CATHOLIC CHURCH RIPS ABORTION FUND FOR POOR WOMEN

By Juan Montoya

"Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón, sin ver que sois la ocasión de lo mismo que culpáis..." Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz

Even as the pedophile scandal reaches into the highest levels of the Holy See, the Catholic hierarchy – Brownsville bishop Daniel E. Flores included – has launched a campaign of ignominy and hatred against the most defenseless of their flock: poor women.
The clergy – unnaturally celibate men who see themselves as moral shepherds of their married flocks – are railing against the Barack Obama Health Care Reform plan because it includes funding for abortions.
To qualify for that funding, of course, you have to be poor.
From the highest level, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, to the parish priest, these men are calling the funding of abortions by the federal government a sin against God and the unborn. Public funding, they say, should be withheld from these women because it is a sin.
It doesn't seem to matter to them that their well-heeled parishioners can get one whenever they want because they can afford it. Besides, in case the clergy doesn't remember, the right of a woman to control her own body is a constitutionally protected right in this country.
Obama, ever the pragmatist, promised reluctant Democrats – including our own whiz-bang kid Solomon Ortiz – that he would issue an executive order to prevent federal funding for the procedures. It is doubtful the order will fare well in the courts, and the Catholic hierarchy knows it. Thus, the outcry.
This as their pope, the former Joseph Retzinger of Germany, has been linked to turning a blind eye to acts of pedophilia by a priest in the Munich archdiocese when he was the archbishop. In that case, the vicar general of the archdiocese has absolved now-Pope Benedict XVI of any responsibility and a subordinate fell on the sword for his pope.
Do they not remember as the Vatican stood by silent as millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the infirm, and "impure" races of Europe were led off to slaughter even as diplomats informed the Holy See of the ungodly acts of the Third Reich?
Do they not remember that it was Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, in negotiations with Nazi Germany who fashioned the Reich Concordat in 1933? The Concordat allowed the papacy to impose the its laws on the German clergy in return for special privileges for Catholic schools and organizations and protected priests from military service. Pacelli also hoped that the agreement would safeguard against Nazi encroachments on and persecution of the German Catholic minority.
In exchange, the Vatican would "encourage" the local Catholic clergy and faithful to "voluntarily" withdraw from politics, going as far as disbanding its powerful Catholic Center Party. This effectually destroyed any political opposition against the Nazis.
This guarantee of nonintervention left Hitler and the Nazis free to pursue their anti-Semitic and anti-national minority policies.
Historians agree that at a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of Hitler's government abroad. Pius bent over backwards to ignore the atrocities of the Nazis that when they occupied Rome, he ignored the trucks hauling off Italian Jews to their deaths as they rumbled past the walls of the Vatican to die at the hands of their captors.
Now the Church is in the process of canonizing Pius, that is, to make him into a saint of the Church.
This kind of hypocrisy makes the Church condemnation of the health reform plan for the "killing of the innocent" incredible. How many victims of pedophilia at the hands of Catholic priests have committed suicide? How many have led an existence of "quiet desperation," their lives ruined as a result of that abuse?
Now, the Church seems more obsessed with matters of the groin and not with matters of the spirit.
The Church and its ecumenical eunuchs would serve their flocks better by tending to their spiritual needs and not engage in intruding into the bedroom or the public treasury.
Benedict is now "elegantly expressing contrition" over the pedophile scandal, intoned NYC Bishop Timothy Dolan during his sermon last Sunday.
That Dolan, Flores, and the rest of the clergy chose Holy Week to deflect criticism of pedophilia and to attack the Obama health reform plan is no accident. Like most acts of the Church, it smacks of a deliberate, calculated campaign to gloss over the sins of the Church and shift the focus on the immorality of the Obama administration.
Mexico has always been considered to have an anticlerical streak. Is there any wonder why this is so?
Doesn't Flores remember that it was his Church that helped the gachupines and criollos to keep the mestizos and indios subjugated? Does he not remember that parish priests used the confessional booth to pry the secrets from pious women to discover any plot by the natives to throw off the yoke of this Church-supported subjugation?
Does he not remember that priests were often the worst offenders of the violation of their celibacy vows, and that often, when convents were destroyed, the skeletal fetuses of infants born of nuns at the hands of priests were exposed for the world to see?
If a woman – any woman – reaches the agonizing decision to terminate a pregnancy, it is her decision, and her decision alone. She alone will have to bear the emotional scars for the rest of her life. And if, indeed, we all answer for our actions to our Maker, it won't be Flores of Dolan who will stand with her for judgment.
Do they want us to return to those glorious days when the only way for a poor woman to terminate an unwanted pregnancy – often the result of desperate economics, rape or incest – was to put herself in the hands of some butcher with a clothes hanger in a dark alley?
For them, there is no exception and no difference.
If a poor woman cannot afford to pay to terminate a pregnancy as a rich woman can, why must she set aside control of her own body and leave it in the hands of the state, or worse, of a spiritual institution so far removed from reality that only until recently it absolved Galileo from a conviction for heresy by the Inquisition for saying the earth revolved around the sun?