After a long slumber, it looks as if the Catholic bishops are waking up to the nature of the assault on Church teachings from abortion-favoring Democrats, such as Joe Biden, who use their status as Catholics to rope in votes.

Here's what they are up to, according to the Associated Press:

U.S. Catholic bishops overwhelmingly approved the drafting of a "teaching document" that many of them hope will rebuke Catholic politicians, including President Joe Biden, for receiving Communion despite their support for abortion rights.

The decision, vehemently opposed by a minority of bishops, came despite appeals from the Vatican for a more cautious and collegial approach to the divisive issue. And it raises questions of how closely the bishops will be able to cooperate with the Biden administration on issues such as immigration and racial injustice.

The result of the vote — 168 in favor and 55 against — was announced Friday near the end of a three-day meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that was held virtually. The bishops had cast their votes privately on Thursday after several hours of impassioned debate.

168 to 55.  Too bad we don't know who those 55 are; all we know is that they are politicized leftists.  One wonders what the hell their conversations are with God are like with that attitude.

But the fact that a big majority voted in favor of this document, as watered down as it is, with no naming names on politicians who oppose Church teachings on abortion and who work to undermine them, is a positive development.  The Church has found some ballast.  There's an emerging backbone in the largest national element of the world's oldest institution.  We didn't know they had it in them.

Obviously, the bishops in the U.S. are realizing they stand for something here, and have to stand for something; otherwise, they become a garden-variety social justice warrior activist group with no compelling reason to join it.  They've been silent on the news of Planned Parenthood nakedly buying and selling human baby parts in a grotesque commodification of human flesh for big dollar gains, saying literally nothing on the grounds that might rile things up.  But in this document, where the issue of what it means to be a Catholic, and the basic requirement that one not troll for votes as a Catholic and then use the political power gained once in to destroy the Church and render its teachings on life meaningless, seems to be a sign that the bishops are waking up.  You can't be a Catholic in communion with the Church taking the literal body of Christ one moment and voting to give cash for abortions to destroy other people's bodies.

That may be because Church teachings are under attack by leftist pols as never before.  Joe Biden, for instance, who's in office by fraud (memo to lefty bishops: no justice, no peace), is the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history, actively forcing U.S. citizens to pay for other people's abortions through Obamacare mandates and other cash shovel-outs, as well as killing off longtime U.S. policy of not promoting abortions abroad.  He's shoveling cash out the wazoo to Planned Parenthood and other radical abortion-promoting leftists and actively stating that he "disagrees" with Church teaching on abortion, so too bad about that.  He's a "devout Catholic," see, especially at election time, profiting from a big base of Catholic voters who haven't heard hide nor hair of Church teachings on abortion for years now and, as a result, don't even believe it.  That goes double for House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who's made hay with her supposed Catholicity that is at odds with the Church teachings on promoting a culture of life.  These opportunists profit politically from their claimed association with the Church, but they sure as hell don't obey or promote its teachings.  Teachings are for little people.  They are elites who, as usual, exempt themselves from that and work to undermine Church teachings, rendering the bishops into zeroes.

As a result of this kind of disordered thinking, they're not just going with the libertarianistic live-and-let-die idea, that if you don't like abortion, don't have one; they're openly on the attack against the Church — suing the Little Sisters of the Poor into bankrolling abortions whether they like it or not, forcing Catholic hospitals to commit abortions whether or not it violates physicians' and nurses' consciences, forcing all taxpayers to pay for abortions and spread abortion culture abroad whether they like it or not, threatening the shutdown of Catholic institutions, including hospitals, if they don't go along with their leftist, secular, actually Bolshevik, vision for America.  It's gotten bad out there.

But there's this attitude, sadly, from my own bishop, who views this solely as an attack on leftists:

Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego countered that the USCCB would suffer "destructive consequences" from a document targeting Catholic politicians.

"It would be impossible to prevent the weaponization of the Eucharist," McElroy said. He warned that the initiative would weaken the bishops' ability to speak on issues such as poverty, racism and the environment.

Memo to the bishop: What does he think this habit of silence is?  If he wants to have any authority at all and not be read as a political animal, which he is if he lets these clowns get away with profiting politically off the Church while opposing its teachings, he'll swallow hard and go along with it.  The politicization is already there.  If he opposes this while promoting illegal immigration and opposing the death penalty, there won't be much distinction between him and the Democrats normal Catholics can't stand, will there?  If he can't adhere to Church teachings even on stuff we know he doesn't like, why would anyone listen to him on anything else?  He'd be dismissed by the faithful as a political animal whose words bear no importance whatsoever.

It's extremely galling to see this crap go unsanctioned for those Catholics, such as myself, who go along with leftist Church teachings opposing the death penalty in the name of supporting the culture of life, despite my natural feelings about it.  After all, who gets the death penalty when killers are allowed to roam free?  Just ask death-penalty-free Mexico about its famous murder rate.  Somebody gets the death penalty there; it's just not the bad guys.  Although I am inclined to think the death penalty is a good thing most of the time, given the kinds of callous crimes out there, I myself go ahead and swallow Church teachings on this with the comforting thought that a vile, unethical, corrupt, unprincipled person such as once-prosecutor Kamala Harris isn't going to pick and choose who gets executed, despite many heinous murders out there that need significant redress.  If I, as a conservative Catholic, can go along with that, then leftist Catholics need to go along with Church teachings on abortion despite their inability to see its merits.  But leftists, of course, don't believe in tradeoffs or viewing the whole thing in the light of whether the Church believes in a culture of life or not.  We can all take that umbrella, but they don't.

Church teachings on the sanctity of life are not a free-for-all open to any last interpretation.  Although the loopholes in the document are extremely annoying — allowing leftist bishops to still give Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi Communion if they choose to do so, despite their lawsuits and other attacks on the Church and its efforts to promote a culture of life — this is way better than the garbage going on in the Church elsewhere.  It's serious, quite unlike in other places where the leftist rot has taken over.  In Germany, for example, there's a complete leftist meltdown going on, with far-left bishops openly sanctioning gay "marriage" and other things that go contrary to Church teachings, turning the Church into a faded Xerox copy of Unitarianism.  Things are so crazy there that Pope Francis has ended up playing the role of the "conservative" on that one.  Many of us also have problems with that product-of-leftist Germany, the promotion of Liberation Theology in Latin America, which pretty much teaches the poor it's OK to steal from others if they have more than you.  We want all of that, and its Marxist secular roots, stomped out now, as had been the case when Pope St. John Paul II was running things and knew the score on that bunch.  We all know how well that worked out in Venezuela, where the crap was promoted extensively by Hugo Chávez and his communist cadres.  The place is an unlivable socialist hellhole — whose chief export is refugees, whom the leftist bishops claim to champion.

All said, this document is a positive development. Creatures like Joe Biden need to be fearful of the Church as they oppose its teachings, not the other way around.  This document creates some kind of natural order and adds balance to what has been a very unbalanced situation, where bishops' words and teachings otherwise mean nothing.  Join the Catholic Church, wear the membership on your sleeve for votes, better adhere to those teachings instead of act as a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Image: Logo, public domain, via Wikipedia.

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