World AIDS Day: Promoting Awareness and Concern

Message for World AIDS Day
Dr Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General

This year, which marks the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day, also marks a major milestone in the long struggle against this disease. Well over 3 million people in low- and middle-income countries are now receiving life-prolonging antiretroviral therapy. Such an achievement was unthinkable 20 years ago, when the world was just beginning to comprehend the significance of this disease and its catastrophic impact on individuals, families, and societies.

AIDS is the most challenging and probably the most devastating infectious disease humanity has ever had to face. And humanity has faced this disease, in equally unprecedented ways. The international community has rallied at levels ranging from grass-roots movements to heads of state, from faith-based organizations and philanthropists to research institutions, academia, and industry.

On this 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day, I find it appropriate to reflect on some of these achievements. The response to AIDS changed the face of public health in profound ways, opening new options for dealing with multiple other health problems. It showed the power of determination to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Civil society brought the disease – and the needs of those affected – to the forefront of world attention. Attitudes changed. Treatments were developed. Clinical schedules were streamlined and standardized. Funds were found. Prices dropped. Partnerships were formed, and presidents and prime ministers launched emergency plans.

The response to AIDS also reaffirmed some of the most important values and principles of public health. The AIDS epidemic showed the relevance of equity and universal access in a substantial way. With the advent of antiretroviral therapy, an ability to access medicines and services became equivalent to an ability to survive for many millions of people. The epidemic focused attention on the broad social determinants of health, the vital role of prevention, and the need for people-centred care. In so doing, it helped pave the way for a renewal of primary health care.
These achievements show the power of determination and global solidarity, but they also remind us of the challenges. I believe that the theme selected for this year’s World AIDS Day captures these challenges well.

Leadership is needed to ensure that vigilance and diligence in responding to the epidemic remain steadfast. Despite the global financial crisis, funding absolutely must remain predictable, sustainable, and substantial. We must ensure that the current unprecedented rollout of treatment reaches more people and is fully sustainable. Stepping back or slowing down on treatment is not an acceptable option on ethical and humanitarian grounds.

Empowerment is critical for an effective response, and most especially so for prevention. We must do much more to empower adolescent girls and women, both to protect themselves and to act as agents of change. We must work much harder to fight stigma and discrimination, which are huge obstacles to all forms of prevention, treatment, care, and support. In many countries, legal as well as social and cultural barriers prevent groups at risk from receiving the interventions and knowledge needed to reduce harmful behaviours.

Finally, we must deliver. In many countries, the weakness of health systems limits the ability to reach those in greatest need with sustainable services. I believe we now have an historic opportunity to align the agenda for responding to AIDS with the agenda for strengthening health systems. As noted in this year’s World Health Report, primary health care is the best way to operationalize a commitment to equity and social justice, to realize a focus on prevention, and to reach marginalized groups. These values and principles are the very foundation for the future of the AIDS response.

On this World AIDS Day, let us redouble our determination to build on past success and to rally our forces against the remaining obstacles – in a spirit of solidarity and for the sake of human dignity.

The Pro-life Movement and Stem Cell Research

ANOTHER SUCCESS WITH STEM CELL RESEARCH

Science now has proven there are moral and ethical alternatives to using stems cells from human embryos. The most recent success transplanted a new windpipe into a 30-year old woman suffering from tuberculosis. The procedure used tissue from the women’s own stem cells. Adult stem cells have also cured over 70 diseases in other men, women and children. By contrast, research using embryonic stem cell research has not cured a single disease in a single person.

Congress is expected to debate the use of stem cells from human embryos early in the 111th Congress. This is a crucial time to educate President-Elect Obama that it is time to end the debate on funding embryonic stem cell research and put our limited funds toward research that is curing and saving lives. The Obama Transition Team is asking for your vision for the next four years. Please share your views that we must follow science on stem cell research and use the moral and ethical alternatives to embryonic stem cells that have suceeded and do not sacrifice one life to potential save another.

From the Democrats for Life of America:

Democrats For Life of America
DFLA -The pro-life voice within the Democratic Party
________________________________________________________________________
Pro-Science and Pro-Life: The Most Promising Stem Cell Research Does NOT Require the Destruction of Human Embryos

Medical research involving “stem cells” is often presented as a false dilemma. It is a falsehood that one must be either pro-science or pro-life; that in order to advance medical and scientific research, one must push aside ethical issues relating to the creation, cloning, and destruction of human embryos. This common misperception is not just oversimplified and misleading – it is also outdated.

Today, scientists can create the most powerful type of stem cells without destroying embryos. Researchers have generated a new kind of stem cell that shares the helpful characteristics of embryonic cells, while avoiding the many moral and practical problems. The new, non-embryonic cells have shown tremendous promise in clinical studies, and scientists have only begun to explore their potential. They add to an already lengthy roster of medical treatments
utilizing “adult” stem cells.

What are “Stem Cells”?

Stem cells are unspecialized cells that can replicate themselves and produce more specialized cells. The most powerful stem cells are “pluripotent,” which means capable of developing into any type of cell.

Stem cells come from a variety of sources. Embryonic stem cells are those obtained by destroying a human embryo in the early stages of its development. Adult stem cells refer to stem cells from adult tissue, umbilical cord blood, or placenta.

In the past, it was believed that embryonic stem cells were unique in their ability to transform into any type of cell. We now know that this is not the case. Researchers have learned to manipulate the genes of adult cells and convert them into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells.
These breakthrough new cells – known as “induced pluripotent stem cells” or “iPS cells” – were created from adult skin cells. Like embryonic stem cells, they can be transformed into any type of tissue, including lung, brain, heart and muscle.

Proven Benefits of Adult Stem Cells

A flurry of research has followed upon the published discovery of iPS cells in late 2007. Clinical studies in mice have already shown progress in treating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and sickle cell anemia, and in restoring blood circulation and function to damaged limbs. More studies are underway.

For many years prior to the discovery of iPS cells, the other types of adult stem cells have provided important medical benefits. Blood-forming cells from bone marrow have been used in transplants for 30 years. Adult stem cells are in widespread use treating many types of cancer, heart disease, and spinal cord injury.

Clinical trials have benefitted patients suffering from conditions including corneal damage, sickle-cell anemia, and multiple sclerosis. Adult stem cells, including iPS cells, permit doctors to treat a patient using cells from the patient’s own body. The advantage is that the cells will not be rejected by the immune system, as would be the case with stem cells from an embryo.

Another advantage of adult stem cells is that they are not as likely as embryonic cells to form tumors – and the advantage now extends to iPS cells. In September 2008, Harvard University scientists announced that they had succeeded in engineering iPS cells so they were not prone to causing cancerous tumors. This feat has so far eluded researchers working with embryonic stem
cells, and it raises the possibility that iPS cells may be used in human studies much sooner than once thought.

Problems with Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Embryonic stem cell research requires the destruction of a human embryo. In some cases, an embryo is created for the express purpose of destroying and harvesting its cells. Supporters of embryonic stem cell research seek to avoid the moral and ethical objections by arguing that the end – the possibility of a breakthrough that might advance medicine – justifies the means – destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells. This dubious argument loses all credibility in light of the research developments involving non-embryonic stem cells.

In addition, major practical hurdles continue to confront embryonic stem cell research. Embryonic stem cells are valued for their capacity to grow and reproduce very rapidly, but that growth is difficult to control. In simple terms, embryonic cells are prone to forming cancerous tumors. To date, concern about tumors has prevented studies of embryonic stem cell treatments in human patients. Immune system rejection is another problem with treating patients using
cells from a destroyed embryo. The high risk of the patient’s immune system rejecting tissue grown from the embryo would mean a lifetime course of immunosuppressive drugs. The tissue rejection problem has led some researchers down a worrisome path.

Their “solution” is to create an embryo cloned from a patient’s own cells, terminate the cloned embryo after roughly 5-7 days development, and harvest the embryonic stem cells. The clone’s stem cells could then be used to grow transplant tissues or even whole body parts. They call this process “therapeutic” cloning.

“Therapeutic” cloning has progressed relatively slowly. The cloning process requires large quantities of human eggs and, so far, there is a shortage of donors. This is hardly surprising: egg donation is a time-consuming process that poses medical risks to the donor. She is subject to multiple office visits, daily hormone injections, and a surgical procedure under anesthesia to harvest the eggs. Even under normal doses, the hormone injections can lead to occasional serious (in rare cases, fatal) complications caused by excessive stimulation of the ovaries. To make matters worse, the commercial value of cloning research means that the doctor would have a financial incentive to administer high doses of egg-stimulating drugs, in order to produce as many eggs as possible. Given the health risks to women and the speculative benefits of the research, the National Academy of Science advises against compensation for women who
donate eggs for research purposes, and such compensation has been banned by California and Massachusetts, two large centers of stem cell research.

A shortage of human eggs available for cloning led researchers in the United Kingdom to use cow’s eggs instead, creating a human-animal hybrid embryo. Termed a “chimera,” the hybrid embryo was reportedly destroyed after five days. The “ends” justifying the “means” argument can be stretched very far indeed.

Conclusion

Recent developments may well make embryonic stem cells obsolete. At a minimum, scientists must be encouraged to harness the enormous potential of powerful new stem cells created without destroying human embryos. With limited dollars available for medical research, legislators should ensure that taxpayer dollars fund research that has tremendous potential for breakthrough cures: adult stem cell research.

Humanae Vitae: 40 Years Later

The Anniversary of Humanae Vitae
By Joseph Bottum

You know the story. Forty years ago—on July 25, 1968—a tired, grumpy, and celibate old man in Rome issued an encyclical called Humanae Vitae, solemnly declaring that birth control is bad, and half the world responded with a shrug. The other half responded with a sneer.

It’s hard to imagine a worse moment for Pope Paul VI to denounce contraception. The Second Vatican Council had finished its great shake-up of Catholicism only three years before, and even the most serious Catholics were still picking themselves up off the ground and trying to figure out what had happened. As for non-Catholics, well, in the summer of 1968, across the civilized world, aroused young people were declaring their freedom from all the senseless old restrictions and chastities. Even if Paul VI was right, there was no one ready to listen to him.

But, of course, the pope wasn’t right. We all know that. Humanae Vitae was treated as a joke because it was a joke, wasn’t it? Vatican roulette, rhythm-method babies: The official Catholic view of sex was a gift to stand-up comedians around the world. A gift to politicians and public figures, for that matter. Want an easy stick with which to whack around, say, the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion? Point out that those nutty Catholics are against birth control, too. Whenever public Catholics need a quick way to ingratiate themselves with non-Catholics, they announce their dissent on the Church’s teaching about birth control. And why not? It costs nothing, and it lets them pose themselves as rebels and independent thinkers, under no one’s ecclesial thumb.

It’s hard to remember all the joys we were told that contraception would bring, back in the day. For generations, from Victoria Woodhull all the way down to Margaret Sanger, birth-control activists had insisted that abortion would cease if we allowed access to contraception. In the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme Court placed decisions about birth control at the center of the marriage bond. The smutty theaters, the back-room racks of pornography, the venereal diseases, the crushing down of young women into a life of timidity, the out-of-wedlock births, the masturbatory shame—all the sicknesses of a repressed culture would be swept away in the free love that contraception allows.

Free love—forty years on, the phrase has a marvelously musty sound to it, like the fragile violets of a Victorian spinster’s girlhood, pressed in the fading pages of her remembrance book. Things didn’t work out quite the way we were promised. In fact, the results were pretty much what the pope had said they would be. A funny thing happened on the way to the orgy, and—as Mary Eberstadt notes in her superb essay in the current issue of First Things—if there’s a joke buried in Humanae Vitae, the joke is on us.

Simply as a piece of argumentative prose, the 1968 encyclical was badly constructed. It lacked the romantic elements that Pope John Paul II would later put in his far more persuasive Theology of the Body, and it appealed to the authority of Christian tradition at a moment in which hardly anyone was willing to listen to authority. Still, along the way, Paul VI issued four general prophecies in Humanae Vitae, and on about all four of them, he seems to have been right.

He said, for instance, that universal acceptance of contraception would have the social consequence of creating men who had lost all respect for women. No longer caring for “her physical and psychological equilibrium,” men will come to “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.” In any great social movement, what’s cause and what’s effect is always hard to figure out, but, at the very least, all you have to do is sign on to the Internet to see that this much is true: Widespread access to birth control certainly didn’t bring us the end of pornography and the objectification of women’s bodies.

Paul VI predicted, as well, that the institution of marriage would have trouble surviving “the conjugal infidelity” that contraception makes easy. Far from strengthening marriage as the Supreme Court seems to have imagined, the advent of birth control left marriage in tatters, as the sexual revolution roared through town. If many more people use contraception today than they used to—and do so certainly with less shame—then why have divorce, abortion, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and venereal disease done nothing but increase since 1968?

Humanae Vitae added that the general acceptance of contraception would put a “dangerous weapon” in the hands of “those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.” And, from forced abortions in China to involuntary sterilizations in Peru, non-democratic governments have seen that there aren’t many steps between allowing people to limit birth and forcing them to.

Finally, the pope warned that contraception would lead people to picture their bodies as somehow possessions, rather than as their actual being. If a woman can paint her house, then why shouldn’t she get her nose bobbed and her breasts blown up with silicon to the size of beachballs? It’s what men seem to like, after all, and the body is just a thing, isn’t it?

Well, no, the body isn’t just a thing. The universal acceptance of contraception changed not just our behavior but the way that we think. It created a chasm between sex and procreation, and into that chasm fell social good after social good. You can’t say Paul VI didn’t warn us.

Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.

Catholic Social Teaching and Healthcare Reform

In Matthew 25, Jesus paints an image of His return in glory. On the Day of Judgment, Christ will separate His sheep from the goats. The sheep are those that cared for "the least" of Jesus' brothers: the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, those sick, and those in prison. The goats didn't remember "the least" among them and as Christ foretold, "in all truth," they have "received their reward," in this life and will not in the next. Jesus’ teaching is unavoidable.

This message is especially relevant to the injustice of the American healthcare system. To call American healthcare—as a system—immoral makes no judgment on healthcare professionals or hospitals, but rather on the design itself. Many have advocated for universal healthcare in our country and have been rejected for proposing so-called "socialized medicine." I am personally a proponent of a universal healthcare system. We have the medical care, the financial resources, but we seem to lack the moral will to acknowledge that we are our brother's keeper.

Does the United States have the best healthcare in the world? It depends. In reality, there are at least five different co-existing healthcare systems in our country. They can be described as follows: first, at the top of the system are the wealthy and well-insured, particularly those with indemnity, fee-for-service health insurance. In this case, the United States has the highest quality, most technically advanced medicine in the world; second from the top is the private, employer-based insurance for the middle class, usually with some features of "managed care" and some restrictions on what the insurance company will cover; the third layer consists of insurance for lower-income workers in the form of tightly managed health maintenance organizations (HMO), substantial out-of-pocket payments and moderate restrictions on the doctors that can be seen and treatments covered; the fourth layer is Medicaid, Medicare, and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which are grossly underfunded systems of federal and state insurance for the lowest of middleclass families, the poor, for children, the disabled, and the elderly. This group faces severe restrictions on doctors that can be seen and on treatments covered; the bottom of the ladder is "charity care" and emergency room care, which is available to those who have no medical insurance.

The American healthcare "system" translates into a socio-economically based distribution of medical care, which is fundamentally more of a medical caste system than a healthcare system. This hardly seems compatible with Jesus' teaching in Matthew 25. The results aren’t either. In virtually every form of basic statistics measuring days of illness, death rates, and life expectancies, the United States ranks behind almost every other industrialized nation. The U.S. ranked last in 2007 of every industrialized nation in terms of the citizens dying from preventable disease; France ranked first. In France 64 people died from preventable disease, in the U.S. approximately 101,000 died from preventable disease. The difference couldn't be starker, particularly given the fact we spend more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation in the world and for us it is only partial, not universal coverage as in other countries.

The "every-man-for-himself," radical individualist strategy of American healthcare not only is disastrously irresponsible, it seriously violates basic Christian teaching. Make no mistake, this is not an endorsement to eradicate personal responsibility and moral virtue (communism, in other words), but an observation that a private sector dominated healthcare system is bad business without some sort of minimal regulation. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity is an organizing principle that calls us to allow the smallest, most local institution to handle matters if it can be done more efficiently than or just as efficiently as would be done at the national level (or state level in America). But, if the task cannot be done efficiently at this level, then the national (or state) government has an obligation to have some sort of role to ensure the common good.

Any healthcare system—in my view—that is based on private insurance with no government intervention is fatally flawed. The incentive of private insurance is upside down. After premiums are paid, the less care they provide, the higher their profits—this is undoubtedly their goal. Hence, all the horrid stories one hears about insurance companies searching for the smallest technicality to not cover something. Thus, public health and human welfare is not the incentive, but rather profit. Profit over health and dignity is not a Christian value. Fundamentally, health and wellness should not be treated like any other consumer-based industry.

The problem with healthcare costs is hard to deal with in the current system. With thousands of different private health insurance plans, it's virtually impossible to negotiate consistently lower costs with healthcare providers and drug companies. A universal healthcare system, on the other hand, has the potential to rein in costs. More importantly, private insurance is a colossal waste of money. Administrative costs for Medicare, for example, which is government-financed (not government-run) are 2-3% of the total cost. Approximately 30% of private insurance premiums go to overhead, profits, and executive salaries. Overall the administrative costs of private insurance exceed $400 billion dollars in a year. That is arguably sufficient to cover all the uninsured without raising taxes.

Many conservative-leaning thinkers are concerned about the loss of freedom and the efficiency of a national healthcare plan. Ironically, the freedom that many people fear will be loss at the implementation of a universal healthcare system is already gone. Many choices in healthcare are at the discretion of the private sector insurance companies. They choose what doctors you can see, whether you are qualified to be covered (if you have a history of illness, good luck—you cost too much), what they will and will not cover and how long you can receive treatment, and this is all if they don't find some small technicality on which they can drop coverage all together to preserve their profits. It seems that we fail to realize how much is already controlled by large corporations—at least government officials can be voted out of office.

Even more so, we already pay for people to get medical care. When people go to the emergency room to receive medical treatment without health insurance, the cost is spread amongst everyone else. This is one reason why insurance premiums skyrocket and we're also taxed, since hospitals can receive government grants to offset some of their losses. Wouldn't we rather have paid for the preventative care than wait until it is much more expensive?

Additionally, it is nothing unusual for a hospital to have to bill more than 700 different payers and insurers--HMOs, PPOs, MCOs, IPAs, and an alphabet soup of other organizations. Each one has its own set of rules for what services are covered, the level of reimbursement and the kinds of documentation and pre-approval required. It is an administrative nightmare. And for this mess, we Americans shell out $2.2 trillion a year (more than any other nation) and all this inefficiency costs patients tens of billions of dollars each year. Billing, collection, and payment administration represents some 20 percent of that $2.2 trillion we spend on healthcare. There is nothing even remotely "conservative" about this—it’s nothing but “big spending” and for what results?

To consider this again in Christian thinking—we have a call from the Lord to give preferential option to the most vulnerable among us. Poverty and ill health travel often together. Poverty puts one's health in jeopardy, ill health with its attendant high medical bills, impairment of working ability, and days lost from work, make it difficult to find and hold a good job. This is a terrible and vicious cycle. The current healthcare system is evidently not accommodating.

Now there is a "safety net" of charity healthcare that ought to be commended. The Veterans Administration healthcare system, the Indian Health Service, state and local departments of public health, public hospital emergency rooms, community health centers and clinics, faith-based clinics for the poor and homeless, and the list goes on. Despite their tireless work and efforts, many lack the funding and the resources to address the problem at hand—they adequately cannot overcome the effects of the lack of good, regular access to mainstream healthcare.

Hispanics, African Americans, people with less education, part-time workers, and foreign-born persons have the highest rates of being uninsured. Guess what? They also are the same people who have more abortions. 1 in 2 African American pregnancies end in abortion. African American children are born into this world more often than not with the odds against them—the black community is experiencing a terrible crisis of missing fathers, thus single parent households. Statistically, children that grow up in such environments are inclined to have a weak parent-child relationship, prone toward committing crime, drugs, alcohol, sexual promiscuity, more likely to repeat a grade, less likely to graduate high school, and are often victims of abuse and neglect. And single mothers, particularly young ones, face a long, uphill battle toward economic self-sufficiency and the current healthcare system does little to help those in this sort of situation.

The elderly have limited economic productivity and healthcare is getting exponentially more expensive; we have a moral obligation to see that their needs are met, particularly for a group that often has very dire medical needs. While there is Medicare, it faces problems in providing long term care of chronic conditions, incorporating new technology, and lacks the financial resources needed.

Much of this may be slightly more "liberal" than one's own political perspective, but Catholic Social Teaching is beyond "left" and "right" politics. If we subjectively identify with one side of the political spectrum more than the other, we must do so as Catholics, which entails crossing party lines. We cannot continue to allow our politicians to cover unborn children in the children’s healthcare program to encourage women not to have abortions only to denounce expanding coverage, or redirect funding from the program. This isn't all "liberal" either. We need to heed the Bishops advice on the both/and approach. There is another side of this debate that conservatives need to win. That debate is in regard to much of the content of American healthcare and this debate involves religious freedom, Catholic and private hospitals, abortifacents, emergency contraception, patients rights', and the full range of so-called "reproductive health services," in vitro fertilization, genetic manipulation, etc.

The Democratic Party is currently the natural home of legislative proposals for healthcare reform. I firmly believe that universal healthcare is going to come sooner or later and if Catholics aren't sitting at the table, our values will be off the table. I see this fundamentally as a "life issue" in its own respect and from a pro-life perspective, the status quo is not acceptable. We may not agree on the details, but on fundamental principles of human dignity, basic civil rights, and the end goal of, in some way or another, providing universal access to quality and affordable healthcare, there should be agreement. No one should be left out. That’s the ideal goal.

Back to the fundamental question: does America have the greatest healthcare system? Not at all and I don't even think it's debatable. And reform is not only necessary, it is required.

Senate Passes Bipartisan Adoption Bill

The U.S. Senate passed the bipartisan Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 (HR 6893) on Monday, September 23. "This is the most significant legislation relating to adoption and foster care since the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997," said Tom Atwood, President and CEO of NCFA. "It provides for a wide array of reforms to benefit children and their interest in adoption."

The reforms in HR 6893 include: Reauthorizing the Adoption Incentives Program, whereby the federal government allocates financial rewards to states that have increased the number of children adopted from their foster care system, through 2013; Increasing the award amounts states stand to receive through the Adoption Incentives Program by establishing 2007 as the new "base year" against which future performance will be measured, and increasing the bonuses for special needs and older child adoptions; Ensuring all children with special needs adopted out of foster care are eligible for federal adoption assistance regardless of family income by 2018; Mandating that states inform prospective adoptive parents regarding eligibility for the adoption tax credit; Requiring states to make reasonable efforts to place siblings together; Establishing relative guardianship assistance payments in a way that does not creative incentives for relative guardianship over adoption; and Allowing states the option of extending adoption assistance, foster care maintenance and relative guardianship assistance payments to children aged 18, 19 or 20.

Knights of Columbus: Vote for Life and Family

Nearing the close of their 126th Supreme Convention in Quebec City on Thursday, the Knights of Columbus approved resolutions calling for the legal protection of marriage and asking Catholics holding elected office to “be true” to their faith by acting “bravely and publicly in defense of life.”

In one resolution at the fraternal charitable organization’s annual convention, the Knights called for “legal and constitutional protection ... for the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.” The resolution declares that marriage is a “natural institution based on ancient human values” that over time has become a “unique and deeply rooted social, legal and religious institution.”

Marriage, the resolution said, provides the best environment in which to protect children and also “reflects the natural biological complementarity between man and woman which predates the state and which is woven into the social and religious fabric of every major culture and society.”

Another resolution passed by the Knights advocates building a “culture of life” and opposing “any governmental action or policy that promotes abortion, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, euthanasia, assisted suicide and other offenses against life.”

Knights of Columbus delegates also exhorted “our fellow Catholics who are elected officials to be true to the faith they claim to profess by acting bravely and publicly in defense of life.” Such officials, the resolution advised, should affirm with Pope Benedict XVI that “there can be no room for purely private religion.”

The resolution reaffirmed the organization’s policy of not inviting to any Knights of Columbus event persons “who do not support the legal protection of unborn children.”

In his opening convention address delivered earlier this week, Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson urged Catholic voters to “stop accommodating pro-abortion politicians” and to “say ‘no’” to every political candidate who supports abortion.

Other resolutions passed at the convention addressed religious freedom, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, decency on the internet and in the media, Catholic education, and the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.

The Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest organization of Catholic laymen, was founded in 1882 and has more than 1.75 million members around the world.

The Catholic Church and Capital Punishment

I read this article in a philosophy course on Ethics. It illmuminates the moral nature of the death penalty and presents a coherent evolution of the Church's stance on the issue without undermining of Sacred Tradition. It is a valuable read; all too often are there situations where one person says, "I can't support him, he's pro-choice," and the counter-reply is, "Well, the other guy is in favor of capital punishment."

Though, I am direly opposed to capital punishment myself, the argument of "proportionalism" in regard to voting for a pro-choice candidate doesn't work in this situation. (And this is coming from a Democrat). The two issues, abortion and capital punishment, are not morally equal. Abortion was legalized in 1973 and since then approximately 50 million unborn children have died in 35 years. Capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 in only 37 states and approximately 1,100 criminals have been put to death. The massive margin between those two numbers demonstrate in one respect [frequency and scope] how abortion immediately trumps the death penalty. Moreover, the Church has consistently taught that the State does not have the right to kill, but it has the obligation to protect (i.e. self-defense) the citizens from harm and if there are no other means of maintaining the common good, the death penalty is morally permissible. Abortion, on the other hand, is the deliberate and intentional killing of unborn human life making it sustinctly murder whereas this is not the case of capital punishment, though it proves unnecessary today [the gravity of abortion is greater, i.e. murder vs. "needless bloodshed" as capital punishment isn't necessarily murder.]

Cardinal Avery Dulles, Catholicism and Capital Punishment