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‘Catholics weep over Barack Obama’s words,’ laments cardinal in address to CUA
Rome, Nov 20, 2008 / 06:15 pm (CNA).- CNA has exclusively obtained the full-text of Cardinal James Francis Stanford’s lecture delivered at the Catholic University of America last week in which the prelate examined President-elect Obama’s loyalty to pro-abortion organizations and described his promises as cause for Catholics to weep tears of betrayal.

Commenting on the results of the recent presidential election, Cardinal Stafford said in his speech that on Election Day “America suffered a cultural earthquake.” He went on to note that though Obama and Senator Joe Biden clearly stated their “anti-life agenda” prior to the election, Americans were too excited at the prospect of electing a Black President. Now that he has been chosen, the cardinal predicted, “I foresee the next several years as being among the most divisive in our nation’s history.”

Cardinal Stafford went on to recall Obama’s promises regarding abortion issues. He mentioned July 17, 2007 when the Senator told supporters from Planned Parenthood that “We are not only going to win this election but also we are going to transform this nation...The first thing I will do as President is to sign The Freedom of Choice Act…I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law...On this issue I will not yield.”

“Catholics weep over Barack Obama’s words,” the cardinal lamented. “We weep over the violence concealed behind his rhetoric and that of Joseph Biden and what appears to be that of the majority of the incoming Congress.”

The cardinal’s address was hosted by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington D.C. MORE
 

Cardinal's Address to Catholic University of America
Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II: “Being True with Body and Soul”

For 51 years of priestly ministry I have been attentive to res sacra in temporalibus in American culture, i.e., “to the elements of the sacred in the temporal life of man” or, in a more Heideggerian idiom, “to man as the sacred element in temporal things.” In 1958 John Courtney Murray, S. J. was my guide. With further guidance from the Church over the years, I have learned that the nucleus of this principle, enunciated by Pope Leo XIII, maintains that the sacred element in secular life, especially our use of language, escapes the undivided control of the supreme power of the State. The secular life of man is not completely secular, nor totally encompassed within the State as the highest social organism, and subject ultimately only to the political power. The sacred word within man in secular life transcends the control of the supreme power of the State. A person’s public life is not encompassed within the State as the highest social organism, and not subject ultimately only to the political power.

President Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated 1802 letter to the committee of the Danbury Baptist Association asserting “a wall of separation between Church and State” formally denied the reality of res sacra in temporalibus. He introduced a latent and powerful virus which would eventually be used to diminish and then to wound mortally a theology of discourse in the public arena. It has led to the increasingly secularized states of the American union and their active hostility towards the Catholic Church. Some of these governments are threatening Roman Catholic adoption agencies because of their refusal to select same-sex couples as potential adoptive parents. They are forcing Catholic hospitals to accept medical procedures which are contrary to the dignity of the human person. They are insisting on hiring practices which will destroy the Catholic identity of health and social services under Catholic Church auspices. They have not refrained from coercing the individual conscience. Here the federal and state governments are enshrining the primacy of secular laws over against religious principles. These decisions are the legal and moral progeny of Jefferson’s insistence on debarring personal faith from the public forum. And this is only a beginning. Their seeds can be found in the 1787 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom sponsored and promoted by Jefferson. His self-proclaimed Epicureanism and crypto-utilitarianism furnish the hermeneutical keys for interpreting the opening paragraph of his 1776 Declaration of Independence.  MORE