ps: providing immigrants with healthcare will just get us more immigrants at a time we can’t fully employ our own citizens. Again, bishops pontificating about stuff they’re clueless about.

These things I know: evil is real, these are very serious times, and the answer to our every problem is the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady of America.

Each diocese in this country should blanket every one of its parishes with information regarding our Dearest Patroness, and this special title she has given us in America as a gift from her Motherly Heart.

If I sound like a broken record in her service, so be it. I believe she has special ties with the NY Archdiocese, her statue having traveled to St. Patrick’s Cathedral (and Ground Zero) where I first saw it. She will save America if we only take the first step towards her. She will take us into her Heart, and accomplish the rest, if only we would respond to her sweetness with trust!

Me either! Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maximus culpa!

Too bad that the Church does not give absolution over the internet!

Michael Sean Winters, the blogger on the “National Catholic Reporter,” is in error when he states: “The health care bill that passed the Senate in the wee hours of the morning is much, much better on the issue of abortion funding than the original bill it amended.” The “health care bill” did not pass – that vote is scheduled for Christmas Eve. What passed with this particular vote was the limiting of debate to 60 hours. Where else may he be inaccurate? Perhaps when he says:

“Every month, when writing that separate check, the individual will be reminded that abortion is not like the rest of their health plan, that this extra check is needed because of that difference, and that this extra check is, in its way, a testimony to the nation’s refusal to use tax dollars to pay for abortions?”

Is he (and others) projecting a thought process, and a particular attitude, onto a woman who may be sincerely ignorant of what abortion is, or emotionally unattached to the concept of foetus as taught by Planned Parenthood since the Roe v, Wade decision?

Mr. Winters *does* do a good job at marginalizing the “far right”:

“Look for similar objections from the far right in the days ahead. They are getting desperate. They see that the President and the Congress are about to achieve health care reform. They will do and say almost anything to keep that from happening.”

This statement makes me question his personal interest in the passage of the bill, that he would go to such lengths to castigate fellow pro-lifers. The defection of Senator Nelson illustrates not only that Harry Reid has the necessary votes to pass the bill, but also indicates the very limited power of the people to have an impact upon how those votes are cast. It strikes me that the rhetoric of Mr. Winters is rather extreme, in this instance.

Regarding your reference to “the 40 pro-life Christians who support the bill,” I don’t see any of them as being a great enough moral authority as to make me drop everything and follow him/her without question. Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, certainly, had he signed. Certainly *not* Doug Kmiec, whose background was discussed previously.

“Almost all mainstream news sources consider the Senate bill a moderate one which extends health care to millions of uninsured Americans.”

How do you know it “extends health care to millions of uninsured Americans?” How do the mainstream media know? The bill is 3000 pages that no one, including the Senate, has seen. It is not on the internet like the House bill was.

I could extend my response in book form, but I will limit myself by addressing your statement with a quotation from “Humanae Vitae”:

“18. It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a “sign of contradiction.” (22) She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.”

“Since the Church did not make either of these laws, she cannot be their arbiter—only their guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for her to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man.”

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html

It seems to me that the mainstream media, along with Mr. Winters, have a difficulty in dealing with the “sign of contradiction,” and the individuals who continue from age to age to comprise it.

A blessed Christmas to you, as well.

Have a blessed Christmas!