The Catholic Church has always remained firm on the answers to these questions, the archbishop continued. “Our Savior chose to come among us as each one of us came into this world, by spending nine months in a mother’s womb. Blessed Mother Teresa used to talk about this a lot. She reminded us that our religion begins with the story of two pregnant women and their unborn children. And it was an unborn child, John the Baptist, who was the first to proclaim Christ’s presence— when he leapt in his mother’s womb at the Visitation (see Luke 1:39–45).”
The prelate also looked at the Didache, “a manual of Church morals written even earlier than the later writings of the New Testament.” He explained that the writings condemn “abortion as infanticide.”
“This tells us that opposition to the abomination of abortion is more than a partisan political position. For the Catholic, this belief goes to the heart of the mystery that Christ came into this world to reveal to us.” He continued, “this mystery is reflected in our country’s founding document, which speaks of our being endowed by our Creator with rights that no one can take away from us or pretend that we don’t have—the first of these being the right to life.”
This all has implications “for our participation in the political process,” Archbishop Gomez noted. “A Catholic must be prepared to live and defend the truths that Christ came into this world to die for. A Catholic is duty-bound to ask: Is a candidate fit to hold office if he or she believes it should be legal to kill even a fully developed child in the last weeks of a pregnancy for undefined “health” reasons?
“And again, can we accept candidates who support experimentation with the stem cells of human embryos, or cloning, or euthanasia? Can we make real progress on any of the critical issues that we face as a nation if we can’t agree to protect the smallest and most defenseless among us?”
Asking these questions does not “impose Catholic beliefs on other Americans,” he continued. “This is the political contribution that a morally mature people must make in a democracy. This is a bearing witness to the truths that Jesus has revealed to us—truths that, again, are enshrined in our country’s founding document.”
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Archbishop Gomez concluded his column by encouraging Catholics to seek leaders with the courage to “stand up for these truths,” who aren’t “afraid to pursue peaceful and democratic means to persuade our fellow citizens of this essential natural truth that it is also a foundational aspect of the teachings of the Catholic faith.”