VILLANOVA, September 21, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Fr. Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest who has made a life work of supporting abortion and leftist political causes, is scheduled to speak at Villanova, a Catholic university in Pennsylvania, today.
Fr. Drinan’s career as one of the more prominent members of the 1960’s sexual and social revolution reached its nadir with his support, in a series of New York Times articles, of President Clinton’s veto of the partial birth abortion ban. Fr. Drinan, who was ordered by the Vatican to give up his seat in Congress, will be speaking on “Pursuing Economic Justice at Home and Abroad: A Worthy Goal for our Nation.”
The Catholic writer James Hitchcock has said that Drinan “bears heavy responsibility for making the Democratic Party the party of abortion.” Drinan, as a Congressman in the 1970’s began a long career of opposing pro-life initiatives as a member of the House Judiciary Committee. After leaving Congress in 1980, he became president of the leftist lobbying organization, Americans for Democratic Action, and sent out a fund-raising letter urging the moral necessity of electing candidates to Congress who favored legal abortion.
Hitchcock has said that Drinan’s actions as a politician were the origin of the now infamous “personally opposed but…” rhetoric so favoured by abortion-supporting “Catholic” politicians. After praising the Roe V. Wade decision, Fr. Drinan went on to compile an almost perfect pro-abortion voting record in Congress.
When Drinan was running for a third term in Congress, in direct defiance of his religious superiors in the Jesuit order and of the US bishops, the National Abortion Rights Action League sent out a fundraising letter denouncing the pro-life movement and lauding Fr. Drinan as a friend whose re-election to Congress was essential to the abortion cause. Villanova University has stated on its website that they are undertaking to re-capture the university’s ‘distinctiveness’ as a college based on Catholic and Augustinian traditions.
To Contact the University: Rev. Edmund Dobbin, OSA President Tolentine Hall Villanova University 800 Lancaster Avenue Villanova, PA 19085 610-519-4511 [email protected]
ph