In their important July 7, 2004 official directives, called
"Catholics in Political Life", it appears that not one of the bishops of the U.S.A. had any reservations about making the following false claim (2nd paragraph) : "It is the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning, founded on her understanding of her Lord’s own witness to the sacredness of human life, that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified. If those who perform an abortion and those who cooperate willingly in the action are fully aware of the objective evil of what they do, they are guilty of grave sin and thereby separate themselves from God’s grace. This is the constant and received teaching of the Church." As the famously witty and scholarly Catholic Senator Patrick Moynihan used to say, "People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." If only the church would select its bishops on the basis of their theological expertise, instead of their achievements as administrators or their loyalty to the Vatican, the church might not embarrass itself by such official misstatements. The fact is that history does not bear out the claims of the recent popes and America's bishops that their present opposition to contraception represents "the constant teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning, founded on her understanding of her Lord's own witness to the sacredness of human life, that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified." The truth is that the Catholic Church's teaching regarding abortion , and when human life begins, is nowhere near as constant as is claimed. And considering the use made by the hierarchy of this teaching to influence the government of the United States (and of the rest of the world to some extent), it is important to set this record straight :
How much of this is constant Catholic teaching? The answer is: none of it. Every stage in his argument is untraditional, which makes it imperative that his reasoning on abortion, like Paul VI's on contraception, be subjected to close scrutiny.
The legitimacy of slavery was officially promulgated by Pope Gregory IX in the 1226 Corpus Iuris Canonici, (Body of Canon Law) which remained official law of the Church until 1913. Slavery was fine with the church for persons captured in war, persons condemned to slavery
for a crime; persons selling themselves into slavery, including a father
selling his child; and for children of a enslaved mother..
"In the US: Many pregnancies are not viable. According to estimates, 50% of pregnancies terminate spontaneously before the first missed menstrual period; these abortions usually are not clinically recognized. Spontaneous abortion typically is defined as a clinically recognized (ie, by blood test or ultrasound) pregnancy loss before 20 weeks' gestation."
In order to better understand the Catholic Church's problem with birth control and abortion, we urge you to read our churchvsex.html chapter, which shows how this issue fits in with that institution's huge problem with sexuality as a whole.
"In his addresses, Pope John Paul II takes certain things for granted that :
According to www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic5.htm,
Is the Soul Infused at Conception?
Most Catholics assume that the soul is infused at conception. They may take it as an article of faith. In fact it is not. Vatican II deliberately left the issue aside and for a very good reason. For fourteen hundred years until late in the nineteenth century, all Catholics, including the popes, took it for granted that the soul is not infused at conception. If the church was wholly opposed to abortion, as it was, it was not on the basis of the conceptus starting as a human being.
From the fifth century, the church accepted without question the primitive embryology of Aristotle. The embryo began as a non-human speck that was progressively animated. This speck had to evolve from vegetative, through animal to spiritual being. Only in its final stage was it a human being. This is why Gratian was able to say: `He is not a murderer who brings about abortion before the soul is in the body.'
The characteristics of the foetus were attributed solely to the father. It (and it was correct to refer to the embryo as `it') became human at forty days for the male and eighty days for the female. A female resulted, said Aquinas, from defective seed or from the fact that conception took place when a damp wind was blowing. It followed that to abort a foetus in the early stages of pregnancy was wrong, since it was the destruction of a potential human being. It was not murder, since it was not the killing of an actual human being.
See how smart the church
wise men of old were :
St.Thomas Aquinas, the church's most respected scholar since the 13tth century, defended slavery as instituted by God in punishment for sin, and justified as being part of the ‘right of
nations’ and natural law. Children of a slave mother are rightly slaves
even though they have not committed personal sin! (Quoted by many later
Popes).
"In 1807 (Protestant) Britain became the first major power to permanently abolish the slave trade". "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution#Situation_in_1789.
The Holy Office in an instruction signed by Pope
Pius IX in 1866 (after the U.S. Civll War) declares:
Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contary to the natural and divine law, and there can be
several just titles of slavery, and these are referred to by approved
theologians and commentators of the sacred canons … It is not contrary to
the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or
given"
In the fifteenth century, moralists began to ask whether it was not possible in certain circumstances to get rid of the foetus without fault. For example, when it results from rape or incest or even from adultery, thus threatening the husband's rights and the marriage itself. The same dilemma arose in the case of a mother whose health would be endangered if she had to bring a foetus to full term. Was it not a moral duty to save a human life at the expense of a non_human if potentially human life? Some of the best theologians answered Yes.
Some went further. They said it was permissible to save a mother's life even after the foetus was humanized, that is, after the soul was infused. For what reason? Because the foetus' life had no absolute value; its value had to be weighed with others. What, then, in the classical case, when it came to a straight choice between saving the mother or the child? Was not the mother's life more valuable than the child's? Many hesitated. They said it was always wrong to kill an ensouled foetus directly. They were content to say it is permissible to kill it indirectly, that is, when medical treatment to help the mother incidentally and without intending it also killed or expelled the foetus The aim was solely to save the mother; the death of the foetus was sad by-product of that virtuous act.
History shows that popes, far from being able to solve these difficult moral dilemmas once and for all, were as mystified as anyone else They had no access to privileged information. They had to put forward arguments that were subject to rebuttal. For example, Gregory XIII (1572-85) said it was not homicide to kill an embryo of less than forty days since it was not human. Even after forty days, though it was homicide, it was not as serious as killing a person already born, since it was not done in hatred or revenge. His successor, the tempestuous Sixtus V, who rewrote the Bible, disagreed entirely. In his Bull Effraenatum of 1588, he said all abortions for whatever reason were homicide and were penalized by excommunication reserved to the Holy See. Immediately after Sixtus died, Gregory XIV realized that, in the current state of theological opinion, Sixtus' view was too severe. In an almost unique decision, he said Sixtus' censures were to be treated as is he had never issued them. Popes can be precipitate. They never did have answers up their sleeve to ongoing moral problems. Moral judgments depend on facts and circumstances, all of which must be kept under review. The nineteenth-century papacy forgot this basic principle on every issue related to liberty. Twentieth-century pope, have forgotten it on every issue relating to sex. Paul VI was not alone in reissuing ancient teachings regardless of entirely changed circumstances and the findings of science. In particular, the morality of abortion depends on biological facts.
In 1621 a Roman doctor, Paulo Zacchia, suggested that there was no biological basis for Aristotle's view that ensoulment was delayed for some time after conception. Zacchia was the most honoured physician in the papal court, yet his view had no impact on papal theological teaching. The Vatican issued a pastoral directive permitting but not enforcing the baptism of foetuses less than forty days. As late as the eighteenth century, the church's greatest moral theologian, St. Alfonsus Liguori, was still denying that the soul was infused at conception. Like Aquinas before him, he did not say direct abortion was right, but his view allowed a flexibility of approach to abortion, especially when the mother's life was in danger. After 1750, this flexibility disappeared. For the first time in centuries, the church started to return to the intransigent attitude of the Fathers." (p. 375)
Now, according to the Church's official teaching, the best that babies and foetuses that die without the benefit of a good Catholic baptism can hope for in the hereafter is an eternity in the state of "Limbo".
Since that has been the fate of the majority of children in the underdeveloped parts of the world throughout history as well as today, and it is estimated that for every human pregnancy that produces a live baby, one and perhaps even two pregnancies are aborted spontaneously, those who accept the official teaching of the Catholic Church must believe that there are destined to be many more souls in "Limbo" for all eternity than in heaven and hell combined. And yet, the Bible never said a single word about this eternal resting place for the majority of mankind!
“I am convinced that some political and social activities and practices of the Catholic organizations are detrimental and even dangerous for the community as a whole, here and everywhere. I mention here only the fight against birth control at a time when overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organize peace on this planet.” [ Albert Einstein, in a letter, 1954 ]
, but didn't hamper his five (or seven) year affair with a married woman with three kids, an affair that continued even after the woman's husband, Fred Snodgrass, found out about it and pleaded with Hyde to leave his wife alone. Their long time sexual liason doesn't appear to have produced any children, so It's not known if "Mr. Roman Catholic Layman" and his married mistress practiced birth-control or abortion at the time. When this leader of the Clinton impeachment process in the Congress was asked how he felt about his own infidelity and the breaking up the Snodgrass family, he exonerated himself, `on the basis that it was "a youthful indiscretion" (committed in his early forties when he was not much younger than Bill Clinton !). ( See 
