Help pro-life heroes expose abortion in D.C.: LifeFunder
LOS ANGELES (LifeSiteNews) – A Catholics for Choice board member wrote in an op-ed on Wednesday that argued that reversing Roe v. Wade would be bad for religious liberty and the Catholic Church.
Sheila Briggs, a professor of religious and gender studies at the University of Southern California, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that reversing the 1973 court decision that legalized abortion through all nine months of pregnancy would be a “disaster for women.”
But it would also be a “disaster for the Catholic Church, whose hierarchy in America has made opposition to abortion central to its mission.”
“At stake here is religious liberty,” Briggs argues, meaning the “liberty” for heretical Catholics to have abortions, enter into same-sex “marriages,” or use contraception, despite the Catholic Church’s definitive teachings against all of those.
Briggs wrote:
Ordinary Catholics feel condemned for their views and for the decisions that they and their families make around abortion, same-sex marriage and even contraception, coverage for which the U.S. Catholic bishops sought to exclude from the Affordable Care Act. Time and time again, the bishops have fought against women having control over their own bodies.
Briggs predicted that Catholics would “feel increasing shame over what their church has done” when the “devastating effects on women’s lives become visible after the Supreme Court’s judgment.” One reason for this is that “four of the five justices who are poised to strip away abortion rights are Catholic.”
All five of the justices presumed to vote to completely reverse Roe are Catholic – Justice Neil Gorsuch currently attends a Episcopalian church, but his parents, specifically his mom, raised him Catholic, and his brother said he received Confirmation.
Briggs explains that religious liberty and freedom to her means people can hold any view they want under the guise of religion, contradicting Catholic teaching.
“Religious freedom carved out a private sphere in which individuals were free to hold any or no religious beliefs and to act on their conscience,” Briggs wrote. “In return, they were required not to impose their religious beliefs and the conduct that derived from their conscience on others. In contrast, the public sphere was to operate on empirically observable and rational norms, which would be self-evident to any reasonable person.”
“The overturning of Roe vs. Wade would threaten religious liberty. If such a ruling remains in effect for any length of time, it will prevent hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, of women from acting upon their conscience,” the member of the heretical Catholics for Choice wrote. “This will result in serious harm for women and their families — and one of the bulwarks of democratic society will be weakened.”
The Catholic Church has always taught against the “moral evil of every procured abortion.” “This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church reads. “Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.”
The Catechism also notes that “the exercise of freedom does not imply a right to say or do everything.” “By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth.”
Earlier this year, Catholics for Choice projected pro-abortion slogans onto the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception during a Mass. The stunt drew a condemnation from D.C.’s Cardinal Wilton Gregory.
Help pro-life heroes expose abortion in D.C.: LifeFunder