St. Patrick’s Church in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin / St. Patrick’s Facebook page
St. Louis, Mo., Apr 3, 2023 / 14:00 pm (CNA).
The Diocese of Madison clarified late last week that the Church does not endorse nor oppose specific political candidates after a Wisconsin pastor urged parishioners in his weekly parish bulletin message to vote against state Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz, who is openly pro-abortion.
“The Catholic Church’s involvement in public life doesn’t extend to endorsing candidates for election to public office nor calling for their defeat and thus refrains from partisan political activities. The Church does encourage voter registration and encourages Catholics, as citizens, to vote and to be civically engaged,” the diocese said in a statement sent to CNA.
“However, the Church also has both a duty and a right to call attention to the moral and religious dimensions of public issues, measuring social policies and political activities against the natural moral law and Gospel values. Since the first century, the Church has consistently affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law in its respect for all human life.”
The diocese’s response comes after Father Brian Dulli, pastor of St. Patrick’s Church in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, urged his parishioners to vote against the pro-abortion candidate in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election, a race that observers say could have major effects on the legality of abortion in the state.
As reported by Wisconsin Public Radio, an attorney with the activist group Freedom from Religion Foundation, which is based in Madison, wrote to the IRS last week to complain about the bulletin, asking the IRS to revoke St. Patrick’s 501(c)3 nonprofit status.
The April 4 election is between former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly and current Milwaukee judge Protasiewicz. Protasiewicz has spoken openly about her pro-abortion views while insisting that she has made “no promises” to pro-abortion groups that she will seek to overturn the state’s current abortion ban.
In a March 26 parish bulletin, Dulli urged Catholics not to vote for Protasiewicz, saying she has “tried to make this race entirely an effort to legalize abortion in the state of Wisconsin.”
“Abortion is the intentional taking of a human life. It is murder. Our Catholic faith is clear that this is grave sin. It should never be controversial among Catholics to say that you can never intentionally take any action that knowingly will help in the taking of a human life. You cannot publicly support abortion or abortion advocates and remain a Catholic in good standing,” Dulli wrote.
“As a Catholic, I urge you, for the salvation of your soul; do not vote for her [Protasiewicz] in the Supreme Court race on April 4,” he continued.
“I encourage you to study the race carefully and form you [sic] conscience correctly in accordance with the truths of the Catholic faith.”
In his April 2 bulletin message, Dulli acknowledged that the March 26 bulletin “got much more exposure than usual” and reiterated that “given a choice between any two people, we must say ‘absolutely not’ to the person who says abortion should be on the table.”
“We need to say no to a system that demands human sacrifice of the unborn be on the table. Jesus said that we will be judged by what we do to the least among us. Babies are the littlest and least. If someone consents to the killing of unborn children, they will not stop at the destruction of you or your family,” Dulli wrote.
“Haven’t we seen enough destruction now to know it?”
Reached by CNA on Monday, Dulli declined to comment further, saying he believes the situation has been “talked about enough.”
What’s Tuesday’s election all about?
The 2023 Wisconsin judicial race, which might have remained obscure in other years even within Wisconsin, is garnering national media attention and record fundraising numbers for the candidates. The reasons have to do with a prediction — both among pro-life and pro-abortion groups — that the winner of the election could tip the scales in Wisconsin when it comes to the state’s current abortion ban.
Wisconsin is the only state in the nation with a pre-Roe v. Wade abortion ban in effect, at least on paper. Wisconsin’s ban, which is contained in Section 940.04 of the Wisconsin Statutes and dates to 1849, allows abortion only to save the life of the mother. The state’s Democratic governor and attorney general have said they will not enforce the ban and are currently suing in an attempt to have it overturned.
The law was previously unenforceable following the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but Roe’s overturning last year allowed the statute to come into effect. So far, it has not been blocked in court, as has happened with pre-Roe bans in West Virginia and Michigan.
Pro-abortion groups within and outside Wisconsin have identified the state Supreme Court race as the key to getting 940.04 overturned. Gov. Tony Evers, along with Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, announced a lawsuit last year to attempt to overturn the law, arguing that it has been superseded by subsequent legislation and cannot be enforced.
The lawsuit is likely to be ultimately decided by the state Supreme Court, which has had a 4-3 conservative majority for the past decade and a half. The current election will determine who will sit in the open seat being vacated by retiring conservative justice Patience Roggensack. The winner will serve a 10-year term.
Pro-life advocates worry that should the state Supreme Court obtain a pro-choice majority, the state’s pre-Roe ban could be declared unconstitutional, as happened last year in neighboring Michigan.
Who are the candidates?
Kelly is a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who served on the court from his appointment by then-Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 until he was voted out in 2020. He describes himself as a “constitutional conservative” and on his campaign website charges that his opponents are “judicial activists who seek to impose their own political agenda on our state.”
Amid a contentious campaign, Kelly has earned the endorsement of three statewide pro-life groups — Wisconsin Family Action, Pro-Life Wisconsin, and Wisconsin Right to Life. He said during a recent debate that his numerous endorsements from pro-life groups came about after having conversations with them about his pledge to uphold the Constitution, not because of any promise to keep the abortion ban in place.
In contrast, Protasiewicz has garnered endorsements from numerous top Democrats in Wisconsin as well as from pro-abortion groups such as NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and EMILY’s List. Protasiewicz currently is a judge for Branch 24 of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court in Wisconsin, having been elected to that court in 2014.
Protasiewicz has insisted she has made “no promises” to pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List but also has made no bones about her pro-choice views. “My personal opinion is that [it] should be the woman’s right to make the reproductive health decisions, period,” she said during a March 21 debate.
What have Catholic leaders said?
At least two of the state’s bishops, including Bishop Donald Hying of Madison, have reiterated to Catholics that the right to life is a foundational issue that should form their consciences as they decide how to vote on Tuesday.
“Without the right to be born and to live, every other right is worthless,” Hying wrote in a March 30 letter.
“Do we want to live in a country that welcomes the wonder of every human life, supports marriages and families, helps the needy and suffering, seeks justice for all, and builds a civilization of love, or, do we want a society which aborts its children, leaves struggling parents without support, and lives a radical autonomy with no reference to the dignity of life and the common good? Do we elect civic leaders who stand on the unshakeable moral principle that every human life is sacred and of immeasurable worth, or, do we elect those who disregard the fundamental dignity of life and advocate for taking the life of the most innocent in the womb? Such questions we should ask ourselves as we exercise our moral and civic duty to vote.”
Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee also issued a letter, dated March 28, urging Catholics to vote for candidates that uphold the right to life.
“The killing of the innocent has never been supported by Catholic Church teachings. As citizens, we have an obligation to support the laws that protect the innocent. We must take our responsibility, as citizens before God’s judgment, for the times we have supported the destruction of the innocent. We must also take responsibility for the lack of support for the protection of the innocent when we vote for candidates and laws that liberalize abortion laws,” Listecki wrote.
“There is nothing enlightened about an individual who fails to realize that the denial of the right to life for the most vulnerable among us is an attack on the dignity and personal value of every citizen. I could not and would not support a candidate whose position on life is contrary to the teachings of the Church — a position contrary to the teachings and love of Jesus.”
[…]
“As that suggests, what this Senate vote tells us about the 2020 election is deeply disturbing. Barring some drastic, unforeseen development, we are likely next year to witness a replay of 2016, which saw an ardent advocate of legalized abortion, Hillary Clinton, pitted against Donald Trump, who as president has delivered on the life issues while also becoming an intensely polarizing figure.
For some, this means the choice in 2020 will likely be as painful as in 2016, when they resolved the dilemma for themselves by not voting or backing marginal candidates or write-ins.”
Polarized thanks to the MSM, which is in the hands of the “leftists.” Why? Because Donald Trump is too “moderate,” too “America first” for them, not because he is the “right-wing” monster they make him out to be.
“But if a harebrained court-packing scheme advocated with the aim of advancing ideological interests, whether ultra-liberal or ultra-conservative, ever in fact becomes the “level of intellectual and policy ambition” of either major party, God save the United States.”
The United States is already in trouble. Abortion is just one issue pitting the left against what remains of the historic American nations. Catholics will have to pick a side, and to advocate some form of civic nationalism, even if it is a religious version of it, is increasingly to side with the leftists.
Is the fanaticism equivalent as suggested by the picture?
If infanticide is not monstrous, what on earth could be? To relegate it to political maneuvering makes it even more heinous. Mr. Shaw is part of the problem and until we are willing to call murder out for what it truly is we will go down in the history books as one of the most self gratifying nations of all time.
A good question. And the last paragraph equates the very real Leftist court-packing endorsed by prominent public figures and aspirants to the Democratic presidential nomination with a purported “ultra-conservative” court-packing that has not been advocated by the Trump administration or anyone prominent in Congress, and is otherwise non-existent. This is spurious even-handedness.
The only fanaticism is in the left’s desire to kill children before they are born. Science has proven that an unborn baby is a separate life & unique being, separate from the mother, not “her body”. Let’s not forget that the woman expressly invited the possibility of a new & separate life to grow by her willingness to have unprotected relations. So that new life is not some chimera that spontaneously appeared, but was expressly invited to begin. The case is further proven by the left’s absolute blocking of the protection of the baby once it is born, resulting in actual infanticide. THAT is fanaticism, not the wishes of those with properly grounded morals who know, without a doubt, that, firstly, even an unborn human being is just that – a human being; & secondly, that once a baby is actually BORN, it can still be murdered if it survived the abortion (murder) attempt. These abortion fanatics even admit that the unborn is a human life, & yet still wish to murder it both before it is born, & then after it is born. This puts the left in the same camp as Hitler’s Germany, except we’ve already murdered 10X more babies than Hitler did to the Jewish people. THAT’S fanaticism.
Your lead sentence: “Let us agree that the 44 Democratic senators whose votes last month blocked the Born Alive Protection Act aren’t monsters.” No. They ARE monsters. The problem is, over the last 40 years, we’ve allowed “being monsters” to be okay. And because we have, the monsters have gotten worse. This is a watershed moment, a turning point. Just like the sex abuse crisis in the clergy. If we don’t accept what is really going on, then we will never be able to combat it.
I am not sure about them not being monsters. They are certainly beyond being bad christians. Pagans were for infant sacrifice, so I have no problem thinking of them as pagans. In order to solve a problem we must accurately identify the problem. A Catholic News Service article appearing in my diocesan newspaper managed, in a lengthy article on the subject, not to mention that all 44 votes were from democrats, and that 10 of them were Catholic. I admire Mr. Shaw and have read some of his books. But I, for One, will not find it at all painful in 2020 to vote for a very, very pro life president as opposed to a very, very pro death challenger.
Since he has dropped out as a potential presidential candidate for 2020, is Holder now looking for a new job on the U.S. Supreme Court?
Those who vote for infanticide are monsters. Trump is the most pro-life President we have had. Action not words count. Instead of constant harping on global warming and immigration, our Bishops should be speaking of the mortal sin of voting for those who support child murder.
Sure, the senators that voted against this measure are not monsters, they just follow orders…
That aside, though, if you think republican senators are any better at protecting life than their democratic colleagues, then let me remind you that it was a certain, now deceased, republican senator from Arizona who was the key to derailing the effort to get rid of obamacare…
So, as author succinctly put it, “backing marginal candidates or write ins” is the most reasonable choice from the point of view of changing the status quo.
Casting your vote for a candidate from either of the 2 “established” parties will yield more of what’s already “established.”
What seems conveniently omitted here is that state abortion legislation where ‘late-term’ abortions are permitted, each law that I know of doesn’t permit 3rd trimester abortions by right of option. These cases must have a valid medical justification to permit the procedure. As it stands, 3% of abortions occur in the final trimester and all are deemed necessary for the mother’s health. If a women is going to get get an abortion, their plan is not generally to delay the procedure for as long as possible. So, any measure that tends to criminalize a rare result in a rare but medically necessary procedure goes too far.