Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio is reaping praise from across the country for a hard-hitting column published in his diocesan newspaper in which he calls the president’s advocacy of abortion “shameful” and says those who voted for him “bear the responsibility for a step deeper into the culture of death.”
Bishop DiMarzio begins by praising President Abraham Lincoln’s for signing that noble Executive Order known as the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves who were being held in the Confederate states.
“How far we have come as a Nation that 160 years later we will celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States!” he says.
But his praise for the president ends there.
He points out that we have just commemorated the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion and started the “pro-choice” movement that was rooted in the ideology of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger who advocated for the elimination of the “unfit” such as the poor and blacks.
“Of course, a young Barack Obama was precisely the sort of unfit child that Sanger and her allies would want to eliminate,” the bishop writes.
“Tragically, the President has not been an advocate for those young children faced with similarly difficult circumstances. He has chosen to use the bully pulpit not to call upon us all to be nobler and to embrace each child, regardless of origins and circumstances; rather, he has been a proponent of an expediency that is shameful and criminal in the eyes of Almighty God.”
The forces of death press on from every side in contemporary American culture, the bishop writes, and cites the passage of ObamaCare which obligates Catholic institutions to provide employees with medical procedures and services that violate Church teaching.
“The President and his supporters sought to make this election, at least in part, about women’s rights. Much has been written about how the targeting of key constituencies was intended to stimulate specific votes,” he writes.
“In my view, those who voted for President Obama bear the responsibility for a step deeper in the culture of death. Under the cover of women’s issues, we now see an assault on religious freedom and personal conscience.”
Regardless of whether some find his tone to be “a bit strident”, Bishop DiMarzio believes the time has come for more direct conversation on these matters if we are to preserve what is left of our God-given and constitutionally-protected rights.
“Abraham Lincoln was a man who understood the intersection between politics and nobility,” the bishop writes.
Although Lincoln would never have been able to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolishes slavery, in 1863, he used the powers of his office to free “slaves” by issuing his Emancipation Proclamation.
“I would have hoped that the first African-American president of the United States would have stood on the side of freedom for all. Instead, he stands on the side of political expediency,” Bishop DiMarzio laments.
“Mr. Lincoln, with great difficulty, put out into the deep and paid with his life. Would that our political leaders today would have some of the same courage.”
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