June 29, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Can a pro-abortion politician be “rooted” in the Gospel?
‘NDP Catholic MPs stress Social Gospel roots’ ran a headline in Canadian Catholic News (CCN) last Wednesday, published by the Catholic Register and The B.C. Catholic. The article emphasizes the New Democratic Party’s support for the poor, the sick, and the unemployed, but somehow fails to mention its official stance in favour of preserving women’s access to legalized abortion.
The NDP’s platform goes “right back to the original Gospel values,” argued Charlie Angus, the NDP’s ethics critic and the Catholic MP for Timmins-James Bay, in a claim repeated by the papers without question. “I think there’s so much of the NDP that was founded in the Social Gospel,” he said. “People think we came out of labour, but we came out of the churches as well, the fight for social justice.”
The NDP’s platform, it should be noted, states clearly that they “will re-affirm women’s rights to safe, accessible abortion services.”
The CCN article notes that at their convention this past weekend the NDP passed several resolutions that “could appeal to Catholics who care about social justice.” Those included measures committing them to strengthen pensions, provide direct support to the unemployed, and ensure that affordable drugs may be sent to the Third World.
Paul Dewar, another Catholic MP and the NDP’s foreign affairs critic, told CCN that these measures are “in line with what I would call the Social Gospel and the notion that the New Testament is a testament about what we can do on earth, on what we can do working together making policies that matter.”
Now, certainly Christians are called to serve the poor and vulnerable. In fact, I have written elsewhere, based on the arguments of the late Fr. Thomas Dubay in his excellent book Happy Are You Poor, that the Gospel is so radical as to call Christians to embrace an evangelical poverty that renounces comfort and superfluity in solidarity with, and in service of, the destitute.
“Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple,” Christ says in the Gospel of Luke (14:33).
That being said, the Gospel is the Gospel – you cannot divide it from itself. The “social” Gospel is robbed of its meaning if it is not founded on the Gospel’s total commitment to the sanctity of all human life.
Can we actually say that a man who feeds the hungry while defending murder is promoting the “Gospel” – the good news of Jesus Christ? Is it not merely philanthropy?
These NDP members perpetuate the sharp divide between the Church’s social teachings and her moral teachings – a false approach that the Church, and Pope Benedict XVI in particular, have worked to correct.
“Openness to life is at the centre of true development,” the pope wrote in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate. He noted also that Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reiterated the Church’s condemnation of contraception, “indicates the strong links between life ethics and social ethics.”
What kind of “social justice” ignores – and in fact worsens – the plight of the world’s most targeted and vulnerable class of citizens? The “social justice” promoted by the NDP is part and parcel of the same ideology that has led to over one billion abortions in the last four decades, according to numbers from Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute.
And ‘Catholic’ MPs Angus and Dewar have certainly done their share to promote that ideology. Both rated pro-abortion and pro-same-sex “marriage” by Campaign Life Coalition, they each opposed Roxanne’s Law in December, which sought to protect from coercion women who choose to keep their unborn child.
Angus’ utter disregard for children in the womb comes out in the article when he claims that radically pro-abortion NDP Leader Jack Layton envisions a Canada in which “no one is left behind.” No one, that is, except the unborn.
My fear is that this glowing piece published in Canada’s largest Catholic papers will further exacerbate the widespread confusion among Catholics that the NDP are a legitimate choice for voters.
There is a disturbing trend by Catholics and other Christians in Canada of disregarding the NDP’s support for abortion in order to promote the party’s vision for helping the poor.
In the recent election campaign, numerous Catholic bishops and other Christian leaders formally endorsed a project promoting poverty as the primary issue for voters in the election.
Candidatesagainstpoverty.ca, spearheaded by the Religious Social Action Coalition of Newfoundland and Labrador, listed candidates who have pledged “to work to close the growing gap between rich and poor in Canada.” By far, the most candidates endorsed were NDP, though there were at least a couple from the Communist Party of Canada as well. The NDP were the only major party to complete the questionnaire.
The campaign dovetailed with a similar effort by the Canadian Council of Churches, which includes the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The truth is that any politician backing the NDP’s platform is completely unfit for office and, of course, unworthy of the Christian vote. The only time one might be in a position to vote for such a person would be where the other candidates are equally or even more pro-abortion.
But in that case we must recognize that this is merely the lesser evil, and by no means delude ourselves into thinking the chosen candidate would actually promote the Gospel.
Patrick Craine is Canadian Bureau Chief for LifeSiteNews.com and the new president of Campaign Life Coalition NS. He lives with his wife and two children in East Chezzetcook, NS.