To the editor:
Thank you for taking the lead in bringing awareness to our Catholic laity regarding the recent Obama abomination in his mandate regarding a ruling that all Catholic entities would be mandated to provide contraceptive and sterilization services that are in direct opposition to the beliefs of our Catholic faith.
What an unbelievable attack on religious freedom as provided for in our Constitution. Our fore fathers are turning over in their graves at this attack.
Normally this column addresses state policy issues. This time it speaks to a national question — the scope of religious liberty in our national health care reform legislation.
To the editor:
The Affordable Care Act, funded by half the Medicare budget, offers free condoms, free birth control, and free abortion for all ages. The right of conscience is not protected as it was before the legislation.
Medicare defunding will not be felt until after 2012. The Independent Advisory Board of 15 appointed by our president makes all decisions about who gets what and at what age without input from seniors or politicians. The board is also delegated to defund Medicare by another $200 billion in the next decade.
In a recent column, David O’Brien, the associate director of religious education for lay ministry in the Archdiocese of Mobile, Ala., recounts the story of Agnes and Jake, devout Catholics who conceived and delivered four children during the first five years of their marriage.
Agnes described how Jake, “wanted to be a good father and husband, and he couldn’t see how that could happen if we continued to have more children. In short, he was getting a vasectomy.”
Agnes had a strong Catholic formation, and understood that married couples should not engage in sexual acts that have been intentionally blocked or “rendered infecund.” She struggled with Jake’s new stance, and dug her heels in.
She wondered how she could possibly be an authentic witness to the Gospel “if within my marriage, I was no longer open to life? How could I minister to other women and encourage them to be bold in their faith if I wasn’t living it myself? And what do I teach my children about marriage and sex when their father and I weren’t aligned?”
The Wisconsin Catholic Conference (WCC) urged support for legislation to provide local districts more flexibility in teaching human growth and development classes, as well as to permit abstinence-based instruction.
In implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) now requires almost all private health plans to cover contraception and sterilization as “preventive services” for women.
The leaders of Wisconsin’s five Roman Catholic dioceses have written the Obama administration to express opposition to the mandated full coverage of sterilization, contraception, and related counseling services by private health plans as required under new federal health care reform regulations.
Married Catholics today often struggle to understand the moral difference between using contraceptives to avoid a pregnancy and using Natural Family Planning (NFP).
NFP relies on sexual abstinence during fertile periods in a woman’s cycle, as assessed by various indicators like cervical mucus or changes in body temperature.
To many, the Church’s prohibition of contraception seems to be at odds with its acceptance of NFP because in both cases, the couple’s intention is to avoid children. That intention, however, is not the problem, as long as there are, in the words of Pope Paul VI, “serious motives to space out births.”
An electrician by trade, Tim Roach is married with two children and lives about an hour outside Minneapolis. He was laid off his job in July 2009.
After looking for work for more than a year and a half, he got a call from his local union in February 2011 with the news anyone who is unemployed longs for, not just a job offer, but one with responsibility and a good salary of almost $70,000 a year.
He ultimately turned the offer down, however, because he discovered that he was being asked to oversee the electrical work at a new Planned Parenthood facility under construction in St. Paul on University Ave. Aware that abortions would be performed there, he knew his work would involve him in “cooperation with evil,” and he courageously declined the offer.
Dear Friends,
As we begin the month of October, we recall first of all that this is Our Lady’s month — specifically the month of the Most Holy Rosary.
