authority over the District of Columbia ("exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever"). That is why the entire budget for the District of Columbia (including revenues generated by local sources) must be appropriated by Congress through an annual appropriations bill.

For many years, the annual D.C. appropriations bill has contained a provision to prevent the use of any congressionally appropriated funds for abortions (except to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest). The White House budget document released today (on Appendix page 1209) asks Congress to repeal the ban on the use of congressionally appropriated funds, and replace it with a meaningless bookkeeping requirement that would apply only to funds specifically contributed for federal program purposes.

"If Congress goes along with the Obama proposal, the predictable result will be tax funding of several thousand elective abortions annually, including roughly 1,000 abortions annually that would not otherwise occur," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for NRLC. "Any member of Congress who votes for a bill that contains the White House proposal is, in reality, voting for tax-funded abortion on demand with congressionally appropriated funds."

From 1988 until 1993, Congress annually included the ban on the use of any appropriated funds to pay for abortions (with narrow exceptions). The ban was temporarily lost early in the Clinton Administration, but it was restored in 1996 (although the city government illegally continued to pay for abortions for two subsequent years, according to press reports), and has been in continuous effect ever since.

During the period prior to enactment of the Dornan Amendment, and during the time it was suspended in the Clinton Administration, the city government paid for elective abortion on demand with congressionally appropriated public funds. During the congressional debates of that era, evidence was cited that indicated that the city's abortion-funding policy was among the most permissive in the nation, and was not even limited to Medicaid-eligible clients. Elizabeth Reveal, D.C. budget director at the time, "confirmed that the District's government has a policy of funding abortion on demand and does not attempt to determine the circumstances of the pregnancy." (Philadelphia Inquirer, August 1, 1985.) In 1994, then-Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly authorized the use of $1,000,000 from the Medical Charities fund, which was originally set up to help indigent AIDS patients, to pay for abortions.

Pro-abortion groups periodically publish academic studies that demonstrate that policies that bar tax-funded abortions actually prevent one-third or more of the abortions that would otherwise occur among the covered populations.

"The abortion industry's own studies suggest that many thousands of residents of the nation's capital are alive today because of the abortion funding ban that President Obama now proposes to repeal," said NRLC's Johnson.

"Today's White House action is one more evidence that President Obama is trying to pull off a massive policy scam -- he generates a smokescreen of soothing rhetoric about seeking 'common ground' and 'abortion reduction,' while step by step advancing concrete policies that will substantially increase the number of abortions -- and pay for abortion on demand with everyone's taxes," Johnson concluded.

The next step, Johnson suggested, would be "an attempt to smuggle vast expansions of abortion into law through health care reform legislation."

Barack Obama met with Planned Parenthood in 2007 and promised that mandatory abortion coverage would be "at the center, the heart of" his health care reform legislation. In an April 30, 2009, National Public Radio report, Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, confirmed that "health care reform is going to provide a platform" for ensuring that "all women . . . regardless of their income, can get access to the full range of health care options . . ."

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) is a national federation of nonsectarian right-to-life organizations, governed by a board elected by the state right-to-life organizations and by members at large.

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Can Barack Obama Become Pro-Life?

First Things looks at whether the Commander-in-Chief can be converted.