Council 112 Respect Life Report December 2006

Tony Marino is an Air Force veteran who later received a degree in English Literature at Long Island University. For more than 30 years, he was an insurance agent for Aetna before eventually becoming a private insurance consultant. Since his retirement in 2003, he has devoted himself to the service of St. Peter's Parish in Concord and the Right to Life movement in New Hampshire. Tony has been married to his wife, Annette for more than 40 years. They have ten children and 22 grandchildren.

Consequences! Whatever we do, or fail to do, carries with it a consequence. The consequence of who we elected this past November is fast becoming visible. I received an
E mail this morning which reveals that the people we elected now have it within their power to remove the only statute which has any limitation on abortion: parental notification. Once the statute on parental notification is abrogated, New Hampshire will achieve abortion primacy among all states in the United States, because it will be a state without abortion restriction. Further, the person who may be elected as the Speaker for the New Hampshire House is seen by some, as a dedicated servant of the pro-abortion organization, NARAL. The result being, that it will be virtually impossible to pass any legislation that could restrict abortion. It also means that this person will have the ability to formulate legislation which could affect other life issues such as embryonic stem cell research, cloning, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. The culture of death appears to be alive and well in New Hampshire.

To those Catholics who voted for pro choice candidates because they believed that there were other issues in the election which were as important, I pose the following question: Let us assume that abortion was not an issue, but that your candidate, i.e. the candidate with whom you shared “other issues” believed in, supported and advanced the cause of slavery. Would you put the slavery issue aside, and still vote for that candidate, because you shared “other issues”. I don’t believe you would. I believe most persons are so horrified by the issue of slavery that any candidate openly supporting that evil would be rejected out of hand. Compare slavery and abortion. Slavery is the destruction of the human person resulting from condition and treatment. Abortion is the destruction of the human person by termination. Slavery and abortion are both evil, and yet support for abortion is seen as acceptable in a candidate, when measured with “other issues”. I suspect that the difference in attitude rests with either ignorance or self delusion. Slavery as a condition is open and obvious. The slave and the human condition of slavery have already made an impression upon us, and we are horrified by it. Abortion, on the other hand is clandestine.

Abortion takes place in a location generally unseen by the populace, and the human tragedy, the death of a child, through years of pro-abortion conditioning, remains unseen and in some cases unknown.

As Catholics, we have guidance: the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Church teaches us that abortion is an intrinsic evil, an evil that is wrong under any circumstance. When we ignore the teaching of the Church, when we support those who support and advance an intrinsic evil, we place ourselves in circumstances where we will reap the evil consequences of our acts and our failure to act. To avoid the promotion of evil, and the evil consequences that surely follow, we need, as Cardinal Ratzinger once stated, “To have a clear faith, according to the creed of the Church”. When we approach our civic duties, we must do so clothed in the armour of our Faith.

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