I’m hardly the only Catholic you’ve heard this from, Save Jerseyans, but it’s increasingly frustrating to watch the Church leadership prioritize all of the wrong stuff. Maddening is more like it.
Pope Francis suggested that President Trump – who governed as a pro-life president – was a hypocrite, but he urged the American church not to condemn Biden for being pro-abortion. Think about that for a second: the successor of Peter will go to the mat over climate change, and wants you to treat vaccination as a “moral obligation” despite the fact that it doesn’t prevent transmission, but he won’t risk a diplimatic row with a “Catholic” president to defend millions of children.
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Things aren’t too much better outside of Rome. When amnesty for illegal aliens was being debated in 2018, the bishop of South Jersey’s Catholic diocese ordered his priests to advocate for it from the pulpit.
Go ahead and compare the response of the bishops four years ago to their relative silence as New Jersey not only condified Roe v. Wade into law this past week but also laid the groundwork for an abortion insurance mandate. The state’s seven bishops – including Cardinal Tobin – issued a statement opposing the law after it was passed but, as our friend Dan Cirucci pointed out, the state’s top Catholic officials let “Catholic” Governor Murphy’s name out of their joint statement.
“Sadly, what’s missing from the above statement is a denunciation of Governor Phil Murphy who has pushed for this action and the solid, overwhelming Democrat majority in the New Jersey state legislature that voted for it and enacted it into law with the governor’s signature,” Dan wrote. “New Jersey Republicans were united in their opposition to the measure. The voters of the state deserve to know this — particularly the Catholic voters.”
Abortion is, or at least is supposed to be, an issue of grave important for the Church. 50,000 babies are aborted in the Garden State alone every year. If the shepherds responsible for our 21 counties won’t defend their own flocks, then it should come as a surprise to no one that the pro-life movement continues to lose ground in New Jersey.
I’d say my church needs better leadership at this point in history, but it’d be more accurate to say we would settle for any leadership at all at this sorry pass.
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