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Secret Weapon
How American Bishops Kept Abortion Legal for Thirty Years
Catholic Bishops Will Do Anything to Keep Democrats in Power
October 28, 2003
By George Kocan
Thirty years have passed since the Supreme Court nullified all the states’ laws against abortion. The ruling instigated a massive reaction among Catholics and other seriously religious persons who just recently witnessed great legal and social changes resulting from the civil rights movement. Many of the same activists who marched against racial segregation and used the same tactics to defend the Right to Life inexplicably ended up with exactly opposite results. Thirty years of parades, demonstrations, side-walk counseling, civil disobedience, educational campaigns and annual letters from the Catholic Bishops have not only failed to bring forth a Human Life Amendment but have also served to entrench abortion as a right deeper into the fabric of the culture.
A review of the social trends and the behavior of the Catholic Bishops since 1973 strongly suggests to this writer that perhaps the primacy weapon being wielded on behalf of the abortion culture is the collective of the American Bishops itself. These Bishops, with a few exceptions, constitute the Secret Weapon of the Democrat Party which functions as the chief advocate and protector of the abortion industry. This conclusion resulted from an examination not of the Catholic Bishops’ pro-life rhetoric but of their spending. The fact remains that the great bulk of the work and leadership in the cause of Life came from the Catholic laity. A few examples from the Chicago area serve to illustrate this point.
Joe Scheidler has been leading pro-life demonstrations, training pro-life leaders and counselors and educating the public through public appearances since Roe v Wade. His work at abortion clinics cut deeply into the revenues the abortionists expected and undermined the ideology of sexual liberation which floated abortion as a political right. Joe Scheidler, a devout Catholic, husband and father, did such great damage to the abortion mentality that the National Organization of Women (NOW), an organ of the Democrat Party, sued him in federal court, under RICO statutes, for racketeering. They demanded millions of dollars in judgment and imposed on him devastating and crippling legal costs. Joe Scheidler was, and is, doing God’s work. Furthermore, he was doing the Church’s work. Yet, in all that time, the Archdiocese of Chicago provided him with no financial help, even when NOW put him under their legal gun.
Conrad Wojnar lived through a similar story. He quit his job as a social worker and dedicated his organizing skills to helping women avoid abortion as a solution to personal problems. A devout Catholic husband and father, Wojnar put together The Womens Center, a place where women with problem pregnancies can find sympathetic counseling about the facts of abortion, medical referrals and material help. The Womens Center provides such services in an atmosphere of Catholic piety, devotion and morals. Wojnar has even set aside space in the building for a chapel where priests come almost every day to offer Mass. NOW also sued Wojnar for racketeering, threatening to take his home and leave him destitute. He too does God’s work, which is supposed to be the Church’s work. As with Scheidler’s Pro-Life Action League, Wojnar’s Womens Center had no financial help from the Archdiocese of Chicago.
In another part of the Chicago area, AID for Women operates in a similar manner to that of The Womens’ Center. The Archdiocese has likewise failed to help this organization, as it has failed to help other pro-life organizations like the Illinois Citizens for Life.
This ecclesiastical failure cannot be understood without reference to the political situation. The political fact relevant here is that the Republican Party has officially taken up the cause for Life. It has become the home of many former Democrats who saw their party taken over by social revolutionaries, change-agents who have nothing but hostility for Catholic teaching and morality. What the Catholic Bishops have done is place the welfare of the Democrat Party over the lives of unborn children. They accomplished this by protecting Democrat candidates from defeat at the polls over the abortion and other family issues. They successfully protected Democrat power by funding organizations and organizers that advanced Democrat political fortunes. The Catholic Bishops in collaboration with change agents, community activists, devised a scheme by which devout, church-going Catholics, including serious pro-lifers, mostly Republicans, would fund the agenda and protect the political power of the Democrats.
The Catholic Bishops created a funding vehicle known as the Campaign for Human Development, later known as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). The acronym should more properly stand for the Catholic Campaign to Help Democrats. What makes this funding vehicle extraordinary is that it, in its by-laws, prohibits giving money to organizations that actually feed, clothe or house needy persons. The funds must go to organizations that foster “social change”. Not coincidentally such organizations had already come into being, tailor-made, so to speak, to carry out the mission that the CCHD had specified. These organizations follow an structure and philosophy established by the Industrial Area Foundation (IAF).
The IAF embodies the beliefs and practices developed by its founder, Saul Alinsky. In the course of time, he trained many organizers who have gone on to successful careers in politics and effecting “social change”. Perhaps the most famous of his protoges is the pro-abortion feminist Hillary Clinton. She actually wrote her senior thesis at Wellsley College on the radical politics of Saul Alinsky. She later became the First Lady when her Democrat husband Bill was elected President of the U.S. and then became the Democrat Senator from the State of New York. Alinsky trained other famous political figures, among them Cesar Chavez, who forced Mexican grape-pickers into his union in California, and Dick Morris, the Clinton’s political consultant, who helped them win the White House.
Social agitation, confrontation and personal attacks characterize Alinsky-style political organizing. It betrays a strong influence from Marxism and the way communists organize political pressure. This philosophy opposes fundamental Christian principles, because it divides persons into antagonistic groups, the “haves” and “have-nots”. It defines an ideology of “class struggle” where one side is considered the enemy and dehumanized, which results in certain ethical consequences: such persons lose their dignity as children of God; persons become means to an end; and the end justifies the means. As Alinsky wrote, “Ethics are determined by whether one is losing or winning.” He also wrote, “He who fears corruption, fears life.”
Alinsky advocated and practiced what we now term, “the politics of personal destruction.” The Democrats use this most effectively in destroying the reputations of their enemies, prominent political figures like Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and most recently, Rush Limbaugh. He wrote it down in his books, “ridicule is man’s most potent weapons” and “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.”
Considering Alinsky’s ethics, it should come as no surprise that he actually dedicated one of his books, “Rules for Radicals,” to Lucifer. What could be more fitting? Lucifer carried out the ultimate rebellion. He too championed “social change”, as he does today. He too rejects God’s moral law, as Alinsky rejects the authority of the Catholic Church and the morality that it teaches. Alinsky opposes the very fundamentals for which the Pope and the Bishops have always stood. Whereas the Church teaches a dogmatic theology, Alinsky protests, “I detest and fear dogma.” Whereas the Church defends eternal Truths, Alinsky insists, “Truth is relative and changing.” Whereas the Catholic Bishops have publicly declared that abortion goes against God’s law, Alinsky proclaims, “I have always believed that birth control and abortion are personal rights…”
Alinsky’s theory of rebellion has a history. He did not just make this stuff up. It goes back at least as far as the time before the French Revolution, where the revels sought to overthrow Throne and Altar. They specifically wanted to overthrow the moral order that protected marriage and children. Their rejection of the moral order was so radical that many of the professed Satanism. Good evidence exists that Karl Marx, himself, the founder of the Communist Party, was a Satanist. He wrote poems praising Satan. His own son-in-law, Edward Eveling, gave lectures on, “The Wickeness of God” and himself wrote a poem in praise of Satan. Frederick Engels, Marx’s partner in communist revolution, expressed the rebellious spirit thus, communism “abolishes eternal truths, abolishes all religion, and all morality.” A colleague of Marx was a German poet, Heinrich Heine, who spoke well of Alinsky’s role model, Lucifer, saying, “I called the Devil and he came.” Marx’s follower Mikhail Bakunin, another rebel, expressed similar sentiments, “Satan is the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and emancipator of worlds.” Bakunin also wrote, “In the revolution we will have to awaken the Devil in the people, to stir up the basest passions.” A fellow socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, also worshipped Satan and praised him, writing, “God is stupidity and cowardice…God is evil. And yet, amazingly, Catholic Bishops bragged about their great friendship with Saul Alinsky.
For thrity years the Bishops have been paying lip-service to the right to life, while putting Catholic money into Alinsky-style organizations like the IAF, using CCHD as a funding scheme. They gave IAF itself a million dollars. They gave a million to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Not too long ago, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin gave a million to fund the Chicago Metropolitan Sponsors (CMS) (while shutting down parochial schools) so that it could hire IAF to organize and train persons to staff what eventually became known as, United Power for Action and Justice (UPAJ). When the Cardinal was criticized for giving so much Catholic money to this group, he answered that it was money not really belonging to the Church. Someone gave it to him for the purpose of funding CMS. No one in authority has yet pointed out that donating money in such a manner constitutes the essence of mony-laundering.
This child of CMS, UPAJ, is an effort to induce Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopalian, Jewish and Moslem Republicans living in Chicago suburbs to funnel money, just as the Catholics do, into the organizing projects of the Democrat Party. It is of course no coincidence that the traditional allies (Perhaps ‘agencies’ is a better word.) of the Democrat Party, the labor unions, energetically sponsored the CMS. These include the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Illinois Education Association (IEA). AFSCME is one of the organizers of a march on Washington being planned for spring 2004 in defense of abortion “rights.” Other organizers are NARAL, NOW, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.(1) The IEA is affiliated with the National Education Association, a reliable organ of the Democrat Party and an aggressive proponent of abortion, feminism, homosexuality and other evils long denounced by Catholic tradition.
In California, Catholic Charities and CCHD-funded IAF oranizations stole the election of Republican Congressman Robert Dornan, by means of documented immigration and election fraud. Hundreds of invalidly naturalized persons were driven from getting their citizenship papers directly to the polling places. Catholic money helped steal an election away from a devout Catholic and patriotic man, with a perfect voting record on the right to life and other moral issues, on behalf of a woman with an anti-life and anti-family Democrat agenda, Loretta Sanchez, a radical with campaign support from the usual mouthpieces of the Democrat Party, the NOW, NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League), the homosexual advocacy group Human Rights Campaign and other such groups.
The Illinois Leader, an internet newspaper (www.illinoisleader.com) found that 75% of the Catholic priests in the Chicago Archdiocese have officially registered as Democrats. Thus they ally themselves with the party of “social change”, the party of permanent revolution, the party of abortionists, homosexuals, pornographers, adulterers, fornicators and perjurers. According to Block, “The Catholic members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, of which there are well over a hundred, cast more votes in favor of abortion than not. In fact, Catholic politicians - whose Church teaches the sanctity of human life from themoment of conception - have demonstrated a worse voting record on life issues than their Presbyterian and Methodist counterparts.” (1)
Many of the Chicago area priests hold membership in another Alinsky-inspired organization, Call to Action. It not only follows the organizations principles Alinsky developed but also the revolutionary world view, taking the Democrat agenda of moral revisionism into the very heart of the Catholic Church. Do the Catholic Bishops oppose CTA or prohibit it in any way from operating in their dioceses? Not at all. CTA has complete freedom to organize and promote its agenda of dissent which seeks to destroy the papacy and the Church hierarchy, to win acceptance for divorce, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, priestesses, liturgical abuses, a married clergy, and the abolition of property rights.
Catholic Bishops give a million dollars to organizations whose world view excludes everything Catholic, to ACORN, to IAF, to CMF but not a cent to deeply committed Catholic operations like Joe Schiedler’s Pro-life Action League or Conrad Wojnar’s Womens Center. They give no real support to the cause of life and the family because that would undermine Democrat power and the revolutionary ideology which drives it.
Stephanie Block put it best, “This year, when the collection plate comes around, remember that you can sabotage Church teaching with a flick of your wrist. You can shoot it down by paying for organizations to fight for health clinics that dispense contraceptives and make abortion referrals. You can shoot it down by paying for organizing that supports pro-abortion politicians. You can shoot it down by paying for organizing that trains Catholics to dissent. Just don’t be surprised by the blood on your hands.”
1. Block, Stephanie 2003. Shooting Ourselves in the Feet: How One of the Most Potent Weapons Serving the 'Culture of Death' Lies in the Pockets of Catholic Donors, www.CatholicCitizens.org
